first of all brace yourself so
fucking stupid when you first hear it
and um it's just like the five second
rule with
food you drop food on the ground you
got five seconds to pick it up before the
floor contaminates it well the same
is true
about your ideas and your inspiration
if you don't take action on an idea within
five seconds your brain contaminates
it with
self-doubt or being too tired or i
don't feel like it or
you know i'm not worthy or i don't
deserve to whatever bullshit you put in
your way it comes in within five
seconds and so
the way that you use the five-second
rule is just as jenny was describing
you have this idea okay i gotta get
my ass to the gym and then you feel
the self-doubt you feel the i'm too
tired dude i don't want to come in
start counting backwards five four
three two one it sounds ludicrous
but by the time you get to one you'll
be doing it and i invented this thing jenny
10 years ago when my uh husband and i
hit rock bottom
my husband had gone into the
restaurant business in boston
and uh it the recession hit i was
unemployed and i found myself at a time
in my life i never thought that i
would check all the boxes you got the three
kids you're in the nice neighborhood
with the great public school
you marry somebody who's great you
put some money away in savings and next
thing you know we're free falling and
we're about to lose the house i'm
drinking too much i can barely get
out of bed i want to kill my husband
i'm isolating the anxiety is through
the roof and i couldn't get out of bed
and so i invented the five second
rule 54321 and this is the crazy idea
okay maybe if i launch my ass out of
bed maybe if i move so fast the anxiety
won't creep in and this bed won't
swallow me whole that
was the genesis of this and so i used
it to get out of bed ten
years ago then i started using it to
pick up the phone and find a job
five four three two one don't snap at
my husband five four three two one
curb the drinking 54321 get my ass
out the door and go exercise and slowly but
surely my whole life changed i shared
this in a tedx talk about seven
years ago that's now got 20 million
views
and this idea of the power of a five
second decision in the five second rule
spread around the world i wrote a
book about it i became the most booked female
motivational speaker in the world i
built a massive online
following and next thing you know
sony's knocking on the door saying we'd
like to turn this into a daytime talk
show
and now here we are it's genius i was
so excited when i saw that because there's
only so many videos i could find
sometimes you know
when i find somebody and i'm like
when i saw you on this shit i'm like oh my god
and i watched the episode and i was
like this is exactly what we
need on tv and promise you guys
you're going to love it like
i don't want to hear another freaking
celebrity talk about their dog
like help me yes well the average
person's really hurting
i mean when you look at the rise in
anxiety when you look at the rise of
anxiety in kids when you consider the
fact that the average
family in america is a blended family
and the research shows that it takes
about six years for blended families
to figure out
all of the emotions that come right
with it
uh when you think about the
instability that people feel
and the fact that we're moving into
an election cycle that's going to be
extremely chaotic and i think
upsetting for
for people regardless of of where you
are in the political spectrum
this is a show that is a daily
destination where you can feel
like i see myself at least once i've
laughed or i've cried
and i feel a little bit better by the
time the show ends because we're leaving
you in action not just thinking
that's right it's so
true because thinking allows those
anxiety
thoughts and justifications and and
like i talked about that fear why are we
why are we so fear-based what what
are we so scared of and sometimes it's the
dumbest thing for instance i had like
a fear of
answering the phone like you had a
fear of answering the phone i
just i don't fear of it anxiety why
so so tell me what's going to hap so
the phone rings and what jumps in
your hand what jumps
in your mind when the phone rings i
should have them call my phone right
now so everyone can hear the
voicemail message
because um it's it's i don't know
it's do you think you're
gonna get in trouble it's either like
it's either trouble like my business
manager or my agent wants me to work
and i'm too tired
or um you know it's just or it's like
uh i don't know small
talk and i hate small talk isn't that
weird i do a talk show
i like words that going to you have
an intention that
or a conversation that goes somewhere
that causes something to happen
does that make any sense it doesn't
it does so here's
do you want do you want me to just
talk do you want me to just listen to this or
would you like me to tell you two
things you can do
please tell me because the piece of
this that
is worth looking at is the fact that
you can't control how often your phone
rings but you can control your
emotional reaction and if you're
living with a lot of stress and
anxiety simply because there's an inbound phone
call and it's triggering something
for you
it's worth looking at so the first
thing that you could do is you could either
turn your phone off so that you don't
have any inbound calls
so now we're managing that or you
could use what i call an anchor
thought so describe for me uh one of
the best
phone calls you ever got um you're
going oprah just
booked you to be on her show for your
new book fantastic
so that is what i call an anchor
thought it's a thought that's very specific that
makes you excited because what a lot
of people don't
realize is a thought that is anxious
or nervous
is in your body is the exact same
physical feeling as a thought that makes
you excited if you're nervous your
heart races your
stomach turns your armpits might
sweat your throat
might get a little tight you might
get that
kind of neck rash thing that some of
us do your hands might get clammy when you
get nervous right oh shit i'm gonna
have to work i don't want to talk to that
person oh my god it's oprah heart
fluttering
same thing hands are clammy and so
what you can do in order to
change your response to the phone
ringing is when it rings before you even
see it you can be like oh i'm so
excited because it might be a call as exciting
as oprah and then you've just tricked
your body
the phone call may suck we can't
control that but what you've
actually done is you've tricked your
body and now you're not living with that
anxiety response to a simple phone
call i just went one level deeper too and the
ptsd i have from phone calls about my
son being sick
there you go that's what it is that's
what it is so
it is exactly that you're dealing and
and that's another thing that the
five-second rule is really helpful
with because
when you can see what the underlying
trigger is
and for you that's all that it is it
doesn't have anything to do with work
it that you've associated the ring of
a phone
with a really bad memory so now think
about
um a call so to make it even better
think about a call related
to your child and one that's really
exciting
maybe it's something cool that's
going on at school maybe it's
it's the phone call that that things
are great and we got a great bill of health
so you should use that to reprogram
it since it goes deeper
you know it reminds me of something
that i hear a lot in my work and that is that
if you grew up in a household where
one of your parents was an
alcoholic i find a lot of people come
to me and
they've got troubles in their
relationships and what we
discover is that at five o'clock
that's when a lot of people's ptsd kicks
in because the lights change and
that's
when mom or dad was coming home
that's so true and you don't even
remember it and so when your spouse
walks in the door you're on edge
and you're micromanaging them and you
don't know why
and the reason why you're doing it is
because your nervous system remembers
what it was like to brace for one of
your parents to come home
and so even though even even though
you might not drink or you know that may be
long in the past if your spouse even
opens a beer
that little click sound triggers your
nervous system to remember and it puts
you into a mode of being on edge and
so we get couples
that fight with us you know like are
nitpicking she's
nitpicking she's nitpicking i don't
even know what the hell's going on i turn to
the wife or the husband i say by
chance did any of your parents drink
or did you grow up in a house where
you witnessed abuse and they're like yes i'm
like this is the problem that is
absolutely fascinating
i've never heard that before i've
heard of sun downing before
but i've never heard of that and that
makes so much sense
yes and so this is the promise of all
of the work that i do and of the mel
robbins show that you're not broken
you have a pattern that's broken and the
pattern that you have for a lot of
people
is that you're still doing stuff from
your childhood and you don't even
realize it and it's no longer working
in your adult
life but because you're not
connecting the dots between the fact
that it's five o'clock or between the
sound of a
bottle of wine coming out of the
paper bag with the trauma you witnessed in
your childhood you're not able to
change these patterns
these patterns are now running your
life and so i help you identify them
and then we figure out what can you
do to interrupt them and change them
so now by just becoming aware of them
and identifying them
that's a step towards is that all you
need to do
it's like 90 of it because what you
can't see you can't change what you're
not talking about you're not going to
change
and so even like we did this show
about failure to launch so there's so many
people that are worried because their
kids go off to college they boomerang
back they can't they're like what are
we gonna do in researching
the show jenny it's largely a problem
with boys
and what happens is we moms in
particular
start to smother them right because
we're like here go talk to this person
work on your resume what did you do
up in your room and then what happens for
boys is they feel demoralized and
they
isolate and so the thing that we're
doing to try to help is the exact
opposite of what's needed and so we
had this show and i started
talking about it as a pattern called
being the smother hen
and when you give labels to things
you can then go oh my god that is
exactly what i'm doing and that's
right and now i can call my
friend and be like sally stop
smothering mike you're being a
smother hand mel robin says it's
going to backfire he's going to hide in his
room and so this is kind of what the
show's
about it's not like making people
wrong it's using the common experiences
and then showing you why this doesn't
work and then giving you a
simple tweak that helps you interrupt
the pattern
see not only are you teaching us but
you're also allowing us the tools to
actually help fix ourselves mel this
is the show we all need i wish i had more
time i want to come on your show
praise you i think sony did a genius job
by hiring you this is what we need
the mel robbins show you guys check your
local listings she could be bigger
than oprah mel
robbins thank you so much come back
anytime okay
thank you
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