Recently, I was watching a TV show– Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt– and there was a moment that seemed simple, but stuck with me long after the episode ended. The main character was trying to help a young boy push through a difficult challenge. He was overwhelmed, stuck, feeling as if things were too big to face all at once, as if the task in front of him stretched out forever.
Instead of giving him some grand speech about courage or telling him to “just keep going,” she asked him something much smaller and more practical: could he make it ten more seconds?
He said yes.
Ten seconds is almost nothing. It’s the length of a breath you don’t think about, the time it takes to blink a few times, the space between one thought and the next. So, after those ten seconds had passed, the boy did what most of us would do—he immediately looked ahead and asked what came next, expecting the challenge to still loom in all its weight.
Her answer was just as simple as the question: start the next ten seconds.
That exchange made me think about how often we treat difficult moments like they have to be handled all at once. It can feel like you’re supposed to push straight through something big without stopping, as if endurance means powering through a single long stretch of time. But that’s not really how most hard situations actually go. They tend to happen in smaller pieces, moments you get through one at a time without always realizing it.
What if life actually worked better in smaller chunks like that?
If you broke overwhelming moments down into something as small as ten seconds, would things feel more manageable, or would it just make everything feel more repetitive? Would time feel faster because you’re not constantly thinking ahead, or slower because you’re noticing each small moment more clearly?
A lot of stress comes from looking too far ahead. When you tell yourself, “I have to get through the whole day,” the entire day can start to feel heavy before it even fully happens. But if you narrow your focus to something like ten seconds, the pressure shifts. You’re not thinking about everything at once anymore; you’re just dealing with what’s directly in front of you.
It doesn’t make the situation go away. Whatever is hard is still hard. But it does take away some of that feeling that you’re stuck in something endless. A lot of the time, what makes things feel worse is the idea that they’re never going to change. Focusing on smaller pieces interrupts that feeling, even if the situation itself stays the same.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt uses this idea more practically through Kimmy’s character. After spending years trapped in a bunker, she has to rebuild her life step by step. She can’t fix everything at once, so she deals with things in the moment—one conversation, one decision, one task at a time. For her, moving forward isn’t about having everything figured out. It’s just about continuing.
That’s what makes the “ten seconds at a time” idea feel useful. It reflects how people actually get through difficult situations when they feel overwhelmed. Not by solving everything at once, but by focusing on what’s immediately possible and then moving to the next thing after that.
There’s also something practical about it. Ten seconds doesn’t require motivation or a perfect mindset. You don’t need to feel ready for a whole hour or a whole day. You just need enough focus to get through a very short moment. And when that moment ends, you reset and continue.
In that sense, endurance is not really one long effort. It is a lot of small restarts. You keep going, but in short sections instead of one continuous push. If you think about it that way, a stressful situation does not feel like one long stretch anymore. It becomes a series of short moments you move through one at a time. You do not have to figure out everything at once. You just deal with what is right in front of you and keep going.
And maybe that is the main takeaway. Not that everything becomes easy, but that it becomes easier to start again.
Just ten seconds. Then the next ten.
