5 Second Minimalism

Intentional Living

Feb 26

Like many of us out there, you may want to simplify and streamline your life, but you may become paralyzed with all of the small or big decisions you need to make day to day in order to become more minimal.

I have a (very quick) minimalism hack for you. Scroll down for the video and more tips!

Pin for later

Especially in your creative life, it can be easy to gather tools but hardly ever use them because of the sheer overwhelm that comes from owning too much. Let's walk through some examples you might've come across (I know I certainly have):

Do I keep this watercolor set that I hardly ever use but that I might need in a few months?
Do I need to buy one brush pen or do I need to buy a complete set so I have all the colors?
My supplies are getting out of hand: do I pare down on what I own or do I go out and buy bins and buckets to help me feel organized?

This sort of pondering can be applied to almost any aspect in your life at home. If you're trying to be more minimal, you could cycle through the "keep-toss-donate-buy-organize" options for almost everything you own on a daily basis.

The overthinking creeps in can completely prevent you from having a successful decluttering day.

What if there were a way to make this process of simplifying your life a lot easier? Okay, I'm starting to sound like an infomercial there, but I have a point.

Mel Robbins' Five Second Rule

According to Mel Robbins, momentous decisions can be made in five seconds or less. She calls it her five second rule; a major brain hack that can be profoundly powerful on many levels (scientific, psychological, etc).

She likens it to a NASA countdown, where if you're stuck on making a decision, you count down from 5.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

And then you make a decision.

She gave the example of using this method to help catapult you out of bed in the morning: when your alarm goes off, instead of hitting snooze or turning your alarm off completely, you can launch yourself out of bed with the simple five second countdown.

As a powerful business woman, Mel Robbins uses this hack in her own life all the time to help make powerful decisions in hardly any time at all.

Applying The Five Second Rule to Minimalism

What if you could apply Mel's business hack to your journey in minimalism?

If you're a fan of the Marie Kondo craze that's happening, you may be thinking, "Here we go again, you're going to tell me to hold an object in my hand and ask myself if it Sparks Joy, right?"

Well, yes and no.

The beauty of the Marie Kondo way is that she focuses on a quick meditation on each item in your home and asks you to ask yourself an important question that will determine whether you keep an item, or get rid of it.

I love that process of the Konmari way. But for those of you who are really familiar with Marie's method, I'm not going to ask you to thank each item for its service to you.

All I'm asking you to do is trust your gut here when deciding whether to keep or toss something. Do a five-second countdown and ask yourself if you really need to keep something, or if you can sell it or donate it.

Do a five second countdown when you're trying to decide whether to buy something or not. Ask yourself, "Do I really need this?" Try not to over-rationalize purchasing an item. In the moment, do the five-second rule for your quick yes or no.

For larger items, you can sit on the purchase in your mind for several days. If you're online shopping, keep it in your digital cart for 2 full days, then at the end of those two days, use the five-second rule again to see if you really want or need to purchase that item.

This isn't a new idea by any means. The Minimalists are big on their 72-hour rule for large purchases. And I obviously didn't come up with the five second rule by myself. And Marie Kondo is already guiding the nation in decluttering with asking if any particular item sparks joy. But combining ideas you get in the decluttering realm can be a powerful experience.

  
    Click for Full Video Transcript
  
What if you could make all your decisions around decluttering and simplifying your life in five seconds?
Hey everyone. I'm Jenn Palandro. Hello Brio is a community of conscious creatives. And if that sounds like you please hit like and subscribe to the channel to be notified of weekly videos about intentional living. 
So today I want to talk about five second minimalism and how it could really help you overcome the overwhelming feeling of what it can take to minimize your life. So you may want to simplify your streamline your life. You may become paralyzed with the overwhelming amount of decisions that you have to make, whether big or small for things that you have to meet, maybe keep or decide to get rid of or donate. Anytime you're decluttering something, you can really get caught up in the donate, sell trash, organize, or buy cycle. It can just become something that cycles through your brain at every moment.
Every time you pick up a new object that you want to get rid of, or that you are thinking about buying, there's a really awesome tactic by Mel Robbins called the five second rule that's so powerful for a momentous decisions on many levels, psychological, spiritual, scientific, et cetera. 
It's kind of like a NASA countdown. So whenever you're stuck on a decision, you literally count down from five to one. So five, four, three, two, one. And then by the end of those five seconds, you decide what you want to do with that item. Mel Robbins' five second countdown really has more to do with making decisions like getting out of the bed in the morning. When your alarm goes off, you might count down five, four, three, two, one in order to catapult yourself out of bed, instead of laying there, hitting the snooze button over and over again.
But in terms of five second minimalism, you can do that for the same type of thing. 
If you've been following minimalism at all, or organizing and things like that, you know, the Marie Kondo method, it's all about asking yourself whether or not this object sparks joy for you. And this five second minimalism trick is a little bit similar in that you hold each item in your hand. And if you can't decide right away, you do the five, four, three, two, one, and then you decide whether you want to donate it, trash it, swap it, or just get rid of it in general. 
What this does is it takes a lot of the logic out of the way, because what we can do when we're trying to declutter is that we can rationalize with ourselves, right? We can say like, Oh, well I use this thing maybe two years ago and I might need to use it in the next two years.
But when you think about it, do you really want that type of item cluttering your space and your storage areas? Probably not. So what this five-second minimalism trick allows you to do is trust your gut instinct. And that is what I'm asking you to do when you try this.
This isn't a new idea by any means, but I found it really helpful when I'm decluttering things around the house, especially when that factor of logic starts to set in. When I feel myself thinking about an item too much, well, I'll just give it the five second countdown and then I'll have a decision by the end of that five seconds. 
Do you think this is going to be a really good trick for you? Leave a comment below and I'll see you in next week's video.

  
  