Self-discipline has always been important, but I feel like it has gotten a lot more prominent in the last few decades with the rise of fast and easily accessible dopamine kicks and an increase of temptations. For me personally, this is a topic I think a lot about, because I often struggle with self-discipline myself. The following post is a compilation of the most useful things that I learned about self-discipline and that genuinely changed my whole perspective on the topic. This is a very long, but hopefully very useful article and if you would like to read it in smaller chunks, I have included the links to each section right here:
Table of Contents
- What is self-discipline and why is it important?
- 4 Misconceptions about discipline
- How does discipline work as a psychological concept?
- How to become more disciplined?
- Lastly: Mindset
But now, let’s get into it!
What is self-discipline and why is it important?
self-discipline means doing things that you know you need to do in order to reach a long-term goal, even when you don’t feel like doing those things. It means taking responsibility for your own behaviour and not letting your emotions dictate your day. Letting your emotions dictate your day may sound drastic, but remember that motivation is an emotion, and far to many people wait until they are motivated to do certain things. However, while motivation can drive you to take action, it is a feeling that depends on external factors. That doesn’t mean you can’t utilise motivation at all: vision boards, notes or phone backgrounds can help as motivators, you just can’t rely on motivation as a feeling to always get you to where you want to get to. Discipline on the other hand, is a skill you can build and therefore within your control.
I like to think of discipline as a concept with multiple layers: the first one is goal-setting (self-explanatory), the second one is planning and prioritisation. This is where you break down your goals into habits and where you create systems. The third layer is self-regulation. Here, you make sure that your systems work. This includes expanding your attention span so that you can focus better and also regulating your emotions and impulses. The last layer is self-evaluation, where you track progress and set-backs and adapt strategies if needed. I would say that a lot of people (including myself) get stuck at the self-regulation stage, since it requires a deep understanding of your own character and how your own mind works.
4 Misconceptions about discipline
There is hope however, because while discipline as a concept is talked of quite a lot, the actual psychology behind it often gets lost in motivational edits (ironically), which creates misunderstandings and associates discipline with hustle-culture, perfection and a joyless lifestyle.
So here are 4 misconceptions about discipline:
- Discipline is hard forever
Because of the “push through”, “sleep when you’re dead” and “getting shit done” motivational edits, it is easy to think that discipline means always choosing the hard thing over the easy one and always fighting that battle in your mind between what you want now and what you know is good for you. However, that is not the case at all. The goal is actually not to endlessly fight temptation, but to create fewer tempting situations. The goal is to make the thing that you know is good for you the easiest thing to do. Yes, a new behaviour can be difficult to do at first, but eventually, it just becomes part of who you are. It becomes part of your identity and it just feels weird not doing it. And even in the early stages, doing the right thing can be made easier than it seems (more on that later).
1.Being disciplined means always denying myself pleasure
That perception, too, is a result of hustle-culture and it is so true that Donald Trump himself could’ve said it. Just like your identity, your dopamine systems change as well and suddenly, reading classic novels and non-fiction books is much more fun than binging two seasons of a Netflix TV-show per day. When your actions align with your beliefs, you experience the process itself as far more rewarding than playing a video game (even though those quick-dopamine-sources never completely loose their appeal and you can certainly still enjoy a piece of cake, even when you are trying to loose weight). At some point, you get dopamine through progress and by seeing results.
2. I need to suppress my emotions to become disciplined
I mentioned earlier that you shouldn’t let feelings dictate your day, but that doesn’t mean that you should ignore them. In fact, suppressing emotions drains your energy and makes it harder to be disciplined. The trick is to learn to understand and how to regulate your emotions and direct them in the right way in order to work more efficiently.
3. discipline means always being perfect
Everyone has bad days, no matter how disciplined they are. But consistency is the key, not perfection. If your goal is to run for 30 minutes three times a week and then life gets messy and you feel like even 5 minutes of running would be too hard, go for a walk instead. If it is 35 degrees (Celsius) outside and you feel like you are melting, go swimming. That doesn’t mean you aren’t disciplined, in the contrary! It means that you can adapt to changing circumstances and that you still manage to prioritise your health. And if there is a week when you are particularly busy at work/school/uni/whatever, you are also allowed to reprioritise and go running for 15 minutes twice that week. Discipline is not perfection, it is commitment and consistency.
How does discipline work as a psychological concept?
Alright, we now (hopefully) have a pretty good grasp of what discipline actually means. But why is it still hard at the beginning? The thing is that our brains love familiarity, because it means safety. If you don’t know something yet, it takes more energy to figure stuff out and build some new connections. Also, because you don’t get a reward right away, it is too big of a hustle for your brain to just enthusiastically jump to action. On top of that, the reward that you do eventually get (e.g. being healthy and fit) can’t be tied to the action that is required (working out), because it takes too long. As I said, at some point, the action just becomes the reward and you begin to crave working out, for example, but before that, your brain doesn’t see any reason to change a habit that it knows so well and that feels so safe.
Under pressure, the more primitive parts of our brain take over, which are even more focussed on immediate problems, which strengthens this effect even more.
How to become more disciplined?
Still, there are ways to work around this and make a new habit the easier thing to do.
- design your environment
Designing your environment is a crucial step to making good habits as easy as possible and bad habits as difficult as possible. In his book “Atomic Habits” (I strongly recommend reading it if you haven’t already done so) James Clear explains in detail how to create a good habit and how to break a bad one. He introduces the habit loop, including cue, craving, response and reward.
The cue can be an object associated with a habit (a pack of cigarettes, for example), but also a specific feeling (anxiety) or a situation (sitting on the balcony). Noticing this, you start craving the reward (feeling calm) and therefore you perform the action (smoking). The reward completes the loop and ensures that the same cue will trigger the same behaviour again next time.
The Laws of Behavioural Change that Clear explains in depth in his book tell you exactly how to create or break the habit loop:
creating a good habit
- cue: make it obvious (put your work-out clothes where you can see them)
- craving: make it attractive (listen to music or an interesting podcast while you work out)
- response: make it easy (choose your specific work-out beforehand to know exactly what you need to do)
- reward: make it satisfying (use a habit tracker and cross the day out when you have completed your workout)
breaking a bad habit
- cue: make it invisible (have no cigarettes in the house)
- craving: make it unattractive (find alternative solutions to reduce anxiety, like working out or meditation)
- response: make it difficult (tell people around you that you don’t smoke anymore and that they should remind you of your goals when you are craving a cigarette)
- reward: make it unsatisfying (whenever you buy cigarettes, write down the amount of money you paid for them and think of what you could’ve bought instead)
Those examples are specific, but the core framework works for pretty much everything. You just need to be a little creative and find ways how to follow those laws. You can even use ChatGPT to help you. Here is a prompt I have tested to get some ideas: Give me 5 ways to make [HABIT] obvious/invisible/attractive/hard/… according to the Laws of Behavioural Change by James Clear.
Surrounding yourself with people who have similar goals as you or who have achieved the same things that you want to achieve can help as well.
2. create systems that work for you
Scott Adams famously said: “Create systems, not goals”. While goals are important to know where you want to go, you can only get there with the right systems in place. A concept that I think is incredibly important to understand is decision fatigue. Every decision we make drains our energy and makes following decisions a little bit harder. Most decisions we make in our lives are unconscious, but they still impact our efficiency. This is why it is so hard to decide on something to eat for dinner, for example. We then tend to take the easy route (junk-food in this situation) and judge ourselves for not being disciplined enough. But the discipline actually happens way before: A good system for this example might be to cook all your meals for the week on Sunday and put them in the fridge so that you don’t have to cook anymore. This is applicable in other contexts too: putting your clothes out the night before or planning your day in advance reduces the decisions you need to make when it really counts.
3. set implementation intention
An implementation intention is a sentence that tells you specifically what you are going to do at which time and which place. Saying you will work out more this week is a nice goal, but saying you will run in your local park for 15 minutes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday right after you get home from work is way more specific and ensures that you actually have time to do it.
The implementation intention sentence formula James Clear uses is: I will [behaviour] at [time] in [location].
4. identify triggers and learn to regulate your emotions
From my personal experience, there are cases where it is not so easy to change your environment to suit your goals, like Social Media. At the one hand, you have a scrolling-problem that might be solved by deleting apps, but those apps are also the way you communicate, learn new things or find inspiration. In such cases, you need to get to know yourself on a very deep level and learn to identify the moments where you tend to slip. Name the emotions you are feeling in that moment and notice why you are feeling the way you feel. This helps you distance yourself from the immediate craving and understand your emotions before choosing an alternative response. A quick meditation, for example. This is something not many discipline books, articles or podcasts cover, but I really believe it is a game changer for anyone who has already tried everything else and still can’t seem to stick to what they said they were going to do.
5. romanticising and rewarding work
Now my last tip is actually based on motivation. We have a strong tendency to only focus on outcomes. We dream and fantasise about how our life will look when we finally reach our goals and we reward the wins we have. But this leaves the hard work it takes to get there completely out of the picture. So reframing and romanticising the effort too can be helpful. For example, instead of thinking: “I am so tired, I don’t want to do this anymore”, you can think: “I wonder how far I can go” or “I wonder where this is going to take me”, or “I think I will be proud of myself for having challenged myself”. Also, don’t only reward wins, reward the work too. A popular example of this would be the gummybear-method, where you eat one gummybear for every page you’ve read. This is called “paired reinforcement” and it teaches your brain that the reward is tied to the work you do, which reinforces the positive habit loop. Of course, you need to be careful with the rewards you choose, because with the gummybear-method, you might end up being overweight, but you get the thought.
Lastly: Mindset
Now you know a lot of facts and science about self-discipline and I hope I could help you in some way. But there are also some mindset-shifts that are quite important to consider. Jemma Sbegs said on her podcast “The psychology of our 20s”: “You can’t hate yourself into self-discipline”. And she is totally right: Judging yourself for slip-ups or mistakes is not going to take you further at all. Self-discipline needs to come from a place of self-love in order to be effective. Remember that you are basically making promises to yourself. You wouldn’t break a promise to a friend, so don’t do it to yourself either. Respect and value yourself enough to do what you said you would do and remember that discomfort is not a sign to stop, it is a sign that your brain is rewiring and that whatever you are doing is working.
I wish you all the best of luck on your journey to self-discipline, and please wish me luck as well, because I won’t pretend I’m all the way there either 😉
sources:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2ChbxlEUYymw0UoMm5k4Jy?si=3487764bab2249c7
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5UQrXuw6gkpqHtYyiStuC0?si=15929d68ab8c46a9
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3aq9MVe2oSTx8krwkpg7W6?si=NO_at94KTMe3_XzQaQvJPw
https://psychuniverse.com/psychology-of-discipline/
