You Are Your Best Investment

Using The Five Minute Rule To Raise Up Your Life

Putting in the work to keep your mind clear and your body calm is the best investment you can make in your future. 

When you consider that your mindset shapes how you see the world and yourself, it becomes clear how powerful investing in yourself truly is. If your outlook is positive, you’ll feel more optimistic, confident, and clear, leading you to make better and bolder choices that help build the life you deeply want to live. More than that, when you bring a calm, open, and positive energy to the world, the people you interact with want to be around you because you’re helping them feel that way too, which creates deeper connections and stronger relationships in your life.

But there’s a problem: We are great at talking ourselves out of doing things that we know will improve our lives in the long term. We put off going to the gym, meditating, eating well, working on our passion projects, reading, and connecting with those we care about. 

Why do we do this?

Because humans are designed to indulge in short-term pleasure and ease over long-term discipline and gains. It’s easy to forget that, at our core, we are still animals navigating life in a wild and uncertain world. Since we are aware of our existential, let’s say…predicament (our lives are short and not guaranteed), we lean into the idea that we should take pleasure or be lazy now because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. 

Here’s the thing, though. Tomorrow may not be guaranteed, but if we do some simple math, we can see that the chances are high that we will be here tomorrow. And the month after that. And the year after that. That’s why the average human life expectancy is about eighty years old. Statistics show that people aren’t just vanishing in their thirties and forties. The average person lives to eighty, much less the outliers that make it a hundred. 

See, life is long. Even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment. So, the wisest thing we can do is set ourselves up for success in the big picture so that our daily lives improve gradually over time. This is one of the things I learned as I’ve aged. Having a good life isn’t about having a good day. Days are flimsy. Some are great, and some suck. Having a good life is about doing the proper daily maintenance so that your overall experience of existence is of higher quality.

How can we better guide our actions so our lives improve in the long term? 

A Cognitive Behavioral Therapy technique called The Five-Minute Rule is a popular method for overcoming procrastination. Essentially, the idea is that when you’re resisting a task, you do it for five minutes to see how it feels. Then, if you find it unpleasant, you can permit yourself to stop because you tried it. The Five-Minute Rule works because we generally enjoy doing certain tasks, but the problem is that we don’t enjoy getting started because it goes against our instinct to put off short-term effort. 

We can use the Five-Minute Rule for positive daily actions that raise the overall level of our lives over time. Meditation, exercise, eating well, working on our passion projects, and deepening our relationships are all prime examples. It’s amazing how well this works. I use it about three of the five times I exercise every week. Some days, every fiber of my being is resisting going into the gym, but I know that if I go in there and start working, I’ll feel a thousand times better and be so grateful I did after about three minutes. 

Another thing we can do is get creative and flip the Five-Minute Rule in reverse. We can use it to disrupt consistent impulsive desires that we always end up regretting. For example, if you go to the kitchen for that late-night snack you know will leave you feeling sluggish the next day, pause and wait five minutes before you get it. Giving yourself that five-minute window gives you the time to consider if you’re truly hungry or just snacking because giving yourself a quick nighttime dopamine hit has become a habit. 

You can use this mindful five-minute window of pause before having another drink, replying to a message, buying something online, committing to plans, and so on. It’s a powerful way to control impulsive behavior and make choices in service of the “big picture you” instead of the fleeting moment-to-moment one.

The transformation that comes from being mindful of how you’re investing in your future self on a daily basis is remarkable. Truly, it has to be experienced to be believed. But once you start feeling the results from putting in the work today so your life is better tomorrow, your perspective on those short-term impulses will shift.

You’ll realize that self-discipline isn’t about depriving yourself of things, it’s about giving yourself freedom from what will limit your future.

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