Audible Book Review | The 5 Second Rule

In anticipation of a long drive from New York to Virginia, I knew I needed something to entertain myself in the car during the 7.5 hours journey (plus the time it took for all the pit stops that my husband needed to make because he was pretty sure he could handle 4 cups of coffee before we embarked). I decided to take a leap of faith and signed up for a free trial of audible which enabled me to get a book for free. You’ll be shocked to hear that it was The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins.

The first thing that struck me about listening to this book, which was narrated by Mel Robbins herself, is that the chapters have so much life. I’ve been to my fair share of speeches where someone reads a book for the crowd and you wonder if they even care to add any flair to the words or if they just intend to speak in the dullest of tones and magically expect to have an audience that is awake. Reading a passage in the way an author would have presented it to an audience is not easy and I really latched onto this book in particular because it was written and presented (not read) by the same person. To be fair, it was my first audio book ever, but I was immediately struck by how much it was like listening to a friend recall a story in colorful detail.

While it was fair to say that I was entertained during the time I listened to the book, if I had to hear the phrases ‘prefrontal cortex’ or ‘5-4-3-2-1’ one more time, I would have lost my marbles (I have ~3 marbles, under the couch, where the cats purposefully hide everything). Content-wise, there were a number of supporting stories and different adaptations of the 5 second rule, but it felt like >75% of it was geared towards mustering the gumption to do something – from getting out of bed to speaking up in a meeting. I, myself, have difficulties getting out of bed in the morning, so I was pretty optimistic that I could make this work for me.

And by golly gee, it did not. I am not sure if I am just really that good at counting down from 5, but it wasn’t enough to distract me from getting out of bed after the alarm went off. By the time I got to ‘3,’ I had a secondary thought process that was pumping the brakes on getting to 1 because I did not want to get out of bed and I would simply stop counting down. I know, pathetic. Oddly enough, a few days later, I heard someone say that using the snooze alarm is one of the worst things you could do in the morning. If you use it repeatedly, you never get good sleep in the 5-10 minutes in between alarm noises. Additionally, if you simply turn it off and go back to sleep, your body naturally goes back into a rhythm of a sleep cycle which lasts ~90 minutes. I am a habitual snooze offender every day of the week. I decided to test it out the sleep cycle theory on the weekend. I would wake up naturally, check the time, and then roll back over to sleep. I would see what time I wake up next and it was uncanny how close to 90 minutes it ended up being. Saturday morning I woke up at 5:30am and then got out of bed ~7am. The next morning I first awoke at 6am and then was out of bed by 7:45am. I have since gotten a lot better on the weekdays, but the counting down trick didn’t really work for that particular task with me.

If you like lessons that are repeatedly drilled into your brain, this is the book for you. If listening to multiple examples on using the same trick could work to inspire you to do the same in your world, this is the book for you. If you aren’t going on a 7+ hour trip and you really dislike listening to the same few songs over and over again, skip the book and listen to Mel Robbins’ TEDxSF Talk about How to Stop Screwing Yourself Over. Towards the end, she describes the 5 second rule in enough detail to enable you to be able to apply it to your own cringe-worthy tasks.