If you’re relying on discipline to change your life, you’re probably making things harder than they need to be. We tend to talk about discipline as though it is the secret ingredient behind every successful person.
There is some truth in that. Sometimes you simply have to do something you don’t particularly want to do. But discipline is a pretty unreliable foundation on which to build your entire life.
The problem is that discipline requires effort. It means making a conscious decision to do the right thing, even when you’d rather do something else. That can work for a while, especially when you’re motivated and everything is going well. But life doesn’t stay that way.
Some mornings you wake up tired. Some days work has been a nightmare. Sometimes you’re stressed, distracted, pissed off or simply not in the mood. If your entire plan depends on you finding enough discipline every single time, eventually you’re going to run out of it.
Why Relying on Discipline Doesn’t Work
This is where routines become so useful.
A routine takes some of the decision-making out of your day. Instead of repeatedly asking yourself whether you’re going to exercise, read, write, study or work on something important, the behaviour becomes part of what you normally do.
Think about the things you already do without much thought. You probably don’t wake up every morning and have a serious internal debate about whether you should brush your teeth. You don’t need to watch a motivational video first. You don’t need to remind yourself how important dental hygiene is.
You just do it.
It has become part of your routine.
Obviously, exercising or working on an important personal goal isn’t going to become quite as automatic as brushing your teeth overnight. But the principle is the same. The more consistently you perform a behavior in the same circumstances, the less mental effort it takes to get started.
That matters because we already make hundreds of decisions every day.
What should I eat? When should I exercise? Should I do this now or later? Should I check my phone? Should I work on that project tonight? Should I go to bed early?
None of these decisions seems particularly important on its own. But constantly having to decide whether you’re going to do something gives you an opportunity to talk yourself out of it.
And we’re very good at talking ourselves out of things.
You might decide that you’re going to exercise after work. Then work finishes and you’re tired. You tell yourself you’ll have a quick rest first. Then you sit down, pick up your phone and suddenly an hour has disappeared.
The problem wasn’t necessarily a lack of discipline. You created a situation in which you had to negotiate with yourself.
A routine changes that.
If you’ve already established that you train at a particular time, putting your trainers on doesn’t require a debate. You’re not deciding whether you’re going to exercise. That’s simply what happens at that point in your day.
This is one of the reasons motivation is such a poor strategy for long-term change.
Motivation feels fantastic when you’ve got it. You can suddenly convince yourself that everything is going to be different from now on. You make ambitious plans, buy the equipment, download the app and feel like a completely new person.
Then the enthusiasm wears off.
That’s normal. Motivation was never designed to be permanent.
A routine doesn’t require you to feel motivated. It gives you something to fall back on when the excitement has disappeared.
Of course, you still need discipline sometimes. There will always be days when you don’t want to do something. But there’s a huge difference between using discipline occasionally and expecting it to drag you through every single day.
If you’ve built a routine around a behavior, discipline only has to get you through the difficult days. The rest of the time, you’re simply following the pattern you’ve already established.
That is also why starting small is so important.
People often try to build a completely new life in one weekend. They decide they’re going to get up at five in the morning, train every day, eat perfectly, read an hour a night, meditate, stop using social media and somehow become a productivity machine.
It sounds impressive.
It also usually lasts about a week.
A routine doesn’t need to look impressive. In fact, boring is often better.
Ten minutes of exercise that you actually keep doing is worth far more than an ambitious workout plan that survives for four days. Fifteen minutes of writing every morning can eventually produce a lot more than waiting for the perfect two-hour block of free time that never arrives.
The goal isn’t to prove how disciplined you can be.
The goal is to make the behavior repeatable.
Your surroundings can make this considerably easier. If you want to exercise in the morning, having your clothes ready the night before removes one small obstacle. If you want to read more, leaving the book beside your chair makes picking it up easier than opening another app on your phone. If you want to spend less time scrolling, putting your phone somewhere other than directly beside you changes the environment in which the decision is being made.
None of this is particularly exciting.
That’s precisely why it works.
Changing your life is rarely about one enormous act of willpower. More often, it comes from making small behaviors easier to repeat until they stop feeling like special efforts and start feeling normal.
And there will be days when the routine doesn’t happen.
That’s important to understand because people often treat one bad day as evidence that the whole thing has failed. They miss one workout and decide they’ve fallen off the wagon. They eat badly for a weekend and decide they’ll start again on Monday. They stop writing for a few days and conclude that they’re just not disciplined enough.
That’s nonsense.
A routine isn’t ruined because you missed it once.
Life happens. You get sick. Work gets in the way. Family needs your attention. You have a terrible day. Sometimes you simply screw up.
The important part isn’t whether you occasionally break the routine. It’s what you do afterwards.
Get back to it.
You don’t need a new plan. You don’t need to wait for Monday. You don’t need to punish yourself or decide that you’re starting your life over again.
Just return to the behavior.
Over time, that ability to return becomes more valuable than having a perfect record.
This is really the difference between trying to rely on discipline and building a life around routines. Discipline asks you to repeatedly make the right choice. A routine makes that choice increasingly familiar.
You aren’t trying to become someone with unlimited willpower. You’re trying to create a life in which the things that matter to you have a regular place in your day.
That’s a much easier thing to maintain.
So the next time you find yourself thinking, “I just need to be more disciplined,” stop for a moment and ask a different question.
Could I build this into my routine instead?
Because you probably don’t need to become a more disciplined person.
You might just need to make the behavior you want to do so familiar that eventually you don’t have to think about it quite so much.
How to Build a Home Workout Routine That Actually Works
James Clear: Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead.