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You cannot build something without basing it on a solid foundation, and discipline is no exception to this rule. The foundation people usually choose to build discipline, though, is generally wrong. Motivation is usually chosen for this role, but motivation is an unstable force of human nature, and it has the unpleasant habit of not staying for long.
I want to help you solve this problem. I want you to build discipline reliably, and use it to your advantage, as much as I want to do the same for myself.
The unreliable motivation spike
Mother Nature, in its infinite wisdom, gave humans the capability to feel motivation. If it wasn’t useful, then we wouldn’t feel it, would we? The sudden burst of energy is much needed to kickstart any project that comes to our mind.
The problem is that it doesn’t last. After two, three days at most, this temperamental companion leaves us with the same habits, the same patterns, the same life, the ones we are trying so hard to get rid of. To add insult to the injury, there is also an unfinished project that now feels heavier because you started it with so much energy and abandoned it so quickly.
Fear not, my friend, because discipline will come to your aid (if you let it, of course). When the motivation is gone, you will need a fair amount of willpower to stay strong and do the thing. Going to the gym when you’d rather stay home, eating correctly when you want the easier option, sitting down and working when nothing inside you wants to – none of this is easy, there’s no denying that, but it’s not impossible either. Once dopamine cools down, discipline is what keeps you going.
Don’t treat them as the same thing, and most importantly don’t expect motivation to do the work that only discipline can do. They are separate feelings and they have separate roles.
How to NOT build discipline
Do you know what is the biggest possible mistake you can make when you decide to turn your life around? Actually trying to turn your life around all at once. That’s a guaranteed failure, if I ever saw one.
You decide you’re going to exercise every day, eat perfectly, sleep eight hours, meditate, read more, drink less, be more productive at work, and build a side project. All of this will start Monday. By Wednesday afternoon, you’re lying on the couch, you just woke up from a three hour nap and you’re wondering if you’re on the same planet you fell asleep on.
The reason behind this isn’t lack of willpower. Au contraire, it’s just poor sequencing. You’ve asked your brain to sustain so much, without giving it enough time to adapt. You used the energy of motivation for problems that were not the motivation’s to solve. You can’t expect discipline to just wake up and do all the dirty work when you were actively keeping it asleep up until yesterday. You need to build a relationship with discipline if you want it to work for you, but you can only build it up slowly, one area at a time.
My own path went like this: I started going to the gym after moving to a new city. That built a first layer of discipline. Then I added karate, without stopping the gym — one more layer. A few months later, a health issue pushed me to study nutrition seriously and apply it. A few months after that, I corrected my relationship with food. Each change built on the previous one.
If I had tried to do all of this simultaneously, I’d be exactly where I started. I could even have taken some step backwards, if possible.
How to build discipline instead of a brick wall without cement
The sequence that worked for me — and that I believe works in general — is this: habit first, motivation second.
If you’re like me, you have approached the problem many times in your life, and you failed every time. You may have noticed that waiting until you feel like doing something to start doing it has a bit of an issue: if you never feel like doing it, you never do it.
How can you solve this? The answer is simple and hard at the same time: you start doing it. Badly, inconsistently, without enthusiasm. This is the only way to build momentum until the doing becomes the default.
Of course, if it was easy, then this article (and this very blog) would have no reason for existing. The reality is that yes, it is “practically” easy to do something you don’t want to do, but it’s very unpleasant. It can be boring, challenging, uncomfortable, it can make you question your sanity, but you only need to do it once to prove that you can do it. Do it twice, you have proved it wasn’t by chance. Do it three times, you have proved you can be consistent.
The start is the hardest part. When it comes to new habits, we are like a diesel engine: we need time to warm up and get accustomed to what we want to do. It’s not a coincidence that the start is when most people quit: when a behavior feels forced, unnatural, disconnected from who you think you are, your mind resists your intentions. The gym session happens but getting to the gym feels like walking towards a guillotine; you eat the correct meal but you really wish you could have eaten something else (and you are still tempted to do it, at least in my case).
Keep going. The feelings catch up to the behavior, not the other way around.
When the legs shake
Does it become easy? No, never. Rest assured, though, that the difficult moments do become less frequent, and the interval between them grows longer. They just don’t disappear completely.
I’ve spent countless evenings alone at home fighting with myself to not eat badly. Again, the first months were the worst — these moments came often and hit hard. Now they arrive less frequently and with less force, but they still arrive. Last week there was a difficult evening, there’ll be another one soon. I’m not counting on them to stop, I’m counting on myself to not give up.
Desire makes us human, so remember that the absence of desire will not get you there. What’s really going to help is the memory of how it felt the last time you gave in, and the decision to never feel like that again.
Avoiding burnout
So, should I absolutely never, ever, ever let my guard down? Should I keep strong all my waking moments?
No, absolutely. Pauses are not just allowed, they are mandatory. They are essential and useful, if you know how to use them.
The perfect example is eating: I went on vacation for a week and didn’t count calories. Of course, I didn’t eat like I was trying to give myself an indigestion, but I didn’t necessarily consider the pros and cons of eating an ice cream. When I came back home, I weighed slightly more. The thing is, I was actually looking forward to starting my diet again, because the months before had built a foundation to return to.
That’s rest. The pattern holds; you step away briefly and then step back.
Surrender is when the vacation becomes the new baseline. When “I’ll restart Monday” gets pushed to the following Monday, and then the one after that.
The way I tell the difference: did what preceded the pause earn it? Months of consistent effort do indeed earn a week of flexibility. A week of effort earns nothing yet (but it’s still worth being proud of, especially if it’s the first one).
If you’re unsure where your pause falls, then the answer is probably no. I encourage you to ask for advice in cases like this.
It’s a long trip
If a problem arose, there’s probably a reason for it. You should remember this, when you think that the work is done, the habit is fixed, and you can coast. The gym membership joke — people sign up in January and stop by March — is a meme because it describes something true about how the human brain works with new behaviors. When the enthusiasm fades, the behavior goes with it, unless something else has taken its place.
What takes its place is identity. At some point — and it will happen silently, almost without you noticing — the behavior stops being something you do and starts being something you are. You’re not someone who is trying to exercise; you’re someone who exercises. That shift is the real destination, and it happens through repetition, not through a magical epiphany that fills your heart with hope and gummy bears. It may take an unbearable amount of time, but your mind can adapt to the new identity you want to form.
In the difficult moments, my concrete approach is simple: find something else to do. When the craving to eat badly hits, I redirect the mind — music, reading, writing, anything that requires enough attention to interrupt the loop. The desire doesn’t disappear, but it buys me enough time to get to the next meal and at least take away the pressure of hunger.
The discomfort of building discipline is not a sign that something is wrong. It’s a sign that you’re actually changing something. It’s working, you should be happy. Unfortunately, modern society sells the idea that discomfort is just wrong, we should be comfortable all the time. That’s not true; change is uncomfortable, and sometimes necessary. Real life requires us to feel discomfort in some circumstances. It’s our duty to suck it up and face it.
What you can do is build the mental toughness you need. That capacity — the ability to do something difficult repeatedly without external pressure — is what discipline actually is. Build it slowly. One area at a time. Trust the compounding.