Self-discipline, often perceived as a grueling battle, can actually be a rewarding journey. If it feels like an uphill struggle, perhaps it's time to reassess your approach. Let's delve into a fresh perspective on mastering self-discipline, making it less of a chore and more of a lifestyle.
There’s a better way to build lasting, solid self-discipline in your life
When I was in college, there were some people on the internet who claimed that you could train yourself to sleep as little as two hours per day
- The scheme was called “The Uberman Sleep Schedule,” and here’s how you did it
- If you took 20-minute naps, every four hours, around the clock, for days and weeks on end, you would “train” your brain to fall into REM sleep instantly the moment you lay down.
- Then, once your REM sleep was over, you felt rested and restored for the next 3-4 hours, effectively staying awake forever.
- But there was a catch: supposedly it took 1-2 weeks of intense sleep deprivation to properly “adjust” to the new schedule.
How to Live a Healthy, Productive Life
Creating discipline in your life can seem like a never ending battle-but it doesn’t have to be.
- Footnotes
- If you want to train your willpower, there are some steps you can follow
- This encyclopedia entry gives a short and sweet account of what virtuous self-denial looked like from the Christian perspective
- Social accountability is a powerful concept that counts the World Bank among its practitioners
Self-Discipline and Willpower
Extreme sleep deprivation is a crash course on how fragile our mind actually is
- To build willpower, we need self-discipline over a long period of time
- We need to have a true sense of control over our own willpower
- If we view discipline in terms of willpower, it creates a chicken-or-the-egg situation
- The same way you can’t just walk into a gym for the first time and lift 500 pounds, you can’t just start waking up at 4 AM on a dime, much less do something ridiculous like an Uberman sleep schedule.
Self-Discipline Through Self-Acceptance
Step one to self-discipline is to de-link your personal failings from moral failings
- You have to accept that you cave to indulgence and that this doesn’t necessarily make you a horrible person
- Emotions are merely internal behavioral mechanisms that can be manipulated like anything else
- Once we’ve de-coupled our emotions from our moral judgments-once we’ve decided that just because something makes us feel bad doesn’t mean we are bad-this opens us up to new perspectives
Why Relying on Pure Willpower Doesn’t Work
The classical approach fused the concept of willpower-i.e., the ability to deny or reject one’s desires and emotions-with morality.
- Someone who can say no to the taco is a good person. The person who can’t is a failure of a human being
Result: Self-Discipline Without Willpower
Once you resolve much of your shame, and once you’ve created situations to provide greater emotional benefits from doing the desired behavior than not doing it, what you end up with is the appearance of airtight self-discipline, without actually putting forth any effort.
- Discipline without willpower: work with the pain rather than against it, pursue it rather than run from it, you get stronger and healthier and happier.
The Classical Approach to Self-Discipline
The classic approach has the paradoxical effect of training us to feel bad about all the things that make us feel good.
- It basically seeks to teach us self-discipline through shaming us-by making us hate ourselves for simply being who we are.
In Case You Didn’t Know: Shame ***** You Up
Disciplining people through shame works for a while, but in the long run, it backfires
- It only breeds greater dysfunction, and ultimately results in self-destruction
- The most hardcore, uncompromising people are usually the ones who are most compromised
- This is why the most “spiritually enlightened” gurus are also the ones blackmailing and extorting their followers
- Shame can’t be numbed away. It just changes form. It’s why the politicians most vocal about party loyalty and patriotism are always the ones shooting up meth in the airport bathroom
- Self-Denial = Emotional Dysfunction
- You will stop going to the gym for no good reason and end up feeling like a complete and total failure
- Exercise religiously to escape self-loathing will eventually turn into a form of body dysmorphia
- People who run ultra-marathons or work 100-hour work weeks for years on end are ironically the people we come to admire for having inhuman willpower
