Who needs motivation when there’s this simple idea. Speaker and author Mel Robbins was explaining how she was able to get herself to make decisions and actually take action before her brain got in the way to stop her. For her it started with the bad habit of hitting the snooze button each morning. For her is wasn’t so much about when she woke up but how she woke up. So what she started to do, when the alarm when off was to give herself a 5 second countdown, 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – and when she hit 1 she would jump out of bed like a NASA rocket taking off. Sounds silly but I think there’s something to this. She explains that this is the amount of time it takes between feeling a good intention and your reason stepping in to scare you out of doing something. It is a dumbed-down way to listen to your inner wisdom and act on it. There’s science behind this too; Mel says it works because you can out-smart your own brain by interrupting the habit pathway in your basal ganglia, the group of subcortical nuclei at encode habits engrained in your brain. By counting backwards you interrupt self-doubt, procreation, and you wake up your pre-frontal cortex which is the part of your brain you need to start a new ritual. I like Mel’s description: “Confidence is the ability to move from thought to action”. Lately the only bad habit I have interrupted is thinking, oh that’s a great idea for a Poly Moone cartoon and just doing it right then and there. There are bigger things that I talk myself out of all the time. I’m going to try this with those. Although I think my window might be a bit smaller! 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1!!
5-4-3-2-1 Blast-Off NASA Morning Habit Change
