The 5-5-5 rule

In 1990, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft was about 6 billion kilometres from Earth. It had been on a mission to study the outer planets of our solar system. Carl Sagan (an American astronomer and astrophysicist) suggested that NASA turn Voyager’s camera back toward Earth for one final photograph before shutting it off.

The result was the now-iconic image you can see above. A tiny speck (less than a pixel) is suspended in a sunbeam. That speck is Earth.

Sagan wrote a book about the “pale blue dot” and later narrated it for audio. You can listen to the popular excerpt here, but this is a small piece of it…

“Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love… every human being who ever was, lived out their lives… on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” - Carl Sagan

I love a good quote. It’s like a written photograph that lives on in simple text - a snippet of someone’s momentary thoughts. This one feels liberating.

It’s liberating because, if Earth itself is a mote of dust, then maybe, just maybe, that rude email I got yesterday doesn’t need to ruin my day. Maybe the awkward meeting, the long to-do list, or the midnight worry spiral…maybe all of it is just a speck of a speck.

How do we stop the spec from feeling big?

It’s easy to say “zoom out” when life is great and we don’t have any concerns. But when we’re encircled with chaos, frustration, heartbreak, or stress, those problems feel like the whole universe. So how do we actually train our minds to pause, shift, and zoom out?

Here’s a beautifully simple mental tool → the 5-5-5 rule.

We ask ourselves: “Will this matter in 5 minutes? 5 days? 5 years?”

That’s it. We just ask those three questions, and then notice what changes in our response.

So, how do we actually use it?

Let’s take two real-life scenarios from the workplace.

Scenario 1: A colleague dropped the ball and throws a challenging last-minute project our way.

We’re fuming. Our heart rate is up. We start crafting the perfect response and imagining what we’ll say to them.

Pause.

5 minutes: Yes, I’m angry. They do this all the time.
5 days: Will this still irritate us? Possibly. But the project might be completed or cancelled and anyway, everyone has moved on.
5 years: What was the project again?!

When we zoom out, we move from reacting to responding. That’s power. And the cost of not zooming out is that we risk our own suffering.

Scenario 2: A huge project that we worked on falls flat.

Low engagement, no praise, and maybe even some criticism. This happens a lot when I think a post I wrote will be a hit on LinkedIn and gets 3 likes…..

5 minutes: Feels like failure.
5 days: It might still sting. Perhaps some embarrassment will linger.
5 years: It was a lesson that led to something better. And a funny story we still tell later.

The 5-5-5 rule doesn’t give us a free pass to ignore what’s not working. It just helps us let go of the weight that doesn’t deserve to stay.

And what if it does matter?

This is a big question.

Sometimes the answer is: “yes, this will matter in 5 years.”
The relationship that's falling apart.
The burnout affecting our health.
The ethical dilemma at work.

As mentioned above, zooming out doesn’t mean ignoring. It just helps us pause to notice (mindfulness) and look from a different vantage point (perspective). We look for the full picture and with that comes clarity to help us see what truly matters.

From that clarity we can get busy on whatever we need to do right now that our future selves will thank us for!

That’s resilience. It’s leaning in with clarity so we can know what to do next.

Other ways to zoom out in real life.

A few simple ways professionals can train their minds to zoom out (especially when it’s hard):

1. Journal from the future. Write one paragraph from our perspective five years from now. What does this moment look like from there? What advice might that version of us give?

2. Get out in nature. Look at the ocean. The mountains. Even the sky. The moment we connect with something ancient, our worries shrink in proportion.

3. Timeline your life. Sketch a rough life timeline. Birth to death. Plot out where we are right now. I did this recently and saw that I’m somewhere just past the halfway point. It reminded me not to waste time obsessing over things that won’t matter next week.

4. Use our breath as a reset button. When overwhelm hits, we can try this: breathe in for 5. Hold for 5. Out for 5. Repeat 5 times. It’s a physical version of the 5-5-5. And any mindful breathing pattern like this will help reset our nervous system.

A speck doesn’t mean it’s meaningless.

Let’s not confuse small with insignificant. Our struggles matter and our feelings are real. But when they take over our entire screen, zooming out helps us reclaim agency.

The 5-5-5 rule is a reminder that we’ll be ok. This is just a moment and we can choose how we carry it.

So the next time something feels impossibly heavy, try asking whether it will matter in 5 minutes, 5 days or 5 years?

And if it will, what’s the next courageous step we can take?

Until next time friends, stay resilient.

Carre @ Resilient Minds

PS - I just had my first ever professional podcast appearance with Scott Raven from the Corvus Effect. It was a great conversation so please have a listen and let me know what you think. You can find it on Scott’s website, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.