I want you to stop and think about what you're doing every evening. Is it serving you? Is it setting you up for success? Does it help you sleep better at night? We've already covered this foundational question, Have you got to pick a bedtime? And that is when you are crawling into those sheets, okay? We've also covered the first step, which is cleaning up the mess from tonight in order to set yourself up for a fresh start tomorrow morning. Now, let's talk Think about the second step in this evening routine. Once you've cleaned up the mess, I just want you to take five minutes and make it easier for yourself in the morning. What do I mean by that? I mean, set yourself up. If you're going to exercise in the morning, lay out your exercise clothes. If you're going to walk the dog, leave the leash by the door. If you're going to try to drink more water, fill up the water bottle and put it in front of the coffee maker so it's waiting there for you like a little gift. If you take supplements or vitamins in the morning, set them out in the morning for yourself.

Just make it easier. If you're trying to eat healthy, pack your lunch so it's done. Why does this work? Let me tell you why this works. There's a term that you may have heard called decision fatigue. Decision fatigue is this concept that basically explains that the more decisions that you have to make, the harder it is to make decisions. It's almost like the decisions build up this resistance inside of you. And over the course of the day, it becomes worse and worse, and the decisions get harder and harder, and your resistance to them becomes bigger and bigger. And So one of the reasons why just taking five minutes at night to make things easier. While you're at half capacity, you're tired. I mean, heck, you can be doing this stuff while you're scrolling on social media. If you do some simple things to make tomorrow easier, it removes a ton of decisions that you have to make in the morning. And what we know, based on habit research, is if you are trying to make a new habit stick, like drinking more water, by filling up the water the night before, and putting it in place where it's right there in front of your face, it is visual, the more likely you will drink it in the morning.

Why? Because you don't have to remember to do it, and you don't have to make a decision to do it. It's right there for you. You bump right into it. It's like you've set a trap for yourself. And you know why else this makes so much sense? Is because you took five minutes last night while you were exhausted to just clean up the mess and to set things out so that you set yourself up for success and made it all easier. And now you got all this time because you don't walk into the kitchen and go, Oh my God, the dishes. Oh my gosh, the lunches. Where's my backpack? Where's my keys? I don't know what to do. I'm running out of time because what happens when you're running out of time in the morning because you didn't set yourself up last night? What goes out the window? Oh, no time to exercise, no time to walk the dogs, no time to do the gratitude practice. I'm now so stressed out and overwhelmed, I forgot to drink my water. Not anymore. Because while you were exhausted last night, you took five minutes to clean up the mess and start the day fresh.

And then you took five minutes, little steps to make your morning easier. And I love this. And there's so many examples of how you can do this. You can put your keys on the counter so you don't have to spend 10 minutes searching for him. I mean, that used to be me. I used to burn through 15 minutes every morning just searching for my keys. Not anymore. Pack your gym bag. Why? Because it sucks to pack your gym bag at 5:45 in the morning. But if you did it while you were half asleep texting your sister, it's already waiting for you by the door in the morning. You just made it easier, and now you're leveraging research to make that habit of going to the gym stick. And what I also love is that you can use half your brain power to do something like this. In fact, last night, I'm here in our Boston studios, and I was staying in a hotel. And as I was brushing my teeth, I'm in my pajamas, I was laying out my exercise clothes on the back of the chair. Why? Because it made it easier when I got up at 5:45 AM morning to get out of bed, just pull them on, and get out the door and go to the gym.

I set myself up. And one of the things that's so cool about this, and this is where I want you to really just consider the argument I'm making, what is your most precious commodity in the morning? I can say this another way. What are you in short supply of in the morning, every morning? Time. You never have enough time in the morning, do you? So by taking just a couple of minutes at night, Without a lot of brainpower, and making the mess go away, and setting things out to make things easier for you tomorrow, it's like a double gift. You're not only making it easier, you're making it more likely that you're going to do the things that you want to do, and you also have found time. I think that's so cool. You've taken time away from the evening so you You can start fresh tomorrow, and you've taken steps to make it easier, and you've protected your time at the time of day that matters most, in the morning, when you never have enough time. So we just gave you time. How cool is that? And so now you're going to have the time to do the things that you want to do.

And that brings me to the third step, which is take five minutes for yourself. Five minutes. When was the last time you took five minutes for yourself? You and I get 1,440 minutes a day. You deserve five minutes at night. Right after you clean up the mess and start tomorrow fresh, and you make a couple moves to make tomorrow a little easier, set yourself up. Take five minutes for yourself. Before you give it to the television, before you give it to social media, before you just waste it. I want you to give it to yourself. And it could be doing whatever you want. You could use it to do something. I mean, if you're the person that feels like every evening, this used to be me, I didn't find the time for myself. I have no time for myself. I didn't find the time to work on the thing that I care about. Whether it's a side hustle, or maybe you're trying to make progress on a creative project, or you're working on a creative gift for somebody, or a grant application, or you're filling out student loan forms, you could Use that five minutes to make a little progress there.

And by the way, you don't have to do anything. This is just time for yourself. You could just sit and be quiet. Imagine that. You could have a cup of tea. You could read a book. And if you didn't get to it this morning, you could do your skincare routine. I see a lot of people doing skincare routines. I think I missed the memo on this one. I don't have a big skincare routine, like 57 steps at night. But you know what I do have at night? I love a bath. So oftentimes for me, my take five is to just linger in the bath and do nothing. And you know what? Here's how I make it so easy. As I am brain dead, and I'm cleaning up the mess, and I'm making my mornings easier, I'm packing my bag, I'm laying out my exercise, close. You know what's happening? The bath is running. I freaking love that. And you know what else I use this time to do? To read or to listen to audiobooks. I want to just underscore this is time for you. And One of the things that I've noticed as I've looked at the data is that so many of you around the world are listening to the Mel Robbins podcast at night.

I think that's cool because you know what that tells me? That tells me that you're taking time at night for yourself, and you're choosing to listen to something that is going to help you improve your life or make you feel better. And that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. So you could listen to another episode of the Mel Robbins podcast as a way to take five for yourself. And I'm saying this as the third step of a rock solid evening routine, because I don't want you to just give that time away. That's what you've been doing. You have been giving the time away to social media or to the television or to whatever, which is why you can't remember what you do Most evenings. I want you, after you pick your bedtime, which is when you crawl into your sheets and you clean up the mess from tonight so you can start tomorrow fresh, and you take a few steps to make tomorrow morning easier. Just set yourself up. Take five. Take this time to be kind to yourself. And for me, my take five usually hits somewhere between 7:45 and 9:15. And I'm saying that because what you'll notice is the more that you fall into this four steps, the more it becomes a rhythm.

And in the beginning, it's just five minutes, right? But what happens is as you take five for yourself, and you don't just flop on the couch and turn on the TV, you don't just zone out into your cell phone. Every single night that you take five for yourself, you break the habit of doing that. You break the habit of cracking open your laptop and putting it on your lap and checking email or scrolling on the phone as you're wasting the evening in front of the TV. And you stop giving that time, time that could be yours, away to something that really doesn't matter. And look, I know why you're doing it. Same reason I was doing it. Because you're exhausted, and you just want to zone out. But here's what I want to challenge you on. Taking this five minutes before you do what you normally do, it's actually extraordinarily restorative. And what I noticed is that it starts with just taking five minutes, but it quickly expands because it feels so good. And next thing you know, it's not five minutes, it's 45 minutes. And you're reading more books, or you've started stretching and doing a hatha yoga practice at night.

And you probably find that as time starts to expand, you realize, Oh my gosh, I've just been giving this time away. Not anymore. I want you to stop and think about what you're doing every evening. Is it serving you? Is it setting you up for success? Does it help you have a more relaxing evening?