Why you have No Self Discipline.

Self-discipline is about leaning into resistance. Taking action in spite of how you feel. Living a life by design, not by default. But most importantly, it’s acting in accordance with your thoughts, not your feelings.

Identity

Imagine two people resisting a cigarette. When offered to smoke, the first person says “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.”. It sounds like a reasonable response but this person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be something else. They are hoping that their behaviour will change, while carrying around the same beliefs. The second person declines by saying “No thanks, I’m not a smoker.”. It’s a small difference but the statement signals a shift in identity. Smoking was part of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as someone who smokes

Source : ‘Atomic Habits — James Clear’ (book)

Nature

“We expect the most amount of reward for the least amount of effort that we put in” — This is our nature, this is how we are built”.

Our nature (natural surroundings) is basically the main reason for us doing things naturally as we do it every day/week/time.

To build self-discipline, to stop wasting our time doing useless things, to build a habit/skill. We should change our nature, don’t try to push ourselves in front of the unhealthy nature. Outsmart the monkey brain, the brain which makes you do something which is terrible but gives pleasure only for a moment, while in the long term, you’ll feel like crap. Change the environment, change the long-term approach.

You see, smart people are ahead of time, they don’t try to exercise self-control at this very moment and do the right thing when they are tempted in the first place because they blocked it out. They are blocking out the noise. The same goes to scrolling social media all day, you can easily lose 2–3 hours to a bunch of nonsense that doesn’t benefit your life or make your life any better.

If you have already optimised against it (changing the unhealthy nature to a healthy one) like if you have certain apps blocked at certain times. This isn’t hard to do, smartphones can do it, it’s just humans will never actually set it up and so, they live an average life. They are bleeding precious time and attention everywhere instead of being focused, a classic example — “A concentrated laser beam does more damage than flimsy lights everywhere”.

Prioritise

Your focus is what gives you the ability to have self-control. You have your attention on what matters to you and what is important. Concentrate your attention, don’t let yourself slide, and don’t allow your brain to go all over the place. Your life will program and progress quickly. You are going to see a lot of growth.

Plan it out, right now if you don’t have any plan already, it’s very important that you have a proper daily routine plan.

Take a blank sheet of paper and

1. Write down everything you do from morning starting from how many times you snooze the alarm, how long you take to brush your teeth, make coffee and etc — -till you sleep. Now look at the sheet, this is basically a simple way of looking at yourself.
2. Remove all the unnecessary things which waste so much time on TV/social media/timeless eating and other things. But do make an hour for healthy entertainment, or you would get mentally exhausted (work-play balance).
3. Now, Create blocks of time for the things that you have to do.(eg. school, office, sleep, eating, etc..) and look at all the free time you have.
4. Take this time and create blocks for a new hobby (eg. reading, gym, etc..) and for mastering your skills (studying-academics, practicing piano-music, reading-thinking/communicating, etc..).
5. Now just do this process every night and you will see a drastic change in your day.

You can also write down the things you didn’t do yesterday that you wanted to do and the things you did that u didn’t do as promised the previous day.

Once you start breaking those bad habits, you might feel that you are missing out on the things that your friends around you are doing. It is completely okay to feel that way. Well, to overcome this, my article on “Trying to please everyone” might help you.