More Self-Discipline

Learning self-discipline isn’t that hard! In this detailed guide, you will learn 3 effective methods to build more self-discipline, perseverance, and self-control.

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Did you know that?

Discipline is one of the qualities that contribute most to our well-being!

People with strong self-discipline are on average happier and more satisfied with their lives.

Unfortunately, many people lack any self-control and are the opposite of disciplined.

Instead of pursuing the activities that bring them closer to their goals, they’d rather pass the time with happy hour cocktails, funny cat videos on YouTube, or a bag of chips and the 127th season of Dschungelcamp.

Do you feel the same way?

• Do you find it hard to constantly work on your goals?
• Do you often not do what you set out to do?
• Do you lack self-control?

Then you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, you will learn the 3 basics to become more disciplined and do what you set out to do.
But first, let’s clarify one enormously important thing.

Why Self-Discipline and Self-Control are so Important

Self-discipline is so difficult for so many people because they associate it with renunciation or even punishment.
They believe that getting up early, working hard, eating healthy, taking cold showers, or exercising regularly is hard.

But it isn’t.

The vast majority of disciplined people enjoy doing these things.
For example, I am very disciplined.

• I work productively.
• I exercise a lot.
• I eat healthy.
• I meditate regularly.

I don’t do these things to punish myself. I do them willingly because I know they are good for me and bring me closer to my goals.
Self-love has nothing to do with lying lazily on the couch every night and munching on sweets.
So realize that self-discipline has nothing to do with punishment or lack of self-love.
Quite the opposite. You’re disciplined because you care about yourself. Because you want to get ahead. Because you care about your mental, physical and spiritual health.

Why am I explaining this?
Because more and more people suffer from a lack of discipline.

Lack of discipline has mutated into a kind of widespread disease

Our society is becoming more and more overweight, suffers from psychological problems and more and more people find it difficult to control themselves.
One of the main causes of this is a lack of self-discipline.

Through self-discipline and self-control, we can do without certain things because there is something more important to us.

• We forgo sleep because we are working on self-reliance.
• Instead of watching TV in the evening, we go to the gym (supposedly, the 127th episode of Dschungelcamp is not even that interesting anymore).
• We eat a couple of organic carrots instead of a 500g. Ice cream
• We control ourselves and listen attentively to our partner, even though he drives us up the wall and we want to yell %§@!&#!!! at him.

Although we often find it so difficult to do without certain things, it is precisely this self-control that makes us happier and more successful.
A very important factor in this is your mindset — how you deal with your thoughts.

Learning self-discipline: What you can Learn from these Famous Experiments

In one study, psychologists compared students’ grades. Of more than 30 different personality traits, discipline was the only trait for which the psychologists found a direct correlation with grades.

Before I get back to interesting things like cocktails, funny cat videos or the jungle camp, I would like to introduce you to another experiment that impressively shows why self-discipline, perseverance and also self-control are so important.

This is the ´marshmallow test´ one of the most famous experiments in social psychology.
Between 1968 and 1974, psychologist Walter Mischel conducted experiments on reward deferral with children about four years old.
The children have put a marshmallow in front of them and were told that they could either have one marshmallow now or two marshmallows if they waited until the experimenter returned.

Thus, the children were faced with the following dilemma:

One marshmallow now or two marshmallows later?

But this was not the end of the study. A full 14 years later, the children, now adults, were analyzed again. With fascinating findings of the effects of self-discipline:

• The children who waited patiently for 15 minutes back then and thus got two marshmallows had become socially competent and self-confident people. They were able to defer rewards if it brought them closer to their goals and were good at overcoming setbacks.
• The children who were impatient at the time, on the other hand, were more envious, insecure, indecisive, and — regardless of their intelligence — had poorer school grades than the children who waited 15 minutes.

Self-discipline Significantly Influences your life Satisfaction

Another psychological study had similar results, examining a thousand children from birth to age 32.

Those who could wait longer for gratification (i.e., had more discipline) were, on average, healthier, more academically successful, in a more stable financial position, and were generally more satisfied with their lives.
To summarize: Discipline has a very big impact on our life satisfaction. More than cocktails, funny cat videos, or the 127th episode of Dschungelcamp.

And probably more than an ice cream sundae, too.
But how exactly can we learn discipline and which factors influence it?

Self-discipline is largely made up of these 3 factors:

goal setting

Willpower

Habits

1. learning discipline — goal setting

As we have just seen, a discipline largely means that we do without something because something else is more important to us. However, for the equation to work, there really has to be something that is more important to us. *These are goals.
So to become more disciplined you need a goal. And that’s a critical point.
Many authors and bloggers write about how important goals and goal setting are. But most of them miss the point. They explain the how but forget the why.

Why do you want to achieve your goal?

The important question is not how you can achieve a goal, but why you want to achieve it.
I believe that as long as we are intrinsically motivated for something, we hardly have to struggle with lack of motivation or a lack of discipline.

Intrinsic motivation

Intrinsic motivation means doing something because we enjoy it, see a purpose in it, or the activity represents a challenge. So if we are intrinsically motivated, the activity itself is the reward.
It is different if we are extrinsically motivated for something. Extrinsic motivation means that we do something to get a reward (money, recognition, good grades) or to avoid a punishment (termination, bad grades).

If your goal is to go to law school, smart goal setting can help you achieve your goal. But the much more important aspect is:

• Why do you want to go to law school in the first place?

Because you enjoy it and it interests you, fulfills you and you see a purpose in it? (Intrinsic motivation)
Or because you want to earn a lot of money, society considers it a good job or you want to make your parents happy? (Extrinsic motivation)
Having extrinsically motivated goals is better than having no goals at all. But ultimately, it’s the intrinsically motivated goals that give your life more meaning and direction. And that leads to you becoming more motivated and also more disciplined.

The next factor that has a great impact on your discipline is willpower.

2. Learn Discipline — Willpower

I don’t think I need to explain to you what willpower means. However, I would like to explain how you can train and strengthen your willpower.
Willpower works similar to a muscle. If we use our willpower regularly, it grows and becomes stronger. If we do not use it, our willpower is weak.

You can train your willpower by regularly doing something that takes effort:

• Taking a cold shower every day.
• To continue reading for 10 minutes even though you don’t want to anymore.
• To give up sweets in the office, even though they are right in front of your nose.
• To continue jogging for 5 minutes even though you can’t anymore.
• Eating only one marshmallow instead of two.

For example, when I write an article like this, I often reach a point where I don’t want to write anymore.
I get tired, my concentration wanes, and often the article hangs in certain places. At that moment, I want to stop writing. But instead of giving in to this feeling, I often overcome myself and write for 15 to 30 minutes longer.

And overcoming myself, again and again, strengthens my willpower permanently.
However, just as it doesn’t do much good to overwork your muscles once, it also doesn’t do much good to push your willpower to the extreme limit once. If you want to strengthen your willpower, you have to do something about it regularly.
It’s better to do a little bit every day than a lot once.
However, there are two important things you should know about your willpower.

Your willpower is limited

In a scientific experiment on self-discipline, participants were asked to perform two successive tasks, both of which required a certain amount of discipline. For example, they first had to hold back their emotions and then squeeze as hard as they could with their hand (or vice versa).

Regardless of the order of the tasks and regardless of how much self-discipline the participants had, they always had less willpower available in the second task than in the first.

So our willpower is limited.

No one has infinite willpower, and the more activities we do that require willpower, the more it diminishes.
That is why our willpower decreases throughout the day. Usually, we have more willpower in the morning than in the evening. Maybe you’ve noticed this too.

The more stressful and exhausting our working day was, the harder it will be for us to do sports in the evening, for example. Most of the time, we just want to relax on the couch, eat junk, and watch another episode. I’m no different, but by now I rarely give in to this temptation.
So it’s important what we use our willpower for and when we use it. So try to do as early in the day as possible the things that are most important to you and that will have the greatest impact on achieving your goals.

It’s quite possible that you can’t organize your day quite as freely as I can at the moment, for example. But I’m still relatively sure that you can use your willpower more intelligently.

External Factors that Influence your Willpower

Glucose is the fuel for our willpower. Where there is no glucose, there is no willpower. So to build strong willpower, our brain must be supplied with enough glucose.
For our brain to always have enough glucose, two factors play a big role: nutrition and sleep.
Any food that contains calories provides glucose to our brain. But foods that contain sugar provide glucose very quickly, but this supply does not last long. These foods strengthen our willpower for a short time, but after that comes the so-called sugar crash.
To provide our brain with a constant and steady supply of glucose, it is best to eat foods with a low glycemic index every few hours. These are foods like:

1. fresh fruit
2. nuts
3. lean proteins
4. vegetables & herbs
5. Marshmallows (These unfortunately have a very high glycemic index, as do almost all sweets).

Sleep is at least as important as nutrition. If we suffer from a lack of sleep, our prefrontal cortex — the area of the brain responsible for willpower — does not function optimally. This ultimately leads to brain cells not being able to absorb glucose.
Arnold Schwarzenegger once claimed that if you want to be successful, you shouldn’t sleep more than 6.30 hours a night — and if that’s not enough, you should just sleep faster.
While that’s amusing, it’s not the optimal tip for everyone. For me, for example, 6.30 hours of sleep is too little. So make sure you get enough restful sleep — or ask Arnie how that works with sleeping faster.

Let’s come to the last and most important point when it comes to learning discipline.

3. Learn Discipline — Habits

No matter how strong and developed your willpower is, sooner or later you will reach the point where your willpower is used up.
Therefore, the best way to have more self-discipline is to develop good habits.

These are things I do daily, or at least very regularly:

• Meditate
• Take cold showers
• Eat healthy
• Work with focus
• Read

Do you think I could do all of this daily if I needed my willpower to do these things?
No, because it would be too much of a good thing.
But since most of these activities have become habits for me, they are no longer difficult for me. I need little or no willpower to do them.

The Trick to Superhuman Discipline

Discipline is most effective when we create good habits and break bad ones. Or, to put it another way, discipline works best when we don’t have to use it.

This is why people who set several goals at once often fail to achieve any.

They use up too much willpower before they can turn individual activities into habits.

Let’s take healthy eating as an example. I can try to give up delicious but unhealthy food at every meal with sheer willpower — and sooner or later I will fail.

The alternative is to get me used to healthy food.
I can learn to cook healthy and delicious food and get used to healthy food until it tastes good to me. Furthermore, I can make my life easier by buying only healthy food. That way, I’m not tempted to eat unhealthy foods in the first place.
The situation is similar to sports.
You won’t exercise regularly for months if you have to overcome yourself and use your willpower every time. So try to discover the fun in sports and get all obstacles out of the way. Instead of going home first after work to get your gym clothes, take your gym clothes to work and go straight to the gym from there.
These sound like trivial little things, but they are exactly what makes a difference at the end of the day.

Develop Habits

To develop habits, there are a few important things to keep in mind:

• Set small goals. If a goal seems too big, you are unlikely to make the activity that leads to the goal a habit. No one can bring themselves to do something every day that they don’t think they’re going to achieve anyway.
• Set only one new goal at a time until you feel the new activity has become a habit. By the way, that it takes an average of 30 days to develop a habit is wrong. How quickly we develop a habit varies from person to person and can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days.
• Don’t be too hard on yourself. Research has shown that missing an opportunity to perform the new behavior has no substantial impact on the formation process of the new habit. Want to make meditation a daily habit, and you sit out on Sunday because the 6 mojitos from the night before are giving you a hard time, there’s nothing wrong with that. Just continue the next day.
• Try to have fun at the activity you want to turn into a habit. Fun is part of intrinsic motivation. If you have fun doing an activity, you hardly have to make yourself do it.

To permanently work on your goals and become the person you want to be, try to develop as many good habits as possible.
Many things will be easier for you than if you try to achieve everything by pure willpower.
And if you don’t manage to develop good habits, can’t find intrinsically motivating goals, and your willpower doesn’t seem to strengthen, you can always spend your time with happy hour cocktails, funny cat videos on YouTube, or another season of your show.

There are worse things.

More Discipline Through the Right Mindset

Discipline and motivation originate in the mind. To permanently pursue your goals, you need the right mindset.

You have to deal with setbacks, learn from mistakes and motivate yourself to continue even in difficult times.

Sources

• Baumeister, R & Tierney, J. (2012). Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.
• Hofmann, W.; Luhmann, M.; Fisher, R. R.; Vohs, K. D. & Baumeister, R. F. (2014). Yes, but are they happy? Effects of trait self-control on affective well-being and life satisfaction. Journal of Personality 2014 Aug;82(4):265–77
• Wolfe, R. N. & Johnson, S. D. (1995). Personality as a Predictor of College Performance. Educational and Psychological Measurement 55
• Cognitive and attentional mechanisms in delay of gratification (1972). Mischel, W.; Ebbesen, E. B. & Raskoff Zeiss, A. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 21, No 2, P. 204–218
• Shoda, Y.; Mischel, W. & Peake, P. K. (1990). Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self-Regulatory Competencies From Preschool Delay of Gratification: Identifying Diagnostic Conditions. American Psychological Association, Inc. Vol. 26, №6, P. 978–986
• Moffitt, T. E., Arseneault, L., Belsky, D. Dickson, N. & others (2011). A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), P. 2693–2698
• Baumeister, R. F.; Bratslavsky, E.; Muraven, M. & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74.5: 1252–265
• Gailliot, M., Baumeister, R., DeWall, C., Maner, J., Plant, E., Tice, D., … Schmeichel, B. (2007). Self-control Relies On Glucose As A Limited Energy Source: Willpower Is More Than A Metaphor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 325–336.
• Spiegel, K.; Tasali, E.; Leproult, R. & Van Cauter, E. (2009) Effects Of Poor And Short Sleep On Glucose Metabolism And Obesity Risk. Nature Reviews Endocrinology, 253–261.
• Dalton, A. N., & Spiller, S. A. (2012). Too much of a good thing: The benefits of implementation intentions depend on the number of goals. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(3), 600–614.
• Lally, P.; van Jaarsveld, C. H. M.; Potts, H. W. W. & Wardle, J. (2009). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, Vol 40 Issue 6