178. 5 steps for building self discipline

are in for such a trait. I'm kind of kidding because this is perhaps not the most exciting topic, but I think it's one of the most valuable during this decade, and that is how we can use psychology, science, even sociology to build self discipline. I have biggest tips for ensuring that you have all the tools to pursue your goals successfully, whatever domain they're in, whether that's fitness, lifestyle changes, work,

creative projects, even just your daily tasks. I think that discipline is such an interesting concept to me, especially in our twenties, because it is seriously the secret ingredient to achieving anything you want in life. Yet so many of us treat it as optional or believe that it's too hard to achieve. I think that's because of a number of misconceptions that we have about self discipline, the first one being that if you are disciplined, you need to

be aiming for perfection. I think that belief keeps a lot of us from ever even starting something, because we truly do buy into this attitude until this belief that we need to never make mistakes or experience setbacks in

order to get to our end goal. This is so far from the true with anyone who has done anything cool or interesting or amazing with their life will tell you that part of the process is learning from the times you almost gave up but kept pushing anyways, the times that you stayed consistent you implemented your habits day in and day out. Secondly, we tend to believe that self discipline means sacrifice and giving up all the things that we enjoy for our one major goal. Again, I

personally believe that that's incorrect. Sometimes there is a small amount of sacrifice that is necessary, but mainly it just means change. It just means substitution, swapping out one behavior or habit for another one. And instead of viewing that as a sacrifice, which I think creates a lot of negative attitudes towards self discipline. We should instead be viewing it as an investment in yourself that you just weren't

previously making. And finally, the negative belief that keeps us from self discipline is that it's going to be this hard forever. It's always going to be a struggle. I actually think it's the opposite. Solely relying on on motivation and inspiration that is a lot more difficult because you're basing your efforts on something that is, let's be honest, quite fickle and not always a constant. You're forcing yourself to do things when you have no incentive in the

moment to do them. That is what drains our energy. But self discipline and consistency is our safety net in those situations. It is the thing that remains constant despite our whims, despite our changing energy levels, despite our mood, and you know, as time goes on. Discipline really creates the habits that make any task a lot easier to do, even when we don't want to do it. Here's the thing. We mostly need self discipline to do things that honestly,

we don't really want to do. You know, you don't need self discipline to binge. Watch the entire season of Mariative First Sight. You know, you don't need self discipline to sleep in till eleven am every day. What we do need it for is to get us into the habits and the routines we know are going to get us a better outcome. We know they're going to give us a better life than what we currently have, even

if they are the harder alternative. I think we often set out to do something to change our life, to change our career, to change our future, with a lot of energy, and we have a lot of gusto, and we are totally sure of the future that we want, and we fantasize about the outcome, and we think it's going to be super easy, that we'll always have this

level of motivation. The thing is, though, when we only focus on the end goal and how great that's going to feel, we often don't think about what it's going to take to get us there, all the small daily steps. And self discipline is that bridge between wanting something and realizing that thing, staying focused even when there are a million other things that have your tension. And that's often

the case in our twenties. It's also about having the foresight to understand that there will be setbacks, but being consistent having self control will allow you to overcome them. It is one of our most valuable skills. It's very much like a muscle, and it's one that we strengthen over time and with consistency, and that we need to

train to get the most out of. So lucky for you, there is so much psychology out there in the world, hidden in academic articles, hidden in research, that can really enable us to be more committed to our long term

goals using self discipline. Rather than just encouraging you to be disciplined and to be more consistent and to be more motivated and to have strong willpower, and just leaving it at that, I want to actually give you five precise, practical steps for building this skill in a manner that is actually doable and will inevitably help you realize the

dream life that I think we all want. So I'm going to cut to the chase, because I really don't like when I listen to a podcast that's like five tips to do this, ten things you need to know about X, and they don't give you the list at the very top and then you kind of end up getting a little bit lost in the weeds. But in this episode, we're going to talk about these five tips.

Understanding the psychology behind what motivates you, leveraging our social desirability bias, building microhabits, creating invariable reward by manipulating your own dopamine levels in response to gratification and challenges, Shifting from a learned helplessness to a learned industriousness approach. And then finally one bonus tip for those of you who get to the very end. That is a very high

level list. There's going to be quite a bit of science in this, but it's super digestible, I think, without further ado, let's get into it and start with point number one, understanding what motivates you. You cannot force yourself to do anything if you have no idea why you

want to do it. Sometimes we set these very obscure goals like I want to be healthier, I want to be more focused, And the thing is is that, yeah, those are amazing goals, right, but they're actually too simple to build self discipline around because it doesn't contain any of the detail that we need to work with. It doesn't get to the why. Why do you want to be more focused and in what area of your life? I see people do this a lot. I do this

a lot, especially with their fitness goals. You know, they just say something like I want to run a ten k or I want to get fitter. Those are amazing goals, But what's your timeline here? Why do you want to do that? What is motivating you towards this outcome? Self discipline is created through detail, So how do we get to that core ambition that's at the center of any of our goals. Well, we need to examine behavioral change

theory to really understand what motivates us towards something. Now, this could be anything, right, It could be a sense of accomplishment. Maybe you like the idea of winning, You like impressing others, you like impressing yourself. Maybe you are unhappy with where you are at currently and you want to improve your life. Maybe you just want to be happier, you just want to be healthier. These are all super valid,

high level reasons. But when you create a goal, I'm going to use that ten k example again and say I run a ten k, you need to include two further details. Firstly, you need to include a timeline and you need to include a motivator. So I want to run a ten k in six months because I want to show myself that I can do it. Or I want to run a ten k in November this year because doing so will make me fitter and improve how

I feel in my body. In those goals, you have that those two additional pieces of information that make them actionable. You have a timeline and you have a motivator, and those two additional points will allow you to push yourself and take action regardless of how you're feeling day to day. And that is essentially the very definition of self discipline. The reason why those details work is because they create what we call smart goals. They are specific, they are measurable.

You know when you've achieved the goal. It's attainable. It serves your overarching mission or ambition, which is maybe to get fit, and there's a timeframe. Now, something I want you to know is that you are a lot less likely to be successful in building the necessary self discipline to achieve a goal if your motivation for the goal

is external rather than internal. For example, if you're trying to accomplish something because you think it will make other people happy, or that you're going to prove them wrong, or to avoid some weird threat like a threat of getting fired, it is going to be a lot less effective than wanting to accomplish something for yourself. That is because internal self discipline is self directed, self imposed, self managed.

It is not reliant on the possibility of a loss, or the fear of external judgment or punishment or any of those things. And what they've found time and time again across multiple studies is that this sense of doing something just for you is a lot more powerful and enjoyable.

So if your motivation is centered around the opinions of others, trying to impress someone else to fulfill some social norm or expectation, I think at this point it's really wise to change that to an internal motivator, an internal reason, or find a new goal, because in three months time, when you've stopped thinking about that person and they're no longer relevant in your life, you still want to be able to stay on track in your journey to accomplishing anything,

to being disciplined. It's also important to keep coming back to that. Why the reason this is effective is because of what we call expectancy theory in psychology. The basic premises of this theory is that you are more likely to achieve your goals when you remember why you set them and why they are important. This is because our motivation is based on how much we value a goal and how much you believe you have the capacity to

achieve your goal. When you return regularly to why you're doing this, the what, the why, the motivation, you highlight the value of the goal to yourself, and you reiterate that you're capable, that there is a future outcome there that you want to be consistent for you can do hard things. Some ways to kind of aid in that active remembering of your motivator of your why is to

create a vision board for the outcome. To consume content on social media, through podcasts and books that align with your goal, because these things act as cues and remind us as to what you're working towards, so it's easier for you to stay disciplined in the pursuit of this sometimes far off objective. It's also important, I think, to

tell people about your goal for that additional accountability. Now, this doesn't mean that you're doing it for them or that you're reverting to external motivation more so that you're leveraging what we call social desirability bias in aid of your goal. This leads me to my next big step or tip for building self discipline. Enlist social support or

even accountability. And this is effective because it leverages something that we know about ourselves as humans, which is that we are very social creatures and we want to make others happy. We want to impress them. We don't want

to let them down. When we feel like we will let someone down if we don't show up to a run, or we don't get something done on time, or we cancel on them or we break a promise, this encourages us to be more disciplined and you know, true to our word because sometimes you know, it's super easy to cancel on yourself. It's super easy to just say like, yeah, I'm not going to do that today, because you are

both the enforcer and the doer. However, when we add in a little sprinkle of social accountability, the weight of not doing something we said we were going to do becomes a lot heavier, meaning that we are more likely to do that thing to avoid additional and secondary feelings of shame or guilt. It's also the case that sometimes we actually just perform better when other people are watching us.

This is called the social desirability bias. It's why people will more likely to behave in a pro social way when they know that cameras are on them or help someone else out when they can see that other people are going to observe that. Now, this concept of social desirability bias. This was initially used to describe how people like to overstate their positive traits and understate their negative traits in social and clinical research, but we can now

apply it to this arena of goal setting. We want others to think that we are good people. That is a very basic human desire, and we know that attributes like self discipline or hard work, they're very positively viewed. They make us look like good people. So when we have the chance to show that we possess these traits in front of others, we are much more likely to do so. How do we apply this knowledge in the strengthening of the self discipline muscle. It's actually really really simple.

You just need to create opportunities for yourself to be accountable to others in the pursuit of your goal. So I'm going to give you some examples here. If you want to be more focused at work, tell a colleague your to do list and have them check in with you at the end of the day and confirm what you've done. If you want to run a ten k oh no, I'm using this example quite a bit, but sign up for a run club and make a commitment to be there two days a week running with others.

Even better, sign up as an admin, sign up as like an organizer. Then you have to be there. You want to be more self disciplined when it comes to a creative project or a side hustle, find someone else who wants to do the same thing and carve out two evenings, maybe even one, where you guys are committed to getting on Zoom together or catching up in each other's houses and just working. It's like having a standing appointment.

It increases your level of commitment and discipline to do hard things by doing them alongside other people, build like a solid work routine, a solid lifestyle routine around other people as well as yourself. It also just makes it a lot more enjoyable. You know, I have an example of how this is working for me. At the moment, I'm trying to really prioritize my physical fitness. I went traveling for two months, and I noticed that I lost

a bit of steam. I wasn't as fit as before, and so I set myself a news resolution to exercise four times a week. You know what, It would have been really easy for me to have just made that promise to myself, not told anyone, and quit after a few weeks. But I leveraged social desirability and social accountability. I told as many friends as I could about it. I created ways to get other people involved to keep me accountable. So every Sunday, I know that I go for a rum with my friend k and I don't

want to let her down by not showing up. On Tuesdays, I go boxing with my friend Emily, I want to show up. I want to keep the promise, not to myself and my larger goal, but the promise to them to do these weekly steps and activities that allow us to also connect. Moving on to our third tip, let's talk about microhabits. Now. I'm gonna keep this one rather brief, because if you're interested in this topic, we actually did a whole episode on this. It's episode fifty three, The

Power of microhabits. If you want to go and listen to that, and I don't want to just be repeating myself, but it is honestly such a life changing, amazing strategy. So microhabits, if you haven't yet heard of this term, they are these small everyday actions or tiny itty bitty routines that turn into automatic behaviors through repetition. The best thing about microhabits is that they're meant to be eagersy, but as you build them up, they create self discipline.

Some examples of this are going outside at least once a day, reading one page of a book before bed, eating one server of vegetables with every meal, walking to work instead of driving. Those things all seem super doable, right, And that's the point. It's because they're meant to be. They counteract that all or nothing thinking that gets a lot of us stuck when we're starting out, you know, we immediately think that big is best when it comes

to getting started. We want to eat healthier, so we throw out everything processed in our kitchen replace it with foods that we just actually don't eat, that we're not used to, and we're not giving ourselves time to adapt to a new routine and lifestyle, meaning that we're more likely to fail because we haven't adjusted. And it's not sustainable when we don't have those habits down pat yet. We're just changing too much too soon. And some people can do that, some people can go cold turkey or

all or nothing. But I actually think that it takes a lot more effort. It puts a lot more strain on your cognitive and physical resources when you apply micro habits instead, you break down your big goal into super manageable tasks that actually stop you from getting stuck in

the procrastination trap of not knowing where to start. It stops you from feeling overwhelmed, and it helps you build momentum so that it doesn't It's not that age old story where you set some goal, you achieve it, and then you go straight back to how you were six months before. It actually creates like a lifestyle change that is going to stay with you for a lot longer. Now, I want you to pause for a second and think

back to that goal that you are setting. What are three small microhabits you could do throughout your week that would aid in achieving that goal? Make them super specific, but also make them easy. Now, what reasons do you have to not do those things, even that they require so little effort and investment. When you start with those

small microhabits, you train yourself to be more disciplined. Okay, we're going to take a small, short, little break for a second, but when we return, we're going to talk about those final two tips I have for you, and of course our bonus tip. We're going to be right back after this break, So I'm going to teach you how to hack your brain and your motivational systems using some of the most basic principles of neuroscience that create some of the most non basic behavioral changes and habits

that I know for building your self discipline. This is the thing about this science. It is so simple, but it is so effective. So when it comes to building self discipline, the neurotransmitter we need to be most conscious of is dopamine. Dopamine is often thought of as our happy chemical, right. It's the thing that you get when you have a tasty meal, when you drink caffeine, when you experience something pleasurable. But it's also so much more

than that. It's not just about pleasure and hedonism and enjoyment. It is also the neurotransmitter that is most crucial when it comes to motivational control because of the role that it plays in reward guided learning and self discipline. When we do a task that we like, we get a

spike of dopamine. When we achieve a goal, again, we get dopamine that is going to drive us to keep working towards our larger ambition, to keep performing those daily and weekly actions that are necessary for cultivating success, progress and self discipline, and we can exploit the science behind that to keep us consistent. So the biggest thing that stops us from having self control or being disciplined is

buying into a mediate temptation and our whims. Of course, it is going to feel so much better in the moment to stay in bed and relax when you should really be doing your big to do list. Of course, it's going to feel momentarily better to procrastinate studying in favor of scrolling through social media, because those alternative activities

give us pleasure. However, what we're encountering in those moments is what we call instant gratification, and that instant gratification is actually just a quick dopamine shot that over time lowers our dopamine baseline and it creates what we know

is the down regulation of pleasure. So this occurs when the number of receptors in our brain for a neurotransmitter, in this case, dopamine, are decreased because of an increase in that neurotransmitter is levels, meaning that we need less points of impact, less points of connection to actually have access to that same amount of pleasure because we have so much of this chemical flooding our brain. So this

is the downside of buying into instant gratification. Pleasure actually becomes less pleasant because there is so much of it, but it's not at the same quality as the pleasure and the satisfaction we would get from a long term goal. But because we have fewer receptors, it also means that that dopamine becomes less powerful in keeping us focused and staying on track. So the alternative to this is to hold off on instant gratification for a long term reward

that comes from self discipline. Obviously, this involves scheduling when you're going to give yourself those small spikes, for example, only letting yourself sleep in once a week rather than every day so that it becomes more special, or giving yourself a break to scroll on your phone whilst you're studying once every two hours rather than once every thirty minutes. Because this increases our dopamine baseline, you are delaying gratification

for a better feeling later on. So by managing your dopamine in this way, you experience more fulfillment because you're not desensitizing yourself to all this pleasure. Another way to utilize our dopamine systems to become more self disciplined is to create a rewards schedule for yourself when it comes to your long term goals. If you set out to get straight a's or hds in every course that you're taking this semester, it is going to take a while

before you get to experience the rewards for your efforts. Instead, what you need to do is create a schedule of positive reinforcement for yourself that is aligned directly to your efforts and the small achievements that you're going to come across in pursuit of your goal. So I'm going to keep using this academic example because I think it is such a great way of demonstrating this. If your end goal is to get a four point zero by the

end of the semester. Break this into smaller goals. To get that HD, you also need to get an A in your midsem and you also need to get an A on your essay. Don't let those small accomplishments go unnoticed or unrewarded. Give yourself a little treat, let yourself have some dopamine in response, take yourself out for dinner, buy yourself something really nice, give yourself the day off.

Managing our dopamine systems doesn't mean completely denying yourselves any dopamine that isn't associated with our long term goal, right. It's about just making yourself or achieving a greater balance

so that when you want to use your dopamine. I know that sounds quite strange, but like when you, yeah, when you want to use your dopamine for the reasons that important to you, you actually have access to it, rather than feeling like there's this whole chemical process going on in your brain that means that you can't actually set goals and meet them. So this thing that we're talking about, this rewards schedule, there are a few caveats.

The important thing is that we want to use a continuous reinforcement schedule, whereby every time we perform the target behavior or achieve the target outcome, in this instance, achieving a grade that contributes to a good overall GPA, you need to be rewarded for that, so it therefore encourages

us to keep doing those things. The thing is, you might experience some boredom and displeasure during the transition, but soon your quality of life actually increases, and it's shown that we do have stronger self control, We are happier, we do experience fewer negative emotions, and you actually appreciate pleasure even more. I think doing hard things being self disciplined is a shift from instant gratification. But you'll find

that when you delay reward, your satisfaction actually increases. You're going to show it more. You feel good about yourself, rather than in those moments where you just live your life based on short term pleasure and hedonism and giving yourself anything that you want. You know, if you were you know, I always think about this in the sense of like being the parent to your inner child. You wouldn't let yourself like run around and eat sugar whenever

you wanted it. You wouldn't let yourself stay up till four am if you were like a twelve if you were like a six year old child. So why are you letting your adult self do things that you know are self sabotaging your efforts for a bigger goal. That

is the main premise of using this reward scheduling. You want to be in control of how you behave and when you want to stay motivated, when you want to be focused, You want to make sure that you have the resources and the passion and the energy available to you to do that. Our fifth tip for today is possibly my favorite. That's why I saved it for last, obviously, because I really never hear people talking about this, and it's one of the most fascinating areas of motivational and

learning psychology. It is the principle of learned helplessness versus learned industriousness, and how shifting from one to the other can actually get us to enjoy doing difficult things, Which sounds great, right. Wouldn't it be great if you enjoyed the hard things on your to do list? Let me explain this a little bit further. So, learned helplessness occurs when we feel like no matter what we do, we cannot escape bad outcomes or failures, and so we just

give up. Researchers, when they first discovered this, began to observe it in animals, whereby they would keep them restrained and then expose them to some really negative aversive condition like pain or an unpleasant noise. These animals couldn't escape, as sad as you know, it's pretty sad what they

used to do back then. But what it showed was that even when they let the animals out, even though when they removed the leash or the collar, they still kept enduring the painful situation, even though now they could get away from it. They had learned that they were helpless in changing their situation. And although a lot of this initial research was conducted on animals, we can see

that in human behavior as well. No matter what you do, maybe you found that you just can't stick to a diet, you can't stay focused on your work, you can't get the outcome you want, the growth you want, the numbers you want because you're not seeing that correlation between action and reward. You lose faith in your self discipline in your actions, and you quit. So what is the alternative? In those situations. Well, it's about shifting from a learned

helplessness mindset to a learned industriousness mindset. The difference here is that learned industriousness focuses on the pleasure in the action itself. We aren't just reliant on what we gain from the outcome, but just like the genuine sensation and good feelings that just come with working hard. I think this is so so important to have an equal investment in your goal but also feel like you're getting something out of the journey, that it's not just a slug,

that there's nothing enjoyable about it. And I also think that you can feel excited by how much you can push yourself. You can romanticize the difficult times, the long nights, the exhausting runs, the hours of studying, instead of just romanticizing this future outcome that you're hoping for. And it has a lot of benefits for self discipline. Individuals who have high levels of industriousness they have a lot of history of applying greater efforts towards tasks. It's been demonstrated

that they have more task persistence. They're less likely to quit when things get difficult because that difficulty is actually, I don't want to say enjoyable, but it's fulfilling. So how can we train ourselves to do this? How do we make that shift? What we need to do is begin to reward our actions, not just our outcomes, through pared reinforcement. So the gummy bear method is an excellent

example of this. If you have twenty pages you need to read for a class, after every page, you give yourself a gummy bear or something that you like, making it so that you begin to associate hard work with something pleasant. We can also do this by romanticizing our labor. Instead of thinking, oh my god, I'm so exhausted, I don't want to work this hard, it would be so much easier to quit. Switch that attitude by deliberately creating thoughts like it's actually really exciting to see how far

I can go. I think I'm going to look back on these moments with a lot of fondness and pride. I'm so proud of myself for how I keep going. It is thrilling and stimulating to be doing these things that are difficult to push myself. We are reinforcing the

feeling of high effort. As we get better at this, the self discipline that is contained in that becomes a valued part of our identity, whereby we begin to see ourselves as a hard worker, as someone with self control, as someone who is tenacious and passionate and kind of willing to do things that others can't. And in this way, you've shifted your goal from not just being internally motivated, but something that informs who you are and who you

want to become, which is even more encouraging. Now, I want to give you one final piece of advice when it comes to self discipline to finish off, and it may seem very contrary to the other things that we've talked about, but I think it's equally important. You need to let yourself fail, sometimes make mistakes, have slip ups, and still show yourself as much self compassion and love as you would if you were perfect at all times. You just can't hate yourself into self discipline. I'm going

to say that again. You can't hate yourself into self discipline because self discipline comes from a place of care and investment in yourself. Time and time again, we see research that shows that when you use shame as a motivator, self blame, self hatred as a motivator. All that discipline becomes so much harder to keep up because you're doing it from a place of loathing and negativity. You can make mistakes. In fact, I think that it's really useful

to reflect and grow. You can start something new and just not be the best at it. Not every day needs to be insanely productive. That's actually not sustainable. But what you do need to do is just show up, Just be consistent. Even if you're not being perfect, Even if you're only at the gym for ten minutes, you still wet, and you still are repeating a patterner behaviors that are going to become routine. You know, I think that if you're still listening right now, if you've made

it this far, you're obviously super committed to yourself. You're obviously super committed to your goals. You're already miles ahead of everyone else who has already convinced themselves that even the first step in self discipline is too hard. And now I guess you also have the tools that you need. You know what needs to be done, and to be completely honest, I'm just super proud of you for even caring enough about yourself and your future to be considering

this change in your life, whatever that may be. I think that self discipline is the secret ingredient. It is the master key to everything that you want in life. So I really hope that you have enjoyed this episode. I hope that you can apply this to your life, that you have learned something. If there's someone else in your life who you think might enjoy this, who you think might take something from this content, from this science that we've shared, please feel free to forward it onto them.

Make sure that you are following and leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening to this right now. Of course, if there's an episode suggestion I say this at the end of every episode, please send it to me. You never know, I never know who else might relate to some of the things that are on your mind. And I take a lot of inspiration from what you guys are going through this

episode in itself. You guys voted on this one, So if there's anything that is in your thoughts that you feel other people could benefit from, please send it my way at that Psychology podcast or at GEMMASPEG. We will be back next week with a special guest episode. On Tuesday, so see then