Try It For 1 Day: 4 Small Choices That Make a Surprisingly Huge Difference

Are there critical tipping points in your day that either set you up to win or make you feel like you're losing? Today, you and I are gonna talk about four simple choices that you and I are faced with every single day. They are so subtle, yet the impact is so major. You're gonna see how easy it is to feel better in your life, starting today. Because you'll realize it is a choice, and you can make a different choice. The first micro choice happens as soon as you wake up, before you even get out of bed, and here's the choice. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to The Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so excited that you're here with me. I'm excited about the conversation. It's always an honor to be together and to spend this time with you. And if you're a new listener, or you're here because somebody shared this episode with you, well, I just wanna take a moment and personally welcome you to The Mel Robbins Podcast family. Today, you and I are gonna talk about four simple choices. I'm talking the smallest micro moments that make a surprisingly huge difference every single day in your life. And here's why I wanted to talk about this topic. So our executive producer is this phenomenal human being named Tracy. She is one of the smartest people I know. We have been friends for nine years. That's how long we've worked together. Now, she came into work the other day, and she admitted to me that the other day, she had all these big plans, and instead of just rolling out of bed and jumping into her day, she spent an hour in bed in her pajamas reading the news on her phone, and it ruined her day. So it got me thinking, are there other critical tipping points in your day that either set you up to win or make you feel like you're losing? Are there other tiny little forks in the road that happen in every day that you live, these little micro moments that have a major impact on you and you don't even realize it? They're right in front of you. So I dug in, and I pulled apart the day, and I have found, yeah, in fact, there are four of them, four of these micro choices that you and I are faced with every single day. They are so subtle, yet the impact is so major. Because once I walk you through these four moments, holy cow, you're gonna see how easy it is to feel better in your life starting today. And I love these so much because I think right now it feels... Life can kinda feel like you're being yanked around as if you're holding a rope tied to a runaway horse, and it's incredible. It's incredible when you notice that you do have a choice, and that when you choose on purpose, when you make a better choice, that you feel more in control. So let's jump in and just unpack choice number one. The first micro choice happens as soon as you wake up, before you even get out of bed, and here's the choice. What do you reach for? Just stop and think about that. You wake up, your eyes open. Micro choice number one, you're not even thinking at this point, which is why you don't realize it's a choice. What do you reach for? The first thing you reach for in the morning, it's either gonna help you or it's gonna hurt you. In fact, let's just kinda picture how this plays out, okay? I want you to imagine that you're lying there. Your head is on the pillow, your body, oh my gosh, all tangled up in the sheets. The alarm goes off. Your eyes are barely open. You can't even register what day it is. Oh my gosh, you got the sleep in your eyes. Is it Monday? Is it Tuesday? Is it a workday? Before you even sit up, you reach for something. And I'm no psychic, but I bet I know what you reach for. You reach for your phone. You've got the phone by your bed, or worse, the phone is already in bed with you, and so that's the first thing you reach for. And what do you tell yourself? You tell yourself the same thing I used to. "Well, I'm just gonna check this for a minute. I gotta check on my kids. I'm just gonna check this thing real quick." And then you open up your favorite app, and then you start scrolling, and by then it's too late. It's an avalanche, a headline about something horrifying, and then another, and then another, and then a video you didn't ask to see, and then a comment section full of people screaming at one another, and then a meme that's trying to make a tragedy funny, and it's never funny. And somebody's hot take, and somebody's rage post, and somebody's conspiracy nonsense. And within 30 seconds, whether you know it or not, that micro choice made your nervous system just light right up. And I wanna say this upfront. I applaud you for wanting to be informed about the world. That matters. But listen to me. You do not need to be informed in your pajamas. I have a rule about the news personally. I never read the news in my pajamas unless it is a Sunday, and I've already made breakfast and had a cup of coffee, and I have made a decision to lounge around in my pajamas, and it's after 11:00 AM. If I wanna choose to spend an hour reading the headlines then in my pajamas, you're allowed, Mel. But never do I read the p- news in my pajamas first thing in the morning. See, reading the news for 15 minutes or an hour every day isn't the problem. It's the micro choice to reach for the phone and do it in bed before you've done anything else. Mainlining it, like it's your coffee or your vodka. The first thing you reach for? I mean, that's a death sentence for your brain because the moment you reach for your phone, here's what your brain reaches for. More. More headlines, more drama, more fear, more outrage. This is why it's hard for you to get out of bed because you're now hiding from the world that you're mainlining because you've reached for your phone. More information that you can't do anything with at six o'clock in the morning while you're curled up under your comforter. More and more, more, more, more, and it's never satisfied. Just like that, first thing in the morning, you have lost control of your day. That's why I call these micro choicesThese tipping points in your day. It's like you opened up the front door of your house and invited the world into your bedroom to shout things at you. You should've gotten into the shower 10 minutes ago, and now you don't have time to take one. And, oh, you didn't have time to walk the dog who's been staring at you patiently from the foot of the bed. And had you just gotten out of bed when you were supposed to get out of bed, you would've had time for breakfast. Well, forget that now. And this is the common sense explanation for how a micro choice can have major consequences. I want you to hear directly from a renowned expert on how choosing this micro choice to reach for the wrong thing first thing in the morning has a major unintended impact on your brain. His name is Dr. Alok Kanojia. Now, he's known to millions of fans online as Dr. K and The Healthy Gamer. But Dr. K is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who teaches people exactly how to protect their motivation and focus in a world designed to steal it. Now, when he appeared on this podcast, Dr. K helped me understand something really important that I now want you to understand. He was one of the 57 experts, by the way, that I interviewed, and I feature his work in The Let Them Theory. And what you're about to hear, 'cause I wanted you to hear from him about how this micro choice, what do you reach for first thing, has such a massive impact on your mental fuel. See, he's gonna explain to you that when you wake up in the morning, you have a certain amount of mental fuel available to you that you need in order to motivate yourself. You need it in order to get through your day. That fuel, Dr. K is gonna explain, is called dopamine. It's part of your body's motivation and reward system that helps you do hard things, and it also helps you feel good when you follow through. That's why it's called the motivation reward system. Makes you do hard things, helps you feel good when you do 'em. Now, here's what I never realized until I sat down with Dr. K. If first thing in the morning, when your brain is full of all that amazing, juicy mental fuel that helps you do all the hard things and be motivated all day, if first thing you make this micro choice to reach for something dumb and easy and cheap, like your phone, you are using up the fuel you need to get through the day on something stupid, and you're not even out of bed. So here is the clip from our conversation on the podcast where he explains all of it. Check this out. What a lot of people don't realize is that you have a certain capacity for pleasure and behavioral reinforcement when you wake up in the morning. So our dopaminergic circuitry in the brain, in this part called the nucleus accumbens, basically, this is what gives us a sense of pleasure and also reinforces our behavior. So the problem with dopamine is we wake up in the morning, and our dopaminergic stores are full. So what happens is we have a, a reserve of dopamine. So the way that this works is, like, I want y'all to think about this. Let's say I wake up first thing in the morning, and then I work for four hours, and then what is the reward, the subjective reward that I feel after four hours of work? It's really positive. Yeah.