Change Your Life Using This Simple 5 Second Brain Hack

Living life on autopilot? No real purpose or passion, raison d’etre as the french say. Ikigai in Japanese. And so we find ourselves, hitting the snooze button everyday. Why would you get up when you dont have a reason to get up right? 

Why would you, in the scheme of life, hitting the snooze button is not that big of a deal. But, here’s the thing about life: none of us wake up, and say today is the day I destroy my life. What we do, is we kinda check out because it feels overwhelming, Or we check out because we’re afraid.

Or we check out because we start listening to self doubt, and then we make these teeny, tiny, decisions all day long. We don’t even realize it. Decision to not get up on time. A decision to not eat the right thing.

A decision to not speak at a meeting. A decision to not look for a job. A decision to not deal with your finances. A decision to not call your parents –, like, whatever it is.

All day long these tiny decisions will take you so far off track. And then you wake up like I did, and you look at your life, and you think, “how the hell did I get here?”

I want you to imagine you are a rocket launching. Think “I am going to launch myself out of bed”

like a rocket ship, like NASA, Think “ I’m gonna move so fast, that I don’t think. I’m going to beat my brain.” The next morning, the alarm goes off, I literally went five, four, three, two, one.

I counted out loud, and then I stood up. And I, I’ll never forget standing there in my bedroom.

It might be dark, cold, but for the first time in months, You have beaten the habit of hitting the snooze button. All from simply, counting backwards, the silliest most effective thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. The next morning I used it again, and it worked. The next morning, I used it again, and it worked.

The next morning, I used it again, and it worked. And then I started to notice something really interesting. You have about a five second window in which you can move from idea to action before your brain kicks in to full gear and sabotages any change in 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 can change everything into acting on them. In the smallest moment, because I went from getting up on time, and waking up on time,

to shaking up my entire life. Because when you understand the power of a five second decision, and you understand that you always have the choice to go from auto pilot to decision maker, everything in your life will change. 

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 shit 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. We all know what to do, none of us know how to make ourselves do it. So, the single most profound use of the five second rule is mind control. You can actually use one, stupid, little trick to push yourself to grab it. I wanted to change my life. And I think most people that are miserable, or that are really, like, dying to be great, and dying to have more, we wanna change.

We wanna live a better life. We wanna create more for our families, we wanna be happier. The desire is there, it’s your job to push yourself. There are tricks that you can use that actually outsmart the tricks your brain plays on you. You can outsmart your own brain.