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

What It Covers

Mel Robbins identifies four daily micro-choices — what you reach for upon waking, whether you frame the day as good or bad, whether you fuel or starve your body, and whether you scroll or sleep at night — drawing on research from Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Alok Khanoja, Stanford's Dr. Alia Crum, and Cornell's Dr. Karl Pillemer.

Key Questions Answered

• •Morning Phone Avoidance: Reaching for your phone immediately after waking depletes dopamine stores before the day begins. Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Alok Khanoja explains dopamine as a lemon full of juice — scrolling first thing is a hard squeeze that empties the reservoir. With dopamine depleted early, motivation, focus, and the ability to feel reward from meaningful work all diminish for the remainder of the day.
• •Dopamine Sequencing: The order in which you use dopamine matters more than the total amount consumed. Dr. Khanoja's framework shows that completing four hours of difficult work before using technology produces significantly more subjective reward than the reverse sequence — even if the same total work gets done. Prioritizing hard tasks first preserves the brain's motivation circuitry for when it counts most.
• •Mindset as Physiological Setting: Stanford neuroscientist Dr. Alia Crum's Mind and Body Lab research demonstrates that mindset functions as a biological setting, not just a mental attitude. Believing the day will be bad changes what the body physiologically prepares for, alters emotional expectations, and shifts behavior. Consciously choosing "today will be a good day because I will make something good happen" reconfigures these settings before external events intervene.
• •Blood Sugar and Emotional Regulation: Dr. Nicole LaPera's research links morning cortisol spikes — which peak in the first 30 minutes after waking — to irritability and emotional dysregulation. Eating protein early stabilizes blood sugar, which directly stabilizes mood. Cornell's Dr. Karl Pillemer, drawing on 22 years of research with adults in their 80s–100s, found that many seemingly serious relationship conflicts dissolve entirely once the people involved eat something.
• •Revenge Bedtime Procrastination: Researchers label the nightly habit of delaying sleep to scroll as revenge bedtime procrastination — a psychological attempt to reclaim personal time after a day controlled by external demands. The behavior backfires: scrolling signals the brain to stay alert, suppresses melatonin, and delays the internal body clock. Dr. Anne-Marie Chang's Harvard/Brigham and Women's Hospital study, published in PNAS, confirms light-emitting devices before bed measurably disrupt sleep onset.
• •The 30-Minute Phone Tuck-In: The American Academy of Sleep recommends removing phones from the sleep environment at least 30 minutes before bed. Charging the phone in a bathroom or closet — physically away from the bed — breaks the brain's learned association between bed and wakefulness. Northwestern University psychologist Richard Boutsen's research shows that using phones in bed trains the brain to stay awake there, making the bed itself a trigger for alertness rather than sleep.