against you in nanoseconds, the barrage of thoughts and excuses don’t seem to kick
into full force and stop you for a few seconds. The five-second window seems to
work for everyone.
That said, by all means play around with it to make it work for you. Personally, I
notice that the longer I wait between my initial impulse to act and physically
moving, the louder that the excuses get, and the harder it becomes to force myself
to move. As Angela found, those five-second decisions “turned into 50 seconds and
then 500 seconds when the fear was deeper.” She now treats the #5SecondRule as
if her brain will “self-destruct” at zero:
If it works for you to shorten or lengthen the window, personalize the Rule to
make it work for you.
Matt, a good friend of my husband and myself, was training for his first Tough
Mudder race. He lives in New Jersey and he sent this text to my husband during the
freezing cold winter. He had shrunk the window to three seconds because he
noticed how fast his mind would go to work to stop him.
“Tell your girlfriend Mel that the 5 second rule is working over here. I have it down to three seconds. Why contemplate
life’s complexities when you can be moving ahead after just 3 seconds. In 5 seconds I can make up at least 2 excuses in my
mind. In three seconds my mind has already pushed the first button on my phone to move the ball ahead. As I awoke this
morning I mistakenly checked the thermometer (that took 2 seconds, but in that third second I started to put on my right
sneaker.”