Quit treating yourself like a work horse to build discipline!

Why media is wrong about building discipline

We have all been there. It's 1am or 2am, you are alone in your room, and you are fired up because you just watched some motivational video. You decide you are going to do a 180 in your life so you make this plan to wake up early and get a workout in or fill your day up to the brim with stuff to get done with no time for rewards or relaxation. You are just going to “Put your head down, cut everything out of your life, and grind”. You wake up early and do the task(s) for a week max and then you find yourself after a couple of days hitting the snooze button, not getting up, not doing the tasks, and back to where you started or worse, in a rut. 

If you were like me, you followed a bunch of the “monk mode” and David Goggins types during this era. While I'm not hating on David, I think he’s great, I do think his advice is not sustainable for 99% of the world. Not many of us are built to just push through tough times with no reward for a long time. Its these types of influencers that I think have it wrong on how to build real discipline for your average guy. 

Drive and motivation comes from dopamine. When we reward ourselves, dopamine is created in the body. So why would we not use this to our advantage? Why would we try to suppress the creation of it?

After all, we are humans, not workhorses or dogs, so why don’t we treat ourselves like humans?

Why treating yourself like this is wrong

Setting these extreme regiments or tasks for ourselves with no rewards actually ends up hurting us in the long run.

Let’s say we set the task ,when we are feeling all motivated at 1 in the morning after watching a motivational video, to get up early and go on a long run. I probably will wake up and do the run for a couple of days while the motivation is still in me. But once that motivation fades, I start waking up later and running less until I’m just not doing the task anymore.

This is detrimental because now I don’t have any confidence in myself to do big things and my self esteem lowers because I can never stick to anything and accomplish stuff in my life.

It also makes you never want to work hard again because now you think every time you set a goal you have to go through this crappy part of life like waking up early and running in order to reach a goal of lets saying getting lean.

How to go about raising your discipline the healthy way

If you were trying to train a dog, but you never rewarded it for good behavior, why would you expect it to listen to you?

This is how you need to treat yourself!

If you set the goal of waking up early and going on a run, but don’t give yourself a reward for doing it, why do you think your brain will want to keep doing it? Same thing with the dog not wanting to listen to you because you never reward it.

So now this time you are gonna set the goal of waking up early and going on a run. But the difference this time is that you know you love coffee, so you are going to reward yourself with 2 coffee’s after the run. Let’s say you set the goal of working on a side hustle for 2 hours after work. You do the work and afterwards you reward yourself with relaxing and watching a movie or netflix show.

This makes your brain feel a reward for doing hard work and it allows you to use dopamine to your advantage!

The 3 main steps to building sustainable discipline

1. Reward your hard work

   1. This is the name of the game. If you can accompany every hard task with a good reward, you will really start to look forward to doing hard work!

2. Realize it doesn’t always have to be perfect

   1. I can’t tell you how many times in my 8+ years of working out that I didn’t want to workout or eat that meal. It happens on a weekly basis. So what do I do? I allow myself to have a crappy workout. I will cut a couple sets, I will only go 85% effort on a lift. I do this because I know I’m human, not everyday is going to be perfect, and me getting that crappy lift in is 10x better than not going at all.

3.  Only use rewards that don’t take you backwards

   1. All of my rewards are ‘simple’ pleasures. I watch one movie, have a coffee or allow myself to play a little video games. You have to find rewards that you enjoy but make sure these rewards dont have negative effects. Examples of these “negative rewards” would be drinking, drugs, junk food, etc. Don’t do anything that is going to slow you down or revert you to where you were.

So remember this next time you have a vision in mind. Set the goal, but set a reward with it!