The Cycle Of Lacking Self-Discipline

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th,: 2024

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I should enjoy it and not spend my precious time washing that dusty car! Car washes are something you pay for, anyway!" To clear up any unhelpful assumptions regarding self-discipline, consider something of a favorite concept of mine: the forty percent rule. It says that when an individual’s mind begins telling them that they are physically or emotionally maxed out, in reality they have only pushed themselves to forty percent of their full capacity. In other words, they could endure sixty percent more if only they believed that they were capable of it. When you think you have reached your limits, you’re not even close, and whether you can keep going or not depends on if you believe it. It’s quite a belief to feel that you’ve reached your limits and say to yourself that you’re only forty percent done. It’s an acceptance of pain, and that’s a belief that is much more beneficial to your self-discipline. What if you were to replace your unhelpful, disempowering assumptions with this one of strength and agency?

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We are usually ready to give up around the time that we begin to feel pain or are barely pressing our boundaries. But that point is actually just the beginning of what we are all capable of, and the key to unlocking more potential is to push through the initial pain and the self-doubt that surfaces along with it. By maintaining a belief in yourself, you show yourself that you can do more, and that evidence builds your confidence and discipline. You might, for example, begin struggling after doing ten push-ups. You’d start hearing the voice in your head that says you feel too tired, too sore, or too weak to go on. But if you take a pause and gather yourself to do one more, you find that you’ve already disproven the voice saying that you can’t. Then you pause and do another. And then another. And then another.

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Suddenly, you’re at twenty. You can take it slowly, but you’ve just doubled what you thought was possible. Believing that you can do more will make it true. It enables you to go well beyond the limits that you’ve constructed for yourself in your own mind. And once you’ve felt the pain and the urge to give up at ten push-ups only to push through it and do twenty, you know that your mental strength helped you persevere. The next time you’re challenged, you’ll feel all the more capable and prepared to push past your supposed limits again. This embodies self-discipline in a nutshell—it’s really a matter of how much pain you can stomach, and most of us will only bend and never break. Our minds can be our best friends when we have a strong belief in our capabilities, but they can also be a poisonous enemy if we allow negativity to seize control. It’s up to you to empower yourself using the forty percent rule rather than throwing in the towel mentally at the first sign of resistance.

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The reality is that most of us have no clue about our true physical and mental limitations. Quite often, the underlying causes of lapses in discipline are the beliefs we create in our minds that we can’t do something. Expecting yourself to be capable, successful, and disciplined will make it all the more likely that you actually are. Two. Increasing discomfort: “I’d rather not wash the car. It’s boring and uncomfortable. I know my spouse asked me to, but it can wait." Self-discipline is uncomfortable by nature. You would never willingly subject yourself to the struggle of being disciplined unless you had a strong purpose for doing so.

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The things we willingly do with enjoyment are called fun. We never hear about people needing discipline to eat ice cream or play video games. There’s no amount of knowledge, habit formation, thinking, or visualization that will make self-discipline comfortable. It’s simply a fact that being disciplined is going to feel like a chore. You’re going to hate it at times, even. The key quantity we need more of isn’t necessarily always self-discipline itself—it’s the amount of discomfort we can handle and tolerate. This process seeks to turn a stabbing pain into a dull annoyance you can barely feel or a hunger pang that you actually crave because it means you are sticking to your diet. That’s as good as it’s going to get. Washing the dishes may not morph into something pleasurable, but at least it doesn’t have to be an agonizing experience.

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Being disciplined comes down to choosing temporary discomfort that helps you in the long-term. Discipline doesn’t care if you are exhausted, irritated, or even dejected—that’s when you need it the most. Making a regular habit of embracing uncomfortable situations can have a positive impact on all aspects of your life. Just as lifting weights causes temporary discomfort that allows muscles to grow back stronger, choosing disciplined actions and decision-making also makes your “uncomfortable muscle” stronger. You don’t need to be uncomfortable in your daily life, but being familiar with the feeling sure helps you in the face of actual adversity. You can even create anxiety and uncertainty yourself—so that they are controlled and manageable—to show yourself that you are capable of handling it. Jia Jiang gave a popular TED Talk about his personal journey outside of his comfort zone, in which he confronted his fear of rejection and the social anxiety that came with it. Jiang wanted to become more confident, so he set out to desensitize himself to rejection by seeking rejection out in some small and controlled way one hundred days in a row. Some of Jiang’s rejections included borrowing one hundred dollars from a stranger, requesting a “burger refill,” and asking to play soccer in somebody’s backyard.

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When the one hundred days were up, Jiang was a new person with more confidence and a greater appreciation for how kind people are to one another. Jiang’s story of overcoming a fear of rejection is applicable to everybody. Your personal fears and discomforts are also your opportunities to challenge yourself. If you like to be in control, spend a day deferring to other people. If you’re more comfortable being passive, spend a day asserting yourself and making more decisions. Whatever you are comfortable doing—do the opposite. Injecting manageable discomfort and uncertainty into your life isn’t difficult to do. You might order the dish on the restaurant menu that has ingredients you haven’t heard of before. Or instead of taking a relaxing, hot shower, you could turn the water to cold and force yourself to stand in it until you gain control of your breath and calm your mind.

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Ask people for discounts that you don’t think you’ll get. Sit down in a restaurant and then leave after receiving the menu—that walk to the door will feel incredibly long. Even just doing something spontaneous or out of character can get you out of your comfort zone enough to see that your uncomfortable zone isn’t that bad. As this practice builds your willpower, you can begin to change some of your less beneficial habits. When you feel pulled into a battle with your urges, you’ll have the mental strength to resist that temptation and to instead ride the urges out like a wave. And if fear motivates you to avoid your urges altogether by distracting yourself from them, fear is sometimes an opportunity for positive change. Discomfort and struggle are what make you who you are. You’re reading this book because you want to be more self-disciplined, so if you’re going to follow through on that, then it’s time for you to get comfortable with discomfort. Three.

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Excuses for lack of self-discipline to decrease psychological discomfort: “It’s perfectly reasonable for me not to wash the car. It’s so hot outside I would melt. My spouse didn’t really mean it when they asked." It’s time to understand the psychology of excuses a bit better. Making excuses isn’t always a deliberate thing. This often makes it hard to pinpoint exactly when we use excuses because we tend toward certain ways of thinking that we just accept as “who we are." Some of these mindsets are classic personality types that we’re all familiar with to an extent. Others are patterns of thought that we don’t easily recognize. All of them conspire to make us delay, procrastinate, or simply refuse to do something.

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But they’re also correctable. There are many different mindsets that contribute to the act of excuse-making, but we’ll focus on four of the more common ones. The Perfectionist. This is someone who only acknowledges results if everything goes exactly as they planned. There can be no deviation whatsoever. The Perfectionist takes a stark “all-or-nothing” approach to what they see done: either everything is right or absolutely nothing gets done. And of course, you can bet the standards of a Perfectionist are frequently impossible to meet. They’ll have an absolute floor of expectation—if that minimum level of accomplishment isn’t meant, the entire project is a waste. So why bother?

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How to change the Perfectionist mindset? First, stop thinking of accomplishments as “off/on” switches where there’s just the binary of “done/not done." Rather, think of efforts in terms of a “dial” where all efforts are simply measured in levels of intensity. You might be going at eighty-five, fifty percent, or three percent—but you’re doing something instead of shutting down if things aren’t perfectly executed. Something is better than nothing. If you don’t come out of the gate stronger than anyone else and do everything perfectly, you can always adjust along the way. It’s a fluid process. The Intimidated. People with this mindset have some commonalities with the Perfectionist in that they use an “ideal condition” to gauge the effectiveness of their efforts.

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But the Intimidated is more gripped with fear than the Perfectionist. They’re afraid they’ve overshot their ability and have taken on more than they can handle. The Intimidated is driven by a consumptive fear of the unknown and the prospect of total failure. Not only will the results be bad, but they’ll also be downright disastrous—the cake in the oven won’t just burn; you’ll set the entire kitchen on fire. To tame the Intimidated and overcome your terror of what might happen, the answer’s very simple: research. Consider what’s the worst-case scenario in your efforts: what would truly define utter catastrophe? Write the answer down and make whatever plans and reinforcements you need to avoid that terrible event from unfolding—and then get to work. Remember too that failure is something to learn from. Just allowing yourself to be defined by failure, without trying to figure out the adjustments you could make to achieve a better result, is a lifelong recipe for eternal procrastination.

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Resist the urge to overthink and overanalyze in advance and risk “analysis paralysis”—just start something. The Environment Blamer. People with this mindset are completely at the mercy of their surroundings. They believe they have no input or control about what happens. Life to them is merely a sequence of things that happen to them, not the accomplishments they make. Their belief that outside forces are always conspiring against them leads them to focus only on the external and not at all on their own internal abilities or contributions. This is especially helpful when they’re trying to evade responsibility. To change the environment-blaming mindset, simply accept accountability and realize that things don’t have to happen to you. Understand that you have just as much ability to affect your surroundings as anyone or anything else.

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Nothing prevents you from doing so besides yourself. This is a matter of understanding just how much you can participate in your daily life. Question whether the environment is really the cause of your sorrows or whether it’s just a convenient excuse. Like the example from earlier, traffic and weather might happen to you, but that doesn’t mean you can’t account for them yourself. The Defeatist. This mindset is pessimistic. A Defeatist is certain there’s no chance for success—and won’t let you forget about it. They’ve already decided they’re not going to succeed, whether they say so or not. The Defeatist uses their lack of optimism to explain their own inabilities—it’s not really a reflection of the truth, just that they lack the requisite tools to do anything.

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More often than not, this attitude stops being an opinion and turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy: they really will start stinking at everything. To change the Defeatist mindset, stop confirming your own failure. Even if it runs counter to your ideas of reality, just attack the problem you’re trying to solve or the goal you’re trying to achieve. Break the big task down into smaller and more manageable pieces—try to score a few “quick wins” instead of the league championship all at once. It’s fair and even prudent to expect hardships or tough stretches, and it’s even okay to ask for outside assistance. Just don’t declare that failure is inevitable. It’s never a done deal. Excuse-making is the most temporary and fruitless method to feel better. Rather than repair faults and flaws from the ground up, an excuse is more like a Band-Aid that just obscures flaws and does little to fix them.

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Understanding the nature of excuses helps us see them coming before we speak them. That pause in our thinking can help us see what the real situation is and can open up insights into how we can positively affect them. And that leads to a tenacious character that can contend with anything that comes down the path. Now that we understand the true purpose of excuses and why they are so unhelpful, it’s time to learn a method to deal with them as they arise. The solution isn’t necessarily to deny what we’re telling ourselves, as that’s nearly impossible. Excuses reflect certain states of mind that we may indeed think we’re experiencing. Instead of denying your excuses, try to dig below the surface and find three components: the truth, the mentally weak conclusion, and the mentally tough conclusion. Drawing a clear distinction between these three factors is what will allow you to truly understand your internal dialogue and isolate where you can choose to be tough and resilient. For example, let’s say you have an essay that’s due in a few days that will require you to perform research.

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You have a reasonable window of time to get it completed, but you’re exhausted—this is the truth. This is the neutral reality of the situation. This is where the fork in the road appears, and you will make your choice about how to approach it—with toughness or not. Now ask yourself what an excuse for the truth would sound like. This might be your first impulse—to come up with an excuse not to get started. “I could start now, but I’ll do much better after I get some sleep." There’s your mentally weak conclusion: it’s allowing you to procrastinate. Even though there might be a hint of truth, its sole purpose is to allow you to take the easy way out. It is indisputably the path of least resistance.

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It seems to be small and harmless, but it is actually attempting to absolve you of responsibility. Then ask yourself what the best approach for the truth is. On the other hand, you could say, “I’m tired, but if nothing else, I can do a few small things right now to get the paper going. I could make a rough outline that’ll make this paper easier to navigate when I’m more refreshed." That’s a mentally tough conclusion. It is recognizing what the right and most effective choice is instead of the easy choice. It doesn’t demand that you exhaust yourself, but it ensures that you set yourself up for success. Often, it’s only when we engage in this type of role-playing that we can understand we are even making an excuse. You’re not required to reject the conditions that make up your mentally weak conclusions.

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No, it’s not about becoming a relentless machine in the face of all adversity. Step by step, it’s just about realizing that you have many choices and that the choices that lead to toughness are just a slight pivot away. We can move forward only when we realize that excuses are almost always lies. Four. Avoidance activities to decrease psychological discomfort: “I will clean the bathroom instead. I’m still productive! I’ll also arrange my desk. Lots of things getting done today." Tinkering with your environment can make self-discipline a whole lot easier.

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a study on dietary habits in: 2006

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The change in plate size was a minuscule two inches—not quite the width of a smartphone—but yielded more than one-fifth of a decrease in consumption. Make the easy thing the right thing; make it the default thing, even. For instance, if you want extra incentive to practice a musical instrument more, you could make a permanent place for the instrument in the middle of a room with instructions of exactly where to pick up. You could also leave a trail of sheet music that literally requires you to pick it up to walk to your bed. If you want to work out more, you’re more likely to visit a gym if it’s located on your way home from work rather than ten miles in the opposite direction. You can also put your gym bag in front of your front door, buy a pull-up bar for your kitchen doorway, and only wear shoes that can double as exercise shoes. Finally, if you want to procrastinate less, you can leave reminder Post-Its next to door handles and your wallet (things you will have to touch), leave your work in a place you can’t avoid it, and hide your distracting temptations. Decreasing distraction is a function of out of sight, out of mind. For example, supermarkets often place higher-priced items at customers’ eye levels to increase the chances they’ll buy them.

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But one could reverse this process at home by keeping unhealthy foods away from immediate view and storing them in less visible or harder-to-reach levels. Put your chocolate inside five containers like a Russian nesting doll and put them in a closet. See how often you binge then. To stop smoking, one might consider removing all the ashtrays from inside the home and placing them as far away as possible on the perimeter of their property so smoking will necessitate a brisk walk in the freezing winter. To keep from sitting down all day, you can switch to a standing desk that will force you to stand up during most working hours. You could also simply remove chairs and coffee tables from the area in which you do most of your work. Depending on willpower and discipline is risky to say the least, so create an environment that will help you automate your decisions toward self-discipline. In taking that decision out of your hands, you’re rewiring yourself to take bad habits out of your routine—and likely saving a little time in the process. Further Considerations Set goals.

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If you Google “goal setting,” you get 952 million hits. Setting goals is a much talked about topic. How can setting goals help you break the cycle of lack of self-discipline? By setting goals, you introduce something external to keep you motivated and accountable. Having an articulated set of goals keeps you on track because you no longer have to convince yourself, “I can do this." Instead, you can say to yourself, “I just need to achieve my goal." The former is easier to let slide, while the latter is more effective because it is tied to a consequence, whether positive or negative. Another way setting goals can help you break the cycle is by decreasing your discomfort. When your unhelpful assumptions have you feeling uncomfortable, having a clear goal with specific steps may help you put aside some of these feelings and remind you that you everything is proceeding just fine and you don’t need to stress or become fearful.

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Finally, being able to actively track your progress toward your goal is helpful for adherence. It’s motivating. Perhaps you have a log where you document how much water you drink each day. Maybe you mark the length of your run each day on your calendar. Whatever your goal, decide how you are going to monitor your progress toward achieving that goal, because it is going to keep you on track and let you know that your efforts are not in vain. Even just a visual reminder can often be a powerful tool. When we struggle with self-discipline, we often make the mistake that however we feel is how reality actually is. For instance, because you feel discouraged, you feel that you’re destined to fail. Sometimes we need a reminder about what we’ve accomplished and how far we have come.

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All the above benefits of goals are especially true if you attempt to abide by the SMART goal methodology. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and with a time frame. Instead of saying that you want to lose weight (too ambiguous and easily shrugged off), you set specific parameters for your goal that help you achieve the goal. Specific. The goals you set should be precise and unambiguous, otherwise you won’t have a clear definition of what you need to accomplish and won’t be strongly driven to achieve your aims. The more detail the better. Let’s use a common and popular behavioral change as an example of the SMART goals track: establishing a workout routine. •Why? Because you want to live healthier.

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•Who’s involved? You, for one. Maybe a personal trainer, too. •What do you need to accomplish? Building strength and/or losing or gaining weight. •Which requirements or obstacles do you deal with? You need to establish a routine and use gymnasium equipment. Your obstacles could be personal—self-consciousness in a workout environment or living a bit far from a useful gym facility. •Where do you need to go to do this?

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If the gym’s too far, maybe there’s a space in your house you can clear for working out—or you could just focus on activities you can do anywhere, like running or biking. These answers don’t have to go too far “into the weeds,” but they should be clear enough to serve as a statement of purpose and mission. Measurable. Keeping track of your advancement through your goal is a huge part of remaining motivated. Recording your progress step by step will keep you fully aware of how much you’ve accomplished and how far you have to go, especially when you’re in the latter stages and trying to keep momentum. For instance, exercise, in particular, thrives on keeping records of your progress: how many reps you do, how many miles you run or bike, by how much you increase your effort over a period of time, how much weight or size you’re losing or gaining on a weekly basis, and how far away you are from your targets. If you don’t measure it, you won’t know it, and you won’t do it. Achievable. Be pragmatic about setting your expectations.

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Although it’s important to stretch your capabilities to grow, your goal should be something you can actually complete. You probably won’t rise into a senior executive position if you’ve only been with a company for six weeks or even six months. Careful estimation of what’s realistically possible for you in a modest time frame will help you build your resources gradually and chart your success more surely. If your goal is too easy, you will be bored and unmotivated. If your goal is too difficult, you will become discouraged and quit. For a workout regimen, results should be achievable according to several factors. Your body build may not support dramatic weight loss or gain, so know what you can expect to achieve, perhaps working from the perspective of getting healthier and changing dietary habits. You’re probably going to need to set a workout regimen that fits into your daily schedule and moderate your expectations according to what you can accomplish in that timetable. Relevant.

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Do you feel like your goal actually matters? Is it a useful or worthwhile pursuit? Does it fill an established need? Is now the best time to be following this track, or might it be too soon? Is it something that will be valuable in the current personal climate? And are you the best person to bring it to reality? For the workout example, this isn’t a terribly difficult dilemma. Getting healthy is obviously a worthy quest and fills a need. You’re of course the best person to make it happen.

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You could conceivably have a few time-related fixes to think about—there might be a practical reason for you to wait a couple of weeks. Or none at all. Time-bound. This is a deadline. This could be an additional “when” question in the “specific” category but deserves its own mention. (Plus, we need a “T” section to finish the acronym, anyway.) You need to set a due date or deadline to measure your milestones and keep your focus on the finish line. Of course, this is critical to avoiding procrastination. Set your expectations along a certain time frame.

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When should you finish the job? What can you do right now, in six months, and in six weeks? In terms of your workout routine, what size or weight can you expect to be after a certain amount of time (two weeks, six months, a year)? Base your expectations on the other factors in your SMART goal assessment—but once you make a deadline or numeric goal, stick to it. Olympic athletes only have the opportunity to compete every four years. How can you remain self-disciplined and motivated for so long? The first year might be doable as you are running on enthusiasm, and the fourth year might also be fine as you can run on anticipation. But what about the middle two years? Those are tough times, and setting goals can drastically help your powers of self-discipline.

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Time management. Yet another way to help break the cycle of lack of self-discipline is to manage your time better. In general, time management is the ability to get specified things done within the allotted time you have available. It’s simple—the worse you are at this skill, the more negativity and discomfort you feel, which leads you down a path of darkness. A good way to start with time management is to keep a time log. Essentially, you document how you spend each minute of your day for at least a week. This can be done on paper, on a calendar or e-calendar, in a spreadsheet, or whatever way works best for you. Whatever method you choose, be brutally honest about your time. This will provide the most information and help you on your quest to become a better time manager.

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At the end of the week, you can look back and see not only what you accomplished, but you can also look for trends. Look for the time of day that you are most productive. Moving forward, you may want to schedule your most important tasks of the day in that time frame. Maybe your time log is an eye-opening look at just how much time you waste. How much time do you spend on social media, surfing the Internet, etc.? If you’ve really been authentic in recording how you spend your time, it can be a truly valuable tool. Time management can actually help break the cycle at almost any point. If your unhelpful assumption is fear of the unknown, time management can help by creating routines and systems that allow you to have a better handle on what’s coming next in your day, month, etc. If you are feeling uncomfortable—say, anxious or frustrated—a good time management system can help you stay or get back on track and alleviate some of those feelings of discomfort by giving you a framework in which to operate.

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Time management also helps when you are making excuses. It’s harder to make an excuse when you have something scheduled on your calendar. By having an appointment on your calendar, you know there’s a deadline, and that creates a sense of urgency, thereby spurring you into action rather than encouraging you to come up with excuses. After all, many of us claim to work better under a time constraint, so you can test this theory on yourself through better time management. If you are in avoidance mode? When you are avoiding a task, you are typically replacing it with something of low or lower priority. By honing your time management skills, you can better schedule time for your priority tasks, but you can also schedule your “time killers” or down times. By scheduling both, it helps keep you on task for the more important things since you know you have time scheduled to do other things. Finally, time management can be beneficial when it comes to consequences.

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You may be able to avoid some of the negative consequences by being an effective time manager. By scheduling your time, you will be less likely to fall behind, which can create stressful demands on you and your time. You are also likely to avoid failing at a task because you’ve planned things out ahead of time. We've delved deep into the science of self-discipline, and hopefully you're walking away with actionable tools to break free from that cycle of procrastination. Remember, self-discipline is a journey, not a destination. You'll be kind to yourself, celebrate small wins and keep putting one foot in front of the other.