The Perfectionism Trap: Why 5 Minutes Matters More Than You Think

You know the feeling: you start a new health habit with enthusiasm, but within days (or hours), that inner voice kicks in. "This five-minute walk doesn't even count." "Why bother with one vegetable when I should be meal prepping for the entire week?" "If I can't do it perfectly, I might as well not do it at all."

If that sounds familiar, you're caught in the perfectionism trap—and it's quietly sabotaging every health goal you set. The problem isn't your lack of willpower or motivation. It's that you've been conditioned to believe that anything less than perfect isn't worth doing. So you end up doing nothing, stuck in an endless cycle of elaborate plans that never get started and ambitious goals that always fall short.

But what if those "insignificant" five-minute moments were actually the secret to lasting change? What if good enough was not only okay—but the key to everything you want?

In this episode, I break down why perfectionism is the real enemy of progress and share two powerful strategies that will transform how you think about health habits.

References

Kara Loewentheil: Perfectionist Fantasies + Tomorrow Thinking

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Audio Stamps

00:30 - Dr. Rentea defines perfectionism as "never good enough" and explains why 99% of people dismiss their health progress and set unrealistic goals.

02:58 - The farmer analogy: How five-minute health actions accumulate like harvesting crops to fill your wellness "pantry" over time.

07:20 - "Don't miss it twice" - the key strategy for maintaining health momentum when life gets in the way.

12:52 -  How to go from "passive action" (consuming content) to "massive action" (actually implementing one small change).

15:48 - James Clear's insights on what prevents people from reaching potentia

All of the information on this podcast is for general informational purposes only. Please talk to your physician and medical team about what is right for you. No medical advice is being on this podcast.

If you live in Indiana or Illinois and want to work with doctor Matthea Rentea, you can find out more on www.RenteaClinic.com

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Transcript

0:29

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how can we get out of perfectionism so that we can keep going down this road to better health and actually living the life that we want. And majority of the time, the things that get in the way are perfectionism, and I'm gonna expand on that for a minute because a lot of the time. When you hear that, you might say, oh, I'm not a perfectionist. Yeah, I wanna achieve some things, but I'm not too hard on myself. But perfectionism is where it's never good enough. Okay this is pretty much 99% of people that I work with that you might be starting to have a walking practice or you're doing some strength training moves here and there, but every time I talk to you, it's never good enough. It's not like, yeah, I'm really proud of myself. Look at me. I wasn't doing anything. Here I am doing these things. Wow, look at what I'm doing. No, that's never in the mix. It's always not good enough, and it's, and when I ask you, I'm like, well, what would you be proud of? It's like, I'd be at the gym seven days a week for two hours. I would have started three new Pilates classes. I would do five swimming classes. I mean something where it would need to be biggest, looser style. Your full-time job for you to get it done. So that's what I mean by perfectionism. There was a really great episode back in the day, I think, I'm not sure if we've referred to it in the past, but Carl Lowenthal on her podcast, she has this episode called Perfectionistic Fantasies. And it's really when you just enjoy planning and sort of prepping, but you never, you're never actually gonna be able to achieve all those things. And that's really hard for people to let that land, that there's gonna have to be an aspect of. This is good enough or sort of what we could call B minus work, meaning something done is better than nothing, right? These are ultimately the most successful people in life that just keep moving forward, even if it's not perfect. I heard a good thing the other day that they were saying for business owners you have to get used to putting a. What you consider is about 60% good enough. Now, some of you hear that and you gasp, but the point is, if you're always needing everything to be perfect, I would never put anything out, every single podcast. I think to myself, oh, I could have done this differently. Honestly, I would love to rerecord these about 10 times. I really would. Now, rarely, I will do a second or third go. Every so often I'll say, oh my gosh, I've tried to record this 10 times, because sometimes there's something that's really hard to deliver. But if I had to wait for something to be perfect, I would truly never do it. Right? So when it comes to our health, we're not practiced in this. We're really practiced in needing everything to be done perfect. Or why even bother? This is what I really want you to start with asking yourself is if you, if I can't do it perfectly I might as well not do it at all. Do you ever say those things to yourself? Or you sit there and you're thinking to yourself, well, that five minute walk won't even matter, so I'm not gonna do it. You discount it. And so today I just wanna talk about a strategy or two that I think really matters and I wonder if it could be motivating too. So the first thing that I absolutely love is the saying of five minutes matters. And I want you to just, just go with me here. I want you to imagine that you are a farmer, okay? And now is the time of the year, uh, year when you're gonna pick the crops, right? So you're out there and there's all this, whatever, whatever crop it is. Okay? Imagine this in your mind, and you're gonna have like old school style. You're gonna have a little like, like. L burlap sack like bag on you, and you're gonna pick these things. Imagine you only have these five minute chunks throughout the day, but you're still gonna fill up that bag at the end of the day. Now imagine if you had told yourself, maybe this analogy is not hitting home at all, but at the end of the day, you have this bag that's full of goods and you can make pies with it, and you can make jams and it's gonna sustain you through winter and it's gonna be amazing, right? And imagine if you had not taken any of those days, you'd not taken the five minutes to just go out and just get a few. During that time, you wouldn't have an entire pantry or whatever we wanna call it, that you would have full of canned goods and stuff that you could use because you kept harvesting those five minutes. That is the equivalent of what you're doing with your health. When you don't take those five minutes after you've had your lunch and you don't yet need to be back at work and you're not just getting in a few minutes of walking or you think, oh, it's not gonna matter, so you're not cutting. One vegetable per week or you're not seeing, well, what could be an easy option at the store? You're not taking these little five minute gifts. And you're thinking it doesn't matter because you're trying to be in this like perfection lane where either everything's prepped and it's all perfect and I've perfectly measured and weighed and calorie counted, or I just do a version where I add in more veggies, where I try to get a few more grams of protein, right? You're not harvesting all these things and you don't have the full pantry at the end. You don't have anything to show for it. Five minutes. Is going to lead to a clean house, is going to lead to veggies. Being prepped is going to lead to multiple miles, walked per week. Think about this. I I love this analogy where. It's not an analogy, but basically where it's, if you walk 10 K steps per day, that's multiple, it's 20 something marathons per year. I don't know, I, I said the exact number, a few episodes back, I just got to thinking, oh my gosh, you wouldn't think about multiple marathons per year, but that's you committing to just walking some each day and so these five minutes matter. Don't miss it twice. One time, maybe the five minutes gets away from you, but don't miss it twice. Taking advantage of those five minutes, and I want you to start to add this up, do a little checklist, reward system if you need to. This is very cognitive, behavioral, therapy, CBT, but make a little chart if you need to. We're all the times that you think don't matter and that you're gonna do it. Make a little list. You are gonna be shocked at the end of the week, how close you're gonna come to it being several hours. This is what I just want to impress upon you. In the morning, you have those few minutes. Maybe when you're annoyed and you're waiting for your kid to come down and take him to school, walk back and forth in the house. Those few minutes you have again, like when you're going back from lunch, but you have a minute or two, you're a physician and you're a patient's getting room late. Don't be annoyed. Walk up and down the hall, one or two minutes. March in place in the room. You're talking to a friend on the phone, on Marco Polo, whatever it is, walk and I'm giving the walking example'cause that's really near and dear to me. But a big example that I use in the clinic too, it will be with getting people strength training with time, we're gonna get you into these big regimens and you're gonna love it. But listen to start out, can you, a few times a week, maybe after you go to the bathroom, you do a few, you do five squats in the bathroom, and then you go about the rest of your day. These things will add up. You do a wall, sit here and there. You start to do these things. They sound so silly. You think, oh, they're these random little things all over the place. They will add up so quick you don't even know what's happening. Five minutes matters. And then number two, don't miss it twice. Don't allow yourself every so often. Sure. We're just not gonna have it in us to just get up and do it. But we're gonna train ourselves that it matters it's kind of like if you listen to the organizing episode that we had a few weeks ago here, she really talked about handle the stuff once. Actually put it away the first time. Don't just kind of put it down on the table. And this takes effort at first, right? Because you just, a lot of us are in the habit of, we come in, we kind of throw stuff on a kitchen table, or if there's some type of landing zone and it's just always a mess and then we can just start to get into the habit of, all right, I'm just gonna put this away the first time because I hate when it gets so messy and out of control. And then I have to look at it, and then I have to take this whole Sunday to clean it up you just start to say, Hey, I'm just gonna have everything have a place and I'm gonna do these little bits a little bit more often. And so five minutes matters. You can find these little bits. You don't need to find whole hours. You don't need to have whole new people coming to help you. But let's take advantage of these five minutes and then not missing it twice. Okay? So one day you're tired and you don't get out to, you're not getting out to do your walk. Fine. Let's hit it the next day. Let's have some boundaries around what we're gonna allow ourselves to say no to and what we won't. So I wanna give you an example for me. I say this often with walking, if I cannot breathe in some type of capacity. So what I mean is I have a really bad lung infection, like every so often I need an inhaler and I'm really not doing well. Although, knock on wood, it's been a really long time since I finally got everything treated properly, but every so often I really legitimately have a hard time breathing. If you have asthma or something like that, okay, that's not gonna be a day you do the walk. The scenarios that I really give is there life or limb involved, like you need to go to the emergency room. Is there blood or fire involved? Those are these sound extreme, but these have needed to be the things that I put in place because otherwise everything was always more important. You know, it's like, oh this, this email, I need to get back to this work thing. I could get ahead on that. Oh, I promised this person everything that everyone else, but not what we need to do. You're not gonna miss it twice. Something might come up here or there, but something cannot come up every single day that compromises your obligations to yourself. Okay, so let me really re-say that you cannot have something repeatedly that's coming up and you're throwing yourself, I always say throwing yourself under the bus, but not taking your own needs seriously, because then you never took it seriously to begin with. Do not be making goals and plans and saying you're gonna do things when you know darn well you're gonna let anything else come ahead of that. This is really important. This starts to be an integrity thing, right? Just like five minutes matters. Stop putting things on your schedule that you have zero intention to follow through on. I mean this very seriously, if you do not plan to do a five minute walk, a 10 minute walk, whatever it is, don't put it on your to-do list. You have no desire to want to actually see this through and to do this. And by the way, I mean this in a nice way too. So let me give you an example. Some of you might have fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue, and you say, some days I just really can't do this. That is totally fine, but I don't want you then to be putting things down where you feel like a failure when you don't do it. That is fine. If your body every so often says, I really can't do this, let's have other goals then, and let it be a bonus if you can do that walk. I don't mean this in a cruel way where you say, well, you really don't get me and you're too harsh. No, but what I mean is that we cannot repeatedly put things down and not follow through on them. So five minutes will matter. They will add up. We're not gonna miss it twice. And when we're not hitting things consistently right, like consistency is such a big thing. When it's again and again and again, we're not following through, then we're gonna scale back the goal. And none of you wanna do this. You all wanna fight me. Every single person. You're like, no, I can do it. Listen, I would not be setting the goal of an hour walking per day. If I didn't think that I had the time, if I hadn't scheduled patients accordingly, if I didn't know in my mind that I have the time for that back when I was in a different practice, this was, years ago, I talk about this. I was waking up really early. I would be there early in the morning already by seven o'clock or seven 10, I forget exactly when I was physically seeing people. And before that I had already over an hour been resulting labs and answering messages and. So there was no time I, for me to say at that point that I would walk an hour a day insanity. But what was possible for me after dinner, it was to walk 5, 10, 20 minutes on the treadmill just to help bring down blood sugar after a meal. That was possible for me. Definitely not an hour. And I grew into different habits and different expectations based on what I could deliver on, but those little things really mattered. It got me out of perfection, I talk about this a lot, even if I was too tired to go up and get the right shoes. I would pop on flip flops. I didn't care. The goal was we're gonna get this little thing done, and it doesn't need to be perfect. We don't need to be on the perfect shoes. We don't the speed. Oh my gosh, that was a big thing. I was like, I have to, it has to be faster. It doesn't count. Are you kidding me? Hop on that treadmill at 1.5. I don't care who says that. If it's three or four, that's only when it counts. Garbage made up nonsense of perfectionistic fantasies. Meet yourself where you're at. Things really change radically over time as you build up. Okay, so you're gonna take those five minutes. You're not gonna miss it twice. And then anything done is better than nothing. Absolutely anything. I want you to get into the habit of you attempting the skill in. Absolutely. Any capacity is good. Even if you don't finish it, even if it, you think you're not making progress, but you even attempting the skill. Taking any action that can be so massive, right? So passive action is when like you're listening to podcasts all day long and you're making lists and things, but you're never actually really doing the thing. Okay? So I need you to sort of assess your life and think, am I in passive action where I'm reading a lot of books or I'm part of a lot of groups, but I'm not actually doing anything? When people are in the 30 30 group, I'm obsessed with saying, listen, you're gonna get outta this passive action land. You're really gonna get into massive action Now, massive action does not mean. Messy, big, unrealistic 75 hard behavior. No, a massive action means I'm actually gonna take an action. I'm actually gonna make a commitment to myself and see it through. I'm gonna try a new recipe. I'm gonna not just think about some ethereal new recipe, but I'm gonna see what it is. I'm gonna put it on the Sunday grocery list, and then ensure that Sunday night I make it so that I try it that next week. Instead of just like saving all these recipes and never doing anything with it, that's massive action. So if you've been saving recipes for years now, my friend, you have the proverbial social media problem where you're just saving, saving, saving, consuming. Okay? I need you to take one of them and actually make it. By the way, this is gonna be a breakthrough when you do it because you're gonna realize that a lot of these recipes are nonsense. And you're gonna start to get really good at being like, yeah, I tried that and that was garbage, delete. And you're gonna start to get more discerning when you see stuff. Okay, but I need you to get out of this passive action where you're reading books all day or you're, you know, just like consuming podcasts and you're in this consumption role. You're listening to friends talk all day long, but you in your own life are not taking any real action. Because remember what we just said, it can be five minutes, it can be small. We're not gonna miss it multiple days in a row so that we're out of our habit and groove. Even if it's, you normally do an hour walk and today you can only do two minutes, you're gonna do those two minutes so that your body remembers, we still do a walk. That you remember the commitment to yourself. Okay. So I just wanted to kind of reiterate a few things that I don't care if it's B minus, if it's not your best work, if it's. A smaller time than you're used to. If it's not fully all the way done, it doesn't matter because those bits are gonna add up to huge things down the road. So hopefully this gets you outta that cycle. If you've been sitting there and you're just always like, it's never enough, I could be doing more. And there's a difference between. As a human, us wanting to evolve to the next level and challenge ourselves, things like that. Verse a negative put down all day long. That's the lane that I want you to be out of. Of course, we're always wanting to strive for bettering our spiritual life and physical health and all the things that's. Very human and normal. That's something that defines us from animals. Okay but we don't need to do the negative version where, and it's not good enough. I put myself down, then I make even more unrealistic expectations. No, it's really meeting yourself where you're at. You fit it in the corners, you fit in these little micro moments. And by the way, with time when you do this, you're gonna start to. Realize what's important and not, and you can really hone in on it. Alright, I wanna leave you with a quote that James Clear had again, he wrote the book Atomic Habits and he has this newsletter. Is it like 3, 2, 1? I think it's every Thursday. Anyway, so he had this quote here and I thought that this was really great. I wanna just read this to you. Think about if this applies to your life. I think it's super powerful. So things that are keeping people from fulfilling their potential. Here's the list. Lacking the courage to try, trying to please everyone. Imitating the desires of others. Chasing status without questioning why? Playing superhero and trying to do it all alone. Dividing attention between too many objects. Alright, let that sink in. I'm gonna make sure that we have this quote, hopefully in our newsletter, on the blog everywhere, so you can come back to this, but I wanna just come back here for a second. You not fulfilling your potential. That is synonymous with you not having consistency, you not setting goals that are small enough. These things, you do not ever reach your potential, and it's not about perfection. So lacking the courage to try, you've gotta get out there. It's gonna be messy, it's gonna be horrible, and you're not gonna be good at to begin with. Welcome to the club, okay? You need some courage. Courage, commitment, capability, confidence. These things come with time. You've gotta actually start though. Okay? So. Lacking courage to try. If you do anything, you are a super courageous person. Number two, here, trying to please everyone. Not possible. Absolutely not possible. So if you're noticing that you're constantly thinking you need to do things a certain way, or maybe you have a trainer where, to be honest, you just don't like the way that they're going about it, but you think, well, but you know, they know more than me. And you're realizing like, my body feels horrible. I don't like what we're doing, all that kinda stuff, drop them. Quitting is actually a courageous act quite often. When you're trying to people please someone just because you think they have some self-imposed authority over you, not helping. Trying to please everyone, really not possible, who's worth you carrying what they think and you wanting to actually have that relationship with them. That's what I care much more about. Okay, imitating the desires of others. Do you even want the same things that other people want? Let's really get clear on that because there's too much of this comparison culture going on. We used to say keeping up with the Jones, but I think it's worse than that nowadays because there's this comparison of like, oh, the GLP wanted this effect for you. Why is it not having that for me? Why do we need to compare the weight number? What about if blood sugar improved? What about if other things improved? So let's not look at the desires of others. Let's really stay focused on our own lane. Chasing status without questioning why? I mean, this one goes beyond health and weight and. Things like that. And this really goes to people typically are not really valuing things that, let's say you're on your deathbed, the things that you're really gonna care about. But we don't have enough of these reality moments. And I dunno, I'm a little bit morbid in the sense that I really daily think about, wow, life is really short. I need to make sure that I'm spending time with my family. I need to make sure that I'm actually taking time off of work. Because at the end of the day, I'm sorry, serious things can happen all day long and this is not well, when we get to retirement age, then we get to enjoy X, Y, Z. Absolutely not. There's a balance for all of this, right? So when we say not chasing the status quo, it's not about you not wanting to be able to pay the bills, things like that, but really getting clear on why is it worth it? Do you wanna keep doing things the same way? Okay. Playing superhero and trying to do it all alone. You hear me say this all the time. It takes a massive village. I think this is such a fallacy. This is very much so a really, I think a developed country problem where we think that we need to live alone. We don't really get help with our families. Often we don't have sort of the cultural expectations or family units anymore that some other cultures might have. And the problem is, you really can't do this all alone. It's really not possible. You can do less and do it all alone. But if you're really sometimes wanting to, let's say sometimes with your health, you're wanting to achieve new things, you often need help. I've needed help from a ton of fitness people and nutrition people, and mindset coaches and business coaches. You name it. And it's all interrelated. Julie who helped me come organize the house that has massively contributed to health. Me doing that I can now find things so easily in my pantry. It's not psychological. It's, it's very clearly, instantly it made a difference. And if I would've said, well, I can organize this on my own, no, I don't have a gift for even knowing what things to pair together in a certain bin. Literally the way she did it, I'm like, oh, this makes so much sense. I wouldn't have known. In no way am I ever trying to do it alone. I'm always trying to find a group to participate in or someone that knows a little more than me where I can learn their angle the way that they're thinking.'cause we all think differently. So there's no superhero move here. It's not helpful. You think it's the answer. It's really not. Alright, the last one here, dividing attention between too many projects. Oftentimes, I wanna just take this for health for example. You wanna do all the things all at once. It's not gonna happen. Because I'll tell you what always people described to me, and I experienced this with myself, you think that you can give intensity to all the things all at once. That's not what happens. Everything gets done in kind of a crappy way, and instead of you just saying, all right, I'm gonna really get this water habit down. And then after a few weeks when I'm just like, yep, I'm used to filling this up. I'm used to getting this in, then I'm gonna see what's happening with my protein. Or maybe you do the fiber angle first, but you just sort of, every few weeks you add in a new thing and they're like, wait, this other thing fell off. Why? And if you start to look at this impact versus effort curve, you start to, to really stratify things and you start with the high impact, low effort activities, for example, what might be really low effort, but high impact? Maybe drinking water, getting your protein in what might be high effort, but also high impact. But again, it takes you a lot of effort and while it will help you, but it's a lot of effort that you're having to put in new meal ideas, actually executing that. So maybe you don't start with new meal ideas and you start with upping the protein of what you already eat. So do you see how we need to look at all of this in context, but in order to achieve any of these things that James Clear is talking about, we need to start with realizing that anything done is great. Five minutes will matter. I'm just not gonna miss it twice. I'm gonna flex to what my life looks like. I'm gonna stop comparing. And I'm really gonna stay in my own lane. All right. I hope that this gave you a little bit of redirection today, that your micro moments matter. You can do this. You are doing it, my friend, and we will talk soon.