Gemma Speck

So without further ado, let's break down the psychology of how you and I can train our brains to do just that.

The journey to completing or starting anything hard all actually has the exact same start line.

And the start line is going from doing nothing to doing something.

And I think a lot of us know that that transition, that jump from doing nothing to something is the hardest.

And it stops a lot of us from ever really beginning, even if we really, really want to see where something's going to take us.

That is why my first biggest tip for how we can train our brain to do hard things is the five minute rule.

You know, after you begin, the first five minutes of anything is going to be the hardest because you have to dig deep and find something.

the motivation to just begin and to deal with that tension from going from doing nothing to doing something and a big part of why that is so daunting is that it feels like when we begin a new task or we begin a new routine or we're like okay I'm committed to going to the gym every single morning or I'm committed to in this moment right now finishing my assignment and I need to work on it in this moment right now absolutely have to do it even though I don't want to do it

It often is like, okay, by telling myself that I need to do that, I now am committing to a lot more than just a couple of minutes.

I'm committed to a whole process, a whole period of time where I have to be focused on this task.

And it's that huge mountain and the idea of climbing that mountain, knowing it's going to take a while, that means that we put things off because of the time burden.

Instead, we want to overcome our brain's natural tendency to want to avoid discomfort that comes with the beginning of the task by saying, I will just do this for five minutes.

It's not actually a trick.

You are only going to do the thing for five minutes unless after you have, you know, lasted that period of time, you feel better about the thing.

You feel better about doing it.

If you're five minutes into your run and you're like, okay, I've done five minutes.

I can stop.

I'm allowed to stop because I've done better than doing nothing.

but you know maybe I'll just do another minute maybe I'll do another minute after that you see that you have overcome the first mental barrier you've overcome that first point of tension

This is just such a simple, accessible, cognitive behavioral strategy.