Use Hal Elrod’s “5 Minute Rule” to deal with negative emotions when you suffer setbacks.
When to use The 5 Minute Rule:
When something “bad” happens, set a timer for 5 minutes and use that time to experience every emotion that comes up. Once your time is done, take a deep breath and say out loud the following 3 powerful words – “Can’t Change It!“. This reduces emotional pain and suffering by removing resistance to the suffering. Do this often enough, you won’t need 5 minutes … just say “Can’t Change It!” and move on with stuff you can control.
How The 5 Minute Rule works:
Hal Elrod shared this technique which is really taken from elements of Stoic philosophy and Buddhism around accepting what we cannot change or control.
In Hal’s early sales training his mentor taught him that sales is a microcosm for life. He said:
“You’re going to set a goal – you’re not going to reach it. You’re going to schedule an appointment – it’s going to cancel … This is just like life – you’re going to face disappointments and failed expectations. Once that happens most people dwell on these things and they let them fester. They get upset and angry and carry it around with them for days, weeks, months, even years.
Let’s break it down …
Hal says, use The 5 Minute Rule when something “bad” happens.
- Set a timer for five minutes
- Literally give yourself that five minutes to feel every emotion that comes up. Be angry, be sad, be scared, bitch, moan, complain, cry, vent, punch a wall … whatever. You get five minutes to do whatever you need to do to feel your emotion.”
- But then, when the timer goes off, you take a deep breath and you say three very powerful words: “Can’t Change It”
Hal ELROD
“Can’t Change It”
Saying ” Can’t Change It!” is an acknowledgement that I can’t change what happened five minutes ago. That’s the real power of The 5 Minute Rule. There’s no value in dwelling on it and wishing it were different. No value in beating myself up and feeling bad about it. There’s no value in resisting something that is now in the past and wishing it were different. Currently the only value is in accepting it fully, unconditionally and then deciding “where do I want to go and what is in my control now? What can I do now that will move me in the direction of where I want to go?”
Is 5 minutes really enough?
I’m fairly sure your first thought is the same as Hal’s was – “Five minutes isn’t long enough! Are you kidding me? Can I get a five hour rule instead? I need a little longer to stew over this and be upset”.
When Hal first came up with The 5 Minute Rule he would hit the timer for five minutes and would sit there for five minutes and be upset. Then the timer would go off and he would still be upset … and so he’d set the timer for 5 more minutes and would do it again.
But here’s what happens after a few weeks or even just a few days of doing this. For Hal, the realization came when he set the timer for 5 minutes and, as he puts it, “I was like, son of a bitch! I can’t believe that woman did that and that happened what am I gonna do now?”. And then he picked up his phone and he still had four minutes and 22 seconds left. It was then he realized “what’s the point of spending the next four minutes resisting reality when I could actually get on the phone and schedule another appointment and actually go do something”.
So The 5 Minute Rule eventually became the five second rule which eventually became a core value in Hal’s life.
The source of emotional pain
What The 5 Minute Rule does is it elevates our conscious awareness around what’s causing our emotional pain. What causes all of our emotional pain? Resistance.
It’s to the degree that we resist our reality that determines the degree of emotional pain that we create for ourselves.
Hal ELROD
In other words, it’s never the thing that we’re pointing out, that we think is causing the pain, that’s actually causing the pain. We know this because the same thing can happen to two different people and one person’s miserable while the other person learns and grows and becomes better than they’ve ever been before as a result of that experience. Was the experience the cause of the pain or was it the resistance to the experience? Once you accept it and you’re at peace with it there is no pain.
Putting The 5 Minute Rule into practice
So, here’s an example of how you can bring this down to the everyday level and practice this in small ways on a daily basis – dealing with traffic. Let’s say you’re trying to leave the house – you wake up late – you’re frantic, trying to get ready to get out the door. You’ve got to meet an important client, drop your kids off at school – something important. You spend that entire car ride totally stressed and tense and you’re resisting reality as to why you should have left earlier and you’re resisting the pace of the cars in front of you. For Hal this was the realization that he didn’t even need the five-minute rule. It’s simply “Can’t Change It!”
You can’t change what’s out of your control. So there’s no value in creating all this inner turmoil by resisting your reality wishing that you had left earlier or wishing the cars would go faster or wishing you had more time. Those are all forms of delusion and it’s futile.
When you catch yourself in the moment, caught in traffic and wishing it were different, try it … “Can’t Change It”, accept it and move on.
The key to what Hal calls Emotional Freedom, or Emotional Invincibility, is acceptance. You accept all things exactly as they are and that five-minute rule is the bridge that enables you to get to that place of acceptance without having to just shut off your feelings.
Looking to respond more effectively to setbacks? Use The 5 Minute Rule to walk the bridge from setback to acceptance and Emotional Invincibility.
I have the ability within me to completely free myself from my self-created emotional pain. No matter what it is.
Hal elrod
Don’t forget to check out our own book “Unbroken: Navigating Life’s Highs and Lows with Resilience and Grit”