I had an interesting chat with one of my students yesterday, and I want to share the main points we discussed:
For context, this student had been very diligent with practicing the stuff I asked her to practice, and she also was keen on cutting out coffee, alcohol and some other less optimal things in her life for the past months…
But yesterday, she told me that her motivation is slowly waning and that she “cheated” a few times last week with coffee and alcohol.
That said, she was on the right path and wished to stay on it, so her question to me was:
“Sam, how do you STAY disciplined and motivated throughout life… especially since life appears to be oriented around making you make the bad choices!”
Here’s the summary of my answer:
1️⃣ DISCIPLINE
I think discipline and willpower alone aren’t strong enough to generate changes in the long haul (at least for me).
By nature, humans are animals, and animals don’t operate well through sheer willpower.
We don’t because willpower requires us to use our prefrontal cortex (logical brain), which often goes against what the primitive and emotional brain (the amygdala) wants.
Therefore, willpower is very energy-demanding since taking action requires a dualistic dynamic.
So, my hack is to structure my environment and circumstances in a way that I DON’T have to rely on willpower.
In a way that I DON’T have to rely on making the “good decision.”
For example, instead of relying on my sefl control to not eat junk, I simply won’t buy the junk in the first place.
Therefore, if I’m at my place and the craving comes around… the only thing I have available is honey and dates.
And I don’t know about you, but honey and dates become boring like hell after a few weeks, so what often ends up happening when I get the craving is… nothing. I just become bored with my options, so I move on and do something other than eat.
Now, if I had had some crap available to eat, I likely would’ve eaten it.
A few weeks ago, someone gave my girlfriend some cake, and she brought it back home.
I didn’t feel the need to eat it… until I started getting a bit too hungry at some point in the day, which led me to devour it.
My logical brain was winning over my “animal brain” when I was on stable grounds (not hungry), but when hunger came in, my pre-frontal cortex had to fight many other parts of my physiology that ALSO wanted to eat the damn cake. This made the battle way harder than it could’ve been.
Of course, it’s not impossible to resist, and I have done it many times in the past in various settings.
However, it’s just a hell of a lot harder to resist when you’re in a bad environment, and it requires MORE energy NOT to do the action you want to avoid compared to doing it.
Now, I may sometimes fail at resisting eating some cake when it’s around, but there are other stuff that I have 100% removed from my life in the past years, and I wouldn’t even WANT to consume them even if I had tons of them around me.
Those things are coffee, alcohol and drugs.
2️⃣ STICKING TO THE RIGHT CHOICE
The reason why I can live life without consuming any of those substances is because it is now very obvious to me what these substances will do in my physiology.
But it’s not obvious “mentally.”
It’s obvious PHYSICALLY.
In other words, I don’t consume them not just because “I know” they are bad;
I don’t consume them because I’m now aware that they make me feel bad… so I don’t even want to consume them in the first place.
It wasn’t always like this, though. I was a big coffee and crafted beer connoisseur many years ago, and I would indulge in these substances multiple times a week (multiple coffees a day, in fact).
What made me switch is when I realized that when I DIDN’T consume them, I felt A LOT better.
I realized that I was 10X less anxious with no coffee… and I finally was able to keep a bit of muscle mass on.
I realized that not drinking beer helped me with my abdominal pressure… which THEN helped me troubleshoot many aspects of my mechanics and be pain-free.
And I realized that I was 5X more productive when I didn’t smoke weed… which helped me break some plateaus with my business and make more money.
After making those realizations, not consuming these substances wasn’t just about “making the right decision” simply because I knew it was good.
Consuming them now became a tradeoff for something else I desired more:
If I drink coffee… I’m staying stuck in the nervous and skinny guy archetype.
If I drink beer… I’m choosing beer over not having any upper back pain.
If I smoke weed…. I’m slowing down the progress I could make with building my life and career and altering my capacity to earn more.
It was now clear that if I took X, then I couldn’t have Y.
So, by looking at the “contrast” and looking at what I was saying no to if I was consuming those substances, the choice was A LOT easier.
So easy, that it was now EASIER to NOT consume them and go chase the other thing instead.
So when it comes to those kinds of substances, I think a good way to stop them is to:
- Become physically aware of how it REALLY messes us up
- Create a “contrast” and see how saying yes to these things is saying no to other more valuable things we may want.
That way, you won’t have to rely on “doing the right thing” anymore, and the choice will be a lot easier.
So, to wrap it up:
1️⃣ Changing the environment around you sometimes has a stronger impact than if you tried changing “yourself.”
2️⃣ Understand and see how saying yes to one thing is saying no to another.
I am aware that these topics have MANY variables to consider and that different individuals may have different realities, but today’s thread was about what worked for me and many others that I worked with.
Creating changes isn’t as easy in some instances, and what I said might not always apply…
But if you found this (long) thread insightful, feel free to take a minute to let me know your main takeaways! @sam.pelletier_