Discipline Is Actually An Emotion

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Own the dream. Today we're going to talk about how to use emotion to cultivate discipline. And this is really important because when it comes to discipline, we all know we need it, but we don't really know how to get more of it. I remember when I was growing up, my mom would always get on my case for being undisciplined. You're always going to sleep too late. You are waking up too late. You're not doing your things on time. Allock, you need more discipline.

And I was like, all right, I hear ya. I sort of get that I should be waking up every day on time. I should be eating healthy, exercising, studying, all that good stuff. I'm game. How do I become more disciplined? And then she's like, Well, you need to wake up every day at the same time. Then you will be disciplined. And I got kind of confused because I was like, wait a second, don't I need discipline first?

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And so if we sort of think about discipline, part of the reason it's so hard to cultivate is because we don't really understand what it is. We think of discipline as the exertion of willpower. But you can exert willpower for a day or maybe two, but over time, at some point you're gonna start failing, right? You can wake up every day or you can wake up at 7 a.m. the first day, the second day, the third day. You can make a New Year's resolution where you're like, I'm gonna eat healthy.

And you exert willpower for a time and eventually willpower runs out. And this is why everyone's so focused on habits, right? Because okay, if you can build a habit, it's all about building habits, then I don't need willpower.

But a habit is about automatic behavior. It's about sort of being reflexive. But what about discipline? What about these people who are like focused over time and can cultivate this discipline? And it turns out that the reason it's so hard to cultivate is because we don't understand what it is. Discipline is actually an emotion.

Now that may sound really confusing because we don't think about discipline as an emotion, but this is something that I sort of figured out when I was working as a as an addiction psychiatrist. I was working with all these people who were addicted to substances, stuff like heroin and cocaine and Adderall and alcohol, marijuana. And I really was trying to figure out like, okay, how do we help this person? How can I help this person overcome this addiction?

And we sort of teach meditation, right? We teach mindfulness. We teach them how to sort of i increase their willpower and resist impulses. But I got kind of fundamentally confused because what an addict needs is discipline. But if you look at the science of psychotherapy, what are we talking about with addicts all the time? We're not sending them to boot camp to sort of train really hard and become disciplined. We're talking to them about their feelings.

So how does that work? How is it that because if you think about overcoming an addiction, someone needs a lot of discipline to overcome an addiction? And yet at the same time, when we sort of think a little bit about okay, how do you help someone become sober? You're doing emotional work. And the answer is actually pretty surprising. That common neuroscience has actually led us astray, and we don't really understand what emotion is.

So what's happened in neuroscience is we've figured out that there are emotional structures in the brain. And it's kind of common knowledge now that if you look at things like the amygdala and limbic system, you have these centers of the brain, these anatomical structures where emotion exists. Like fear and anxiety and things like that. We have all these brain scans that show that these are the emotional centers of the brain.

But this is actually a huge misconception. So we have a anxiety center and that's absolutely in the amygdala. We have a fear center and that's absolutely in the amygdala. But what about the positive emotions? Where is the humor center of the brain? Where is the joy center of the brain? Where is the love center of the brain? And this is where we really have to get out into the specifics of the neuroscience, but we've actually all been led astray because negative emotions

are localized to anatomical structures. But as we move into the positive emotions, people are kind of confused about where they are, right? You can go to a psychotherapist and they can teach you how to be less anxious. We're really good at working on that. But can you go to a psychotherapist to be more funny? Can you go to a psychotherapist to actually learn joy?

And that's not where we actually go, right? And where the traditions that we sort of find this knowledge, it's actually in yoga, in meditation, in places like Zen Buddhism. So if you look at sort of the what Zen Buddhists are really good at, they're really great at understanding humor. They actually use humor as a path to enlightenment. And I'd love to share with y'all a story that kind of exemplifies this.

So when I was studying in the ashram, I had a teacher who sort of told me the story that was brilliant. So there was a master. who's teaching people to meditate. And he had a lot of disciples. So they would wake up every morning at 4 30 in the morning and they'd go to the meditation hall to meditate. The problem is as the monks were sitting there trying to meditate, there was a cat that lived in the ashram or the monastery.

And the cat would get pretty excited because now everyone's awake and everyone's kind of sitting down and trying to meditate. And the cat starts messing with people, right? It gets excited, it starts walking on one monk, starts walking on another monk, just interferes with their meditation.

And so the master looks at this and realizes, okay, this cat is interfering with everyone's meditation. So he tells his his disciples, he says, okay, when the cat shows up, the first thing we need to do is put a bucket on top of the cat for like 45 minutes while we meditate, then we're gonna lift the bucket, and then the cat can do whatever it wants.

So the the the monks start doing this, the disciples start doing this, put they put a cat under the bucket, and then everyone's able to meditate. So over time, the master teaches this lesson and says, okay, before we start to meditate, the most important thing to do. is to put the bucket on the cap.

And everyone's like, okay, master, we got it. And if anyone screwed up and forgot to put the bucket on the cat, the cat would interfere with everyone's meditation. So the master taught this principle to one disciple after another, after another. Make sure before you start to meditate, you put a bucket on the cat.

So then the master dies and everyone's like, okay, that's you know, that's okay. We're gonna mourn the master, but the master taught all this stuff, so we're gonna continue doing it. And so they continue to get up every day, they continue to put the bucket on the cat. And then one day something weird happens. A couple of years later, the cat dies. And now suddenly all the monks are in a panic.

They're like, what do we do? What do we do? What do we do? There's no there's no we can't put the bucket on the cat. And the master taught us the first thing you should do anytime you meditate is put the bucket on the cat. What do we do? And someone else is like, I know, let's go find a new cat. And that's exactly what they did. Ready to relax in your dream bath retreat without the stress of figuring out every detail yourself? At the Home Depot, your bathroom.

Is covered. Shop fully designed rooms and curated bath collections to go from inspiration to transformation. We'll make it easier on your toilets and haul the tile in between. Your vision to life. Green baths? So this is what I love about the tradition of meditation. When it comes to sort of the cultivation of positive emotions, how do we find joy? How do we find humor? This is where the yogis and zen masters really figured something out.

And when I was struggling as an addiction psychiatrist to try to figure out how can I help my patients be more disciplined, I actually went to an ancient yogic text. It's one of the Upanishads that sort of blew my mind as I tried to understand where in the mind discipline comes from.

So I'm gonna share with that with y'all now. So let's start with one basic observation that the yogis make. The first observation that they made is that opposites are in the same category, right? So we can say that red and blue, let's say, are opposite colors, but they're both colors. Hot and cold are both within the same category of temperature. Heavy and light are in the same category of weight.

And so then that when they looked at discipline, they tried to figure out, okay, what is it that causes a lack of discipline? And what they concluded is that doubt or a wavering mind is the opposite of discipline. And so they kind of looked at people and they said, Okay, what is it why is it that someone stops being disciplined? Well, what they doubt, right? So if if I think about a marriage where I'm starting to like be uncommitted to my partner, I'm not disciplined in terms of the marriage.

What's at the root of that? It's doubt. I don't know if this person is right for me. I know that maybe like I felt this and maybe you'll feel this too, where if you sort of think about what causes what keeps you from being disciplined with studies, right? So if you're if you kind of think about it like maybe you chose to major in like engineering or some some STEM field.

And you wanna be super disciplined about it, but you're not really sure that you like it. You're not really sure if it's right for you. So you wake up every day and you try really hard and you kind of end up getting Bs and A's and maybe an occasional C, but you just don't have that fire or that discipline to really work the way that you need to.

And why is that? It's because in the back of your mind, you're not sure. You're not sure that this is what you want to do. You're not sure that this is the right thing. And so the doubt gets in the way of discipline. The next thing that the yogis sort of discovered is that, okay, if doubt gets in the way of discipline, what is the opposite of doubt? And they used a slightly different word, I th this is all in Sanskrit, but they translated that not as as discipline, but as resolve.

So what is the opposite of doubt? Well, the opposite is resolve. And as I started to look at that, I kind of stumbled into this thing that really helped me help my patients a lot, which is that I don't need to cultivate discipline. What I really need to do is cultivate resolve. Because when someone is resolved internally.

then what they end up behaving like is disciplined. Right. So when I wake up it, let's say on New Year's Day and I have a New Year's resolution and it's even baked into the language, what is that New Year's resolution? It is a resolve.

The problem is that we are never taught how to cultivate resolve, right? We make them all the time, but then we don't keep it going. And that too is consistent with emotion, because if we look at which parts of our body change or which parts of our brain change, habits are pretty fixed. Our willpower even is sort of a battery that has a certain amount of energy in it. But what is it that fluctuates on a day-to-day basis in the mind the most?

It is actually emotions. If you're angry today, you won't necessarily be angry tomorrow. Falling in love today doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna be in love ten years from now. So what resolve really is, is actually an emotion. And if you've been resolved at some point in your life, you know what I mean. When you kind of think about those moments where you get resolved, right? You're like,

I'm gonna pass this class, or I'm gonna be at the top of my class, or I'm gonna get a 4.0, or I'm done with this person. I am never texting this person again. I'm never playing another game of League of Legends. I'm never playing another game of Dota. I'm done with video games. What is that? Right? That's a resolve. It's actually an emotional kind of thing.

And this is what's really interesting is once I sort of stumbled on this through yoga, I started to wonder, well, hold on a second. Is resolve actually an emotion? And I went back to actually more recent and sophisticated neuroscience. Where it's kind of shocking, but if we sort of look at this together If we look at this table, what we'll see is core and extended emotional brain circuitry component.

And if y'all are amateur neuroscientists, you know that the amygdala in the limbic system are where we sort of think about where emotions exist. But if you look at all this, this is complicated, right? This is parts of our frontal lobes, this is parts like our anterior cingulate cortex.

And if we look at these emotional circuits in the brain, what you sort of discover is that a lot of positive emotion actually comes from circuits, not anatomical structures. So this is where we have to get a little bit technical. But one of the things that we a lot of people kind of don't get is that functions in the brain can come from two places.

They can sometimes come from an anatomical structure, like an amygdala, that is kind of like surrounded. It's a chunk of tissue that emotion comes from. But the other place that's uh that that's Fo like stuff can come from in the brain isn't a a structure, it's actually a circuit. It's a series of connections from different parts of the brain. And the really interesting thing is that positive emotions come from circuits.

So if we look at something like love, there is not a love center in the brain. There isn't not a part of the brain where if you get a stroke or you get some kind of problem, you will never be able to love again. I mean, there may be multiple areas that you can get strokes that will sort of interfere with love. But there are some of these more positive emotions that come from the harmony or the the communication between different parts of the brain.

And resolve is absolutely one of those things. So if we look at the brain of someone who is resolved, there's stuff going on in the frontal lobes, there's stuff going on in the limbic system, there's stuff going on in places like the anterior cingulate cortex. And so this is where neuroscience kind of falls short because we're not really good at sort of activating those circuits.

And if you want to cultivate discipline, what you actually need to do is not cultivate willpower, that's a different function in the brain, not cultivate habit, but actually cultivate resolve on a daily basis. And the cool thing is, just like the Zen Masters figured out where the nature of humor is, and they sort of tell all these hilarious stories, they were the original comedians. we can actually turn to yoga to teach us how to cultivate results.

So the first thing that I'm gonna tell y'all to do is notice when you feel resolved, right? So the next time that you feel resolved, just take a snapshot of it. Close your eyes and try to sort of notice what is the experience of resolve. And what you'll discover is that resolve fuels your willpower. Right. When you get resolved in something and then you start to do it, the doubts and other kind of ideas and distractions will pop into your head. But there's this like

There's this thermonuclear engine within you that is fueling that willpower. So you're able to say, no, no, no, I'm resolved. No games today. No distractions today. I'm focused. I'm resolved. It's actually emotional. So the first step is to actually notice what it is.

The second thing that we're gonna talk about is something called a sankalpa, which is something that literally translates to resolve, but what yogis actually figured out is that there is a practice to develop a sankalpa, and we're gonna talk about that now. So what I I strongly recommend that y'all do is pick one thing that you want to be resolved toward. And there are kind of two versions that we're gonna do.

One is sort of a very specific thing and one is kind of a broad thing. So you can pick any kind of resolve. So I, for example, gave up ice cream for a decade. And this was part of my yogic practice that my teacher was teaching me how to develop results.

So I didn't pick something that was hard. I picked something that was like relatively easy. It was like kind of like medium difficulty. Because you don't wanna if you're someone's learning how to swim, you don't want to dump them in the ocean. You wanna start them in the kiddie pool. So the first mistake that we oftentimes make when sort of trying to become disciplined is we pick something that's really, really important to us.

The problem is that the things that are really, really important to us usually are hard and that's why it's important to us, right? Because we haven't been able to do it. They have a lot of emotional energy. So we're not practicing, we're going right up on stage and performing. So I gave up ice cream for a period of about 10 years. So you can pick one thing that I would say is kind of medium difficult.

And ideally every day, which I know is gonna be hard, but what you can hopefully do is every day when you wake up, somewhere within the first hour or hour and a half of your day. Close your eyes, sit down somewhere, and just think about that resolve, right? So s try to kind of

Stoke up that fire of resolve within you. And okay, this is gonna be the thing that like, you know, this is what I'm focused on. I'm I'm gonna give up ice cream. That's what I did. So I I think you it's fine to pick some kind of food or something that's not like too hard to resist. Right, because we don't want to rely on a ton of willpower for our success. We want to focus on the consistency of the results. and spend about five to ten minutes in the morning

Just focusing on that resolve and try to feel whatever that internal emotional state is that you kind of took a snapshot of in step one. Try to feel that coming up again. Let let yourself kind of open yourself to it. Hard to describe, you know, it's kind of weird. Like you just have to practice and you'll figure out what I mean. And sort of start to stoke that resolve. Okay, so like no ice cream today, I can do this.

I feel good about it, you know, like this is gonna help me in in my long-term goal. So sort of think through that resolve and just give that resolve a calm space in your mind. That will cause the resolve to kind of grow. The second kind of resolve that you can do is something that's a little bit more global and something that's a little bit more emotionally charred.

So if there is something that is really important to you in life, I would say sit down and spend a little bit longer. This usually takes 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and think about that result. So one example of resolve that I've used with a patient is I deserve to be whole. It's not that I am whole. It's not that I will be whole. It's that I deserve to be whole.

And it can take some time to try to figure out what's the right resolve for you. You know, really think about like what you can resonate with that is something that you want to move. and resolve that towards yourself. Develop that Sankalba. And for about 10 to 20 minutes, as many days as you can manage, start with just today, try to do tomorrow, try to do the next day. Think about that resolve and let those emotions come up. We want to cultivate those emotions kind of like a fire.

And if you practice these three steps, the first is take a snapshot of it. The second is you can start with something small that is not actually that emotionally engaging, so that you can practice fanning the flame. And the third thing is to pick a resolve that is more important. I'd say you can move on to step three after about thirty days of step two. Then you want to start cultivating that emotion on a daily basis.

And the cool thing about that is that as we cultivate, literally sit down and for 20 minutes cultivate that positive emotion through that Sunkalpa on a daily basis. That emotional energy will carry over through discipline. We don't have fMRI studies of people doing sunkalpas and meditative techniques, but it is my firm belief that when you do this, you will be activating that positive emotional circuitry in every part of your brain.

The last thing to think a little bit about is what are some of the things that get in the way of this. So I made one really interesting observation clinically, which is that people who are undisciplined are numb. And you may have sort of noticed this that if you crave discipline,

You're emotionally kind of numb, right? Like you really want this thing, you really want this thing, but every day kind of feels like a drab, gray, kind of like not super high highs, not super low lows, or maybe you're getting completely overwhelmed by emotion.

And if we sort of think about the the connection between being undisciplined and being numb, what's going on there is if discipline is an emotion and we're feeling numb all the time, we don't have the capacity to really cultivate or stoke that positive emotion. And so, even though we use this numbness as a protection against negative emotions, because my life isn't going anywhere, I'm screwing up.

I'm not going anywhere or I'm just doing average. I can't really give it my all and I wanna give it my all. And what what do you do with those kind of thoughts and those emotions? You numb and numb them out. You numb them out through technology, you numb them out through marijuana, you numb them out by just Pushing them to the side. But the problem is that when we numb our emotions out.

We numb the positive stuff too, right? So if you kind of think about it, you can't just numb your negative emotions. We can't just numb the anxiety and feel happiness and joy and love and excitement all the time. Either we feel everything or we feel nothing at all.

So one of the problems with this technique that sometimes people run into is that they're alexathymic. So we've got a whole video about that and some of these other aspects that relate to this sort of cultivation of positive emotion. So definitely check those videos out. My hope is that at the end of this video, you will have gained a new understanding on why you cannot be disciplined. And the core reason you can't be disciplined is because we don't really understand what it is.

It's not willpower and it's not habit. It's actually emotion. But common neuroscience in the way that like sophisticated neuroscience gets buried by simple neuroscience. gives us this idea that discipline actually isn't an emotion, but it absolutely is. And once you understand that, you have a whole new dimension to actually work on cultivating your discipline.