Name: The 5 Second Rule ❖ Mel Robbins
Uploaded: 2026-01-10T11:29:43.000Z
Duration: 6 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

When you understand the power of a five second decision and you understand that you always have a choice to go from autopilot to decision maker, everything in your life will change.

Future simple

You will be a different negotiator, you will be different in sales, you will be unstoppable in the gym because you will realize the amount of garbage that you put in the way of your hopes, of your dreams, of your potential, of your confidence, of your courage.

Everything comes down to the decisions that you make.

None of us know how to make ourselves do it.

And I think most people that are miserable or that are, that are really like dying to be great and dying to have more, we want to change, we want to live a better life.

Again, it's about how do you go from knowledge to action?

So the first thing in this story that's important is realizing that the answer was in me.

And my mind was telling me, pay attention.

The next morning the alarm goes off and I pretended NASA was there.

And I'll never forget standing there in my bedroom.

It was dark, it was cold, it was winter in Boston.

And for the first time in three months, I had beaten my habit of hitting the snooze button.

And I thought, wait a minute, counting backwards, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my entire life.

Well, the next morning I used it again and it worked.

The next morning I used it again and it worked.

And the next morning I used it again and it worked.

And then I started to notice something really interesting.

There were moments all day long, all day long, just like that five second moment in bed where I knew knowledge, what I should do.

And if I didn't move within five seconds, my brain would step in and talk me out of it.

Every human being has a five second window, might even be shorter for you.

You have about a 5 second window in which you can move from idea to action before your brain kicks into full gear and sabotages any change of behavior.

Because remember, your brain is wired to stop you from doing things that are uncomfortable or uncertain or scary.

It's your job to learn how to move from those ideas that could change everything into acting on them in the smallest moment.

I should tell you the science behind it, Because I'm going to be honest with you, it is stupid.

Had I ever thought that I would find myself eight years after discovering it, spending my days telling people about the five second rule.

First of all, I would have picked a different name because it reminds you of the one where you have to like pick up food within five seconds off the floor, right?

I never intended to tell anybody because I went from getting up on time and waking up on time to shaking up my entire life.

Why does something so silly create such powerful and profound change?

Metacognition is a fancy pants terms that means something real simple.

You can outsmart your own brain in furtherance of goals.

There are tricks that you can use that actually outsmart the tricks your brain plays on you in furtherance of a higher purpose.

You can restrain yourself if you're in a situation that calls for it.

You can jump into a raging river to save your dog or your kid.

You can direct yourself in ways if it's important to you.

And so the rule, what it does is it does something really remarkable when you count backwards.

What you're actually doing is you're interrupting what researchers call habit loops that get encoded as closed loop patterns in your basal ganglia.

That's the part of the brain where your feelings, where your emotions, every habit that you have, which is nothing more than behavior that you repeat that you don't even think about.

When you go, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, it interrupts what's going on here that's spinning without you thinking.

And it moves and awakens your prefrontal cortex.

So when you hit one, your habit has been interrupted.

You've interrupted maybe snapping at your kids.

You've interrupted the desire to grab for a drink.

You've also, by counting backwards, done an action.

That is the part of the brain that you need, that's awake when you're changing behavior, when you're learning new things.

So in the language of research, you'll hear people talk about starting rituals.

That is something that's proven to help you learn a new habit.

The five second rule, when you repeat it becomes a starting ritual that triggers you to act with confidence that triggers you, that this is a moment for courage that triggers you to shift gears.

And because you've also done the manual work of awakening the part of the brain that you need to change, you've set yourself up for success.

It doesn't work if you count up, because you can keep going.

And also, counting up doesn't require focus.

It again awakens the prefrontal cortex, and it prompts you to move.

When you start to use it and then you read about it, you'll see that it's being used all over the place.

They use it in the armed services order to align troops and get them to start an exercise.

At big assemblies to get a huge room full of kids to stop talking.

It will become a habit that prompts you to have confidence and courage.

But in the beginning, it interrupts patterns of behavior that you do on autopilot.

it teaches you how to become the kind of person that moves from thinking about something to.