The High Five Habit: Mel Robbins and Chris Robbins on Learning to Love Yourself in the Mirror

High-Level Overview

Mel Robbins opens the new year with what she calls "the mack daddy of all habits": high fiving yourself in the mirror as part of your morning routine. She admits up front that it sounds silly, but she argues it is the first domino in rebuilding the most important relationship you have, the one with yourself. The first half of the episode lays out her case. Love is an action, not a feeling. Half of people can't or won't look themselves in the eye. And a high five paired with an everyday routine works as what neuroscientist Lawrence Katz called a "neurobic" exercise. She supports this with studies on NBA teams and on children working through hard math problems, and with her own five-day challenge, which 175,000 people have taken.

The second half turns personal and emotional. Mel brings on her husband, Chris, who at first called the habit "the dumbest idea ever." As he explains why, it comes out that for about 15 years he couldn't look at himself in the mirror without seeing failure, and both of them end up in tears. Chris now leads men's retreats and is studying transpersonal psychology, and he speaks directly to men about shame, the pressure to provide and forgiving yourself. The episode closes with a long listener email from a woman named Chris whose life changed after one high five. The tone starts high energy and playful and becomes vulnerable and tender. The conversation moves from research and practical instructions to a raw talk inside a marriage, and ends with a listener's testimony.

The Discussion Explores:

• Why self-love feels impossible: we treat love as a feeling when it is really shown through actions
• The high five habit step by step, and why it's stacked right after brushing your teeth
• Why looking yourself in the eye is the hardest part, and the claim that 50% of people can't or won't do it
• Neurobics: how a routine, a sensory surprise and an emotion together speed up new wiring in the brain
• Dopamine, and how a lifetime of good feelings about high fives gets pointed back at you
• Research on high fives among winning NBA teams and in motivating children
• Chris Robbins' 15 years of feeling like a failure, and what men in particular struggle with
• Forgiveness, repetition and a listener whose life turned on a single high five

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Love Is Something You Do, Not Something You Wait to Feel

Mel starts with a listener question. Maria from Spain writes that she knows she should love herself, "but no one tells you how to do that." Mel agrees: everyone is told to love themselves, but nobody shows them how. Her diagnosis is that the dictionary gets it wrong. It defines love as a feeling, but, as Mel puts it, "Love is an action." Think about when you feel loved by someone else. It's because of what they do. When Chris brings her coffee in the morning, or says "I love you, Mel," she feels loved because of the action.

With ourselves, though, she says we sit around waiting for the feeling. Her answer is to reverse that: "The secret to self love is demonstrating to yourself, through your own actions toward yourself that you love yourself." The high five habit is the simplest daily way she knows to take that action, and she calls it the first domino that needs to fall. This idea runs through the whole episode, and she returns to it at the end. Looking yourself in the eyes, bringing compassion to the person in the mirror and raising your hand to high five them are each, in her words, "an act of love."

How to Do the High Five Habit

The instructions are simple. Get out of bed, go to the bathroom and brush your teeth. Then, as you put the toothbrush down, look in the mirror. Mel chose this moment on purpose. She is using habit stacking: attaching a new behavior to something you already do every morning, so the brain locks it in faster.

She says the key is to really look at the person in the mirror instead of looking through them. Don't scan for flaws like weight, bags under the eyes or, in her own case, one breast hanging lower than the other. When you feel ready, raise your hand and high five your reflection. She warns there are usually two reactions. You laugh because it's "kind of dorky," which is what happened to her the first time. Or a wave of emotion hits, even sadness, and you cry. Crying the first time was very common among the 175,000 people who tried it five days in a row.

Mel also stresses that you don't need to think anything: "No mantras, no thoughts, no nothing." Your brain already carries a lifetime of critical wiring, and the physical gesture is meant to get past it. She says that as your hand gets closer to the mirror, even if you're thinking this is dumb, your brain goes silent.

Why Eye Contact Matters So Much

Mel spends a lot of time on eye contact because she thinks it is the real barrier. Based on her team's research, she says "50% of men and women cannot or will not look at themselves in the mirror." The reason is sad: they don't like who they've become, or they carry regrets about what they did or where they thought they'd be by now.

She asks what we do when we see someone we love: we look them in the eyes. She says that gaze brings dopamine and oxytocin, and holding it with love and compassion is itself an act of love. So if you avoid your own eyes every morning, or only look in order to judge, you are showing yourself rejection and criticism every day instead of love. That's why the first step, before any high five, is simply to look.

Neurobics and the Dopamine Boost

The science Mel leans on most is "neurobics," from Dr. Lawrence Katz at Duke. As she explains it, a neurobic exercise takes a routine activity, like standing at the bathroom mirror, and adds two things. The first is something unexpected that involves your senses, such as the touch of your hand on the glass. The second is an emotion you want to feel. A high five always carries a positive emotion: celebration, acceptance, encouragement. As she puts it, "You've never high-fived somebody and thought I hate you."

When all three are present, she says, the act becomes "like brain fertilizer that makes your brain learn new habits faster." You've high fived other people all your life, but high fiving yourself is new, and that surprise puts the brain on alert. The result, she argues, is that feelings of celebration, acceptance and love get linked to your own reflection.

She adds a second benefit: dopamine. When someone high fives you, your brain releases a little dopamine, and "Your brain doesn't know the difference between somebody else's high-five and you high-fiving yourself." She points to what the gesture already means to us: cheering on runners at a road race to say I see you, keep going, or high fiving a teammate who just blew a play so they can shake off the shame and get back in the game. The habit takes all of that built-up positive meaning and aims it back at you, in less than five seconds.

What the Research Says: Winning Teams and Motivated Kids

Mel highlights two studies and says all the research is linked in the show notes. In the first, researchers at Berkeley and Yale looked through National Basketball Association data for habits that winning teams had in the preseason and losing teams didn't. The answer: the top teams had more high fives, fist bumps and pats on the back among teammates. Mel explains that a high five says "I'm with you" and builds trust, partnership and belief, which she calls the backbone of a winning team. She argues the mirror habit rebuilds that same trust with yourself.

The second study gave children hard math tests to find the best way to encourage someone who is struggling. Mel says the winner wasn't praise like "you're really smart," or even growth-mindset praise about working hard. It was saying nothing and giving a high five. Those children did better than the kids who got verbal praise, felt better about themselves and kept working longer. She says the researchers were so struck by this that they renamed the study "high fives motivate." Her takeaway: when times are hard, you don't need tough love from yourself. You need encouragement.

How Mel Stumbled Onto It

Mel found the habit by accident. After she was fired from her own talk show, she felt like a player who had "flubbed the last shot of the game." One morning she saw how sad and beaten down she looked in the mirror and, without thinking, high fived her reflection "because the woman in the mirror looked like she needed one." She says she felt the dopamine and a lift in her mood right away, along with a sense that she had her own back. She calls that moment the first domino: it led her into intensive therapy and to start taking her happiness seriously.

Chris Robbins: "I Saw Failure"

When Mel asked Chris to try the habit for five days, he refused. He thought it was "the dumbest idea ever." As they talk it through, a deeper reason comes out. He had thought of the high five as a pep talk to push yourself forward, but he found that "the power of that high five in the mirror is less your hand meeting the mirror and more your eyes meeting your eyes." The high five was easy. Looking at himself was not. "I was not seeing somebody that deserved a high five. I saw failure," he says, along with regret and a sense of not living up to his own expectations or society's.

Holding his hand, Mel says how hard this is to hear. Standing next to him at the sink all those years, she saw "the world's best dad," an amazing husband and a key partner in building her business. He hid his feelings well and stayed stoic. Asked how long he felt that way, Chris answers, "Oh, it had to have been 15 years anyway." It started before the restaurant business fell apart. He moved through many roles, industries and job changes without ever feeling he was succeeding, while believing his job was to be "the proverbial provider" and make it happen. He also describes the picture he had of his father: the suit and tie, the briefcase, the train to a high-rise in Manhattan. That was who he thought he was supposed to be.

He is also honest about the marriage. In the rush of those years there was no pause to acknowledge what was going well, and Mel wasn't saying those things to him either, so he never heard encouragement from her.

What Men Struggle With

Chris now leads men's retreats called Soul Degree (for six years, he corrects Mel, which gets a laugh and a high five) and is working on a master's in spiritual, transpersonal psychology. He describes the typical male pattern: get up, "put the boots on and go," take care of the wife, the kids, the employer and the dog, maybe squeeze in a workout, and put yourself last. For many men, he says, standing in front of a mirror, looking yourself in the eyes and saying you love yourself is an "Outlandish concept," yet it matters enormously. It only happens if you slow down and accept that you matter too.

He gets emotional explaining why. In his experience sitting with men, "very rarely do men feel truly seen and heard on an emotional level." His message to any man who feels he has failed, or who has struggled with addiction or depression: "I strongly encourage you to start with you and to begin with forgiveness." He believes men are all working hard to do the right thing, even when the results fall short. On whether the habit really sticks, he's realistic: "transformation doesn't happen without repetition." Life events will knock you back, just as they do with exercise, drinking enough water or getting good sleep. But every time you pass a mirror, he says, you have a chance to see a person worth celebrating "simply because you're here." Despite his first reaction, he agrees the place to start is the mirror.

Mel adds that the physical gesture helps because you don't have to change your thoughts first. She says the brain chemistry and other effects kick in right away and support the harder work of forgiving yourself. She connects this to why she ends every episode with "I love you." Many people can't look at themselves, and if you can't show yourself love, you won't let in the love others offer you. Chris adds that anyone standing alone at the mirror isn't alone in the struggle, and that "there's actually a human being in the mirror who needs you." Mel notes that although Chris spoke to men, the message applies to everyone, and that men and boys need to hear it from a male voice.

A Listener Named Chris: One High Five, a New Life

Mel invites listeners to try the five-day challenge at highfivechallenge.com, which she says 175,000 people from 91 countries have done. Then she reads an email from a 35-year-old woman named Chris. From 2019 through early 2021, her life quietly fell apart. She lost what she had built. She numbed her feelings with TikTok and wine, got stuck in rumination and gained 35 pounds. She lived with an anxious inner voice she named Patrice, which told her she was disgusting and unloved. Her panic attacks got so bad she would shake and hit herself, and eventually she thought she might as well not be here. She couldn't look in the mirror.

On her way to work one day she found a podcast with Mel as a guest. While cleaning a glass slider door at a client's house, she heard Mel say to go high five yourself in the mirror. She walked over to a big round mirror, stared at herself, and "I raised my hand, high five myself. And the tears came rolling down. And in that moment, a new life began." She writes that "The spark was small, but profound." Her healing began in December 2021 with therapy and with learning about anxiety, depression, trauma, ADHD and PTSD. She says she is herself again.

Moved by the email, Mel ties it to her 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 countdown for getting out of bed. She says that seeing someone in the mirror who is worthy of love and giving them a high five is, to her, "a secret to everything." She ends by asking Chris what he sees in the mirror today. He answers, "I see a man I love. I see a man I'm proud of." He sees a great father and partner, a man doing his best who deserves a look in the eye and a high five.

Conclusion

This episode takes a habit that sounds like a gimmick and makes a heartfelt case for it. Mel Robbins' core argument is that self-love is built through actions, not feelings, and the simplest action is to look yourself in the eyes each morning and give yourself a high five. She backs this with habit stacking, Lawrence Katz's neurobics, dopamine, and studies of NBA teams and of children doing math. What makes the episode memorable, though, is Chris Robbins admitting he spent about 15 years unable to look at himself without seeing failure, along with a listener's story of how one high five started her recovery from a very dark place. Together they show that the hard part isn't the high five, it's the eye contact. Starting there, with forgiveness and repetition, is where Mel and Chris believe a kinder relationship with yourself begins. As Mel puts it at the end, "it's the person in the mirror who's doing the work."

This is a summary of "The One Science-Backed Habit You Need in 2023" from The Mel Robbins Podcast, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.