How To Stop Overthinking EVERYTHING | Mel Robbins

in any year of your life where you feel stuck you know what you need to do to move the needle to change your career to improve your health to work on your marriage the information is everywhere and in fact if you're listening to me right now and you go mel robbins you are wrong i have no idea what to do i just know i'm stuck go to google and type in i hate my job and you will get hundreds of millions of links you will probably find a hundred thousand videos that are made by people

who have been stuck in their jobs who will walk you through a step-by-step process that you could take in order to change the what is easy the issue is how how do you make yourself take actions when you're afraid when you're scared when you're overwhelmed how do you break bad habits how do you break the negative thinking that is causing you to feel paralyzed see the problem for most of us is we think about what we need to do but thinking won't change your life the only way you're going to change your life or change

your career or change your health is to take action and so the reason why so many people get stopped by procrastination and stopped by fear and stopped by anxiety is because they never get past the part of just thinking about it and i believe that we all have a habit that i call the habit of hesitation and in psychology psychologists and researchers say there's basically two types of people right there's people that have a bias towards action and those are the kinds of folks that when inspiration strikes or when confidence strikes or when courage strikes

or when opportunity strikes they tend to lean toward it and to take action and based on research those folks tend to be happier healthier more successful more fulfilled in life and then there's the rest of us and those of us that have what psychologists call a bias towards thinking which means in a moment of uncertainty a moment of opportunity a moment uh where you need courage or confidence instead of leaning toward it you lean away from it you start thinking what should i do and it's that habit of hesitating in moments of change that is

keeping you stuck we call it procrastination we call it overthinking we call it a lot of things but it's just a habit of pausing and then you trip into patterns of thinking and patterns of behavior that have been holding you back for years i mean people say information is power and based on what you're saying there and i actually agree with this information's not everything is it like we can have the information we can have the knowledge you know knowledge is power it is but it's it's not everything is that you can have the knowledge

and not take action i know a lot of really smart people that are miserable yeah i know a ton of people that do nothing but read self-help books or watch videos on youtube about inspiration and do nothing yeah and the reason why is they gather information as a way to feel like you're working on something and learning is a really important thing to do like understanding becoming more self-aware it's critical to you improving your life it's critical to you being happier and more fulfilled if you don't understand yourself and you don't understand the patterns of

thinking the patterns of behavior that are keeping you stuck you'll never be able to break them and replace them but you can get yourself comfortable with learning and duping yourself into thinking that somehow being smarter about what you need to do to be healthy will make you healthy that's not true just like reading about launching a business doesn't launch a business and so you know one of the other things that i find to be really interesting and i think this is one of the reasons why um people really resonate with a lot of what i

have to say i don't know if it's the dyslexia the adhd what it is but i can't remember a lot of information in terms of a list so if i'm trying to get healthy and you give me 11 things to do i will do none of them if you give me one simple thing that i can grab onto i will likely try it and i think a lot of times what happens for folks is and i know it certainly has happened for me is that even if the information is empowering if it feels complicated i'm

not gonna do it yeah that's the beauty or one of the beauties i'd say of your approach whether it's in your you know you've written multiple books but the one before this um and including this one the high five habits you know the subtitle i think says all take control of your life with one simple habit and as you talk mel i really i can't tell you how much i connect with what you're saying because it's a it's very similar to the approach i've tried to take with patients for over 20 years now is keep

it simple you know what is that one keystone habit that's going to unlock the door to audios to all those other habits um before we get into the new book i have a new team member uh-huh and she's a huge fan of yours okay and last night i said to her hey so i've got mel come to the studio she was losing it with excitement and she said mel robbins changed my life if it wasn't for mel i'd still be in a job that was stressing me out so i couldn't stand anymore if it wasn't

for male i'd still be on antidepressants if it wasn't for males 54321 rule i wouldn't have pressed send on the application to join your team rongan and she only joined a few weeks ago and that just really hit me at how profound and how life-changing your work is because this is one individual who has shared how it's helped her health it's helped her well it's helped her physical health her mental well-being and it's helped her to get a job which as she said to me last night has pushed her out of her comfort zone that

she knew she could do but probably wouldn't have had the courage to go for yeah well thank you for sharing that and um there's a couple things that i want to say about that that story does a beautiful job of explaining my mission in the world and that is to uncover simple tools that anybody can use to help them make changes in their life and so the reason why what's her name her name's steph so the reason why steph was so excited and i hear it every day like one of the coolest things uh about

you know being on youtube and being on social media and putting work out and speaking on stages around the world is when you have a super simple idea it's so sticky yeah that anybody can share it it sounds kind of stupid that count backwards okay you know you're not going to forget that because it sounds kind of dumb and the idea itself is so simple and so sticky anybody can try it and anybody can share it and oftentimes people don't even know my name they're like oh my gosh you're the five lady or robin you

know they like mix like they don't even like they've been watching me and they've and i love that yeah because for me it's about the tools and in steph's case what's super interesting about her excitement because i literally cannot go through a day at this point and have somebody not walk up to me and say you changed my life and i always say the exact same thing when somebody tells me that i say thank you so much for telling me i appreciate you acknowledging me and following me but you deserve the credit because you did

the work i just gave you a tool that i happen to discover that helps you move from thinking to doing so she moved herself from thinking about how much she hated her job to 54321 stopping the thinking by counting backwards and pushing herself to move she moved herself from thinking about applying for the dream job of yours and 54321 hitting send she moved herself from thinking about going to the gym to 54321 cutting the procrastination loop in half and then replacing it with a push to take action and so what's so elegant and simple and

empowering about the five second rule or the high five habit or all the other simplistic stuff that i tend to share with the world because that's the stuff that works for me is that these are all tools that cut through the holding you back and it just so happens that your nerdy friend mel has done all the research to be able to explain to you why science and research and decades of psychological academic work actually is encapsulated by counting backwards 54321 or in this particular new brain hack the high five habit how simply high-fiving the

human being you see in the mirror every single morning as part of your morning routine will build the habit of self-empowerment self-respect self-worth self-encouragement self-love like this is powerful stuff hey it's mel thank you so much for being here if you enjoyed that video bye god please subscribe because i don't want you to miss a thing thank you so much for being here we've got so much amazing stuff coming thank you so much for sending this stuff to your friends and your family i love you we create these videos for you so make sure you

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