How To Trick Your Brain Into Becoming So Disciplined Your Friends Will Be Shocked By Your Success

Discipline has got a major branding problem. It gets told as gritting your teeth, getting on with the suffering and just doing what you think you have to do even though you don't want to do it. Most disciplined people never describe discipline as feeling like that. To them, discipline is effortless and it should be effortless to you as well. That's because the popular understanding of what discipline means is entirely neurologically wrong. So I'm going to break down what is right and then give you five strategies that are going to help you become the most disciplined version of yourself. The popular model is that you have lazy instincts, willpower will override those instincts and discipline is a sustained exercise of willpower over a period of time. Wrong, that is not how your brain works. Willpower is actually a function of your prefrontal cortex and it's cognitively expensive, it degrades under stress and fatigue and it is something that is not a stable foundation for long-term behavior change in and of itself. This is because it is highly transient, highly context dependent and it's not something that you can depend on. Now the people who are the most disciplined are not the ones with the most willpower. This is never the case because willpower in and of itself actually does not lead to any meaningful changes. The most disciplined people are the people who have gotten rid of their dependence on willpower. They don't need willpower to do what it is that they want to do and that is what makes them so disciplined. One explanation covers over 90% of why discipline feels hard. The cost is in the present, the reward is in the future. When you go to the gym, for example, you get the immediate cost of feeling fatigued, of taking on hard exercises, of being quite tired and exhausted and you've got to get through a session, right? But the reward of your dream body, your dream physique, your dream level of fitness, that happens in the future. When you have to sit down and study, the time cost and the mental fatigue that happens now, the exam results happen at some point in the future. There is this mismatch between the effort you're putting in now and when those results are actually realized. The brain's dopamine system is a present biased machine. What this means is it discounts future rewards steeply and this is what's known as temporal discounting. In plain English, this basically means that if I said I'm gonna give you 100 pounds today, you're going to value that more greatly than if I tell you I'm gonna give you 200 pounds next week because you've got that time delay before you get that 200 pounds so you'd rather get the 100 in the present. Even if you're sat there thinking, oh no, I'd take the 200 pounds next week, that is a very trivial example but that is the way that your brain is thinking about these sort of temporal discounting processes. This is why the whole idea of, oh, just think about your long-term goals and then that'll make you do what you want to do in the present is terrible advice because you're asking willpower to override a hardwired system in your brain. Your neurobiology is very hard to override and so that is why building up discipline feels so hard. But here are five tricks that are actually backed by neuroscience that you can be using if you do want to become much more disciplined. First of all, you want to bring the reward forward. This comes from Milkman's research on temptation bundling. And essentially, you want to take a task that you have to do, this is the disciplined thing, and pair it with a task that you enjoy doing. This is your sort of reward. You're basically bringing a reward into the immediate present. So what does that actually look like? For example, I use this all the time. I have a one playlist that I absolutely love that I really want to listen to but I only let myself listen to this playlist whilst I'm on a run. And so therefore, it gets me out running and I feel good whilst I'm running because I'm getting an immediate reward. It might be that every time I sit down to study, that is the only time that I allow myself to drink my nice little iced coffee with my nice little syrups that I really enjoy drinking but I'm only gonna have it if I put in the work and I do my studying. You're taking something hard, you're pairing it with something you enjoy and that's making it easier for you to stick to actually doing the hard thing. And also with this, when you're sort of tracking how many hard things you're doing, you want to be breaking down those hard things into the smallest possible units that give you a tangible sort of checkpoint. So you've heard this piece of advice before but it's very relevant that I mention it now. Instead of telling yourself, okay, I'm going to do this massive task, you break up that big task into five mini subtasks and you maybe tick them off each time. You get a little boost of dopamine that actually kind of triggers your motivational circuits because motivation is heavily tied to dopamine release. And if you're getting a little tick of dopamine every time you're checking off a task that you've completed, your motivation to follow through and continue subsequent tasks is going to increase as well. Trick two is to automate things. Basically, when your brain has to decide that it's going to do a hard thing, you're gonna face a lot more friction and a lot more resistance than if you just do the hard thing. So what that looks like in practice is implementing something known as the cue routine reward loop, which is basically where you do a certain thing that tells your brain that you're about to initiate a different task. It's like conditioning, classical conditioning. If you're familiar with the Pavlov's dog experiment, then it's just a little bit like this, right? So for example, I can take my iced coffee. When I go to the kitchen or go on my walk and buy my iced coffee or make my own iced coffee, then my brain is subconsciously preconditioning itself for a study session because it knows I'm only going to be having an iced coffee whilst I'm studying. And because I'm doing that cue, I face significantly less internal mental resistance to sitting down and studying because my brain is sort of already prepared for that being what's happening next. And you can implement this in so many different ways. Trick three is to basically reframe your goals in terms of your identity. So you want to be making identity-led goals. What this looks like is instead of going, I wanna go to the gym every single day, you rephrase that as, I am somebody who trains every single day. Or from, I want to spend 30 minutes studying every day, I am a top student and I'm the kind of person who will always make time for studying. Do you see how you're inserting yourself into the goal? It might seem very trivial, it might seem very small, but your brain responds exceptionally well to these sorts of identity-based goals. And it's such a simple change that you can be making, but that really anchors your brain in the understanding that actually, yourself, not necessarily your worth is tied to your ability to do these things because that's not what I'm telling you to do, but I'm telling you to basically put some level of your identity in towards the task completion, and your brain's going to register that as the task therefore being something almost essential for you to be doing. And it becomes a lot easier for you to follow through. Trick four is to make sure you're designing your environment to be conducive to achieving your goals. So for example, if your goal is to be studying more effectively, make sure your environment is clear and uncluttered because there's so much research out there that shows that having a cluttered environment is reflected in your brain being overwhelmed in your working memory because your working memory can't hold many bits of information at once. So if you're constantly seeing loads and loads of things all the way around you, you're going to find it very, very hard to focus in on the task in front of you. Similarly, if you want to be going for a run more frequently when you wake up, put your shoes by your bed, your running shoes, lay out your running clothes the night before. These principles can be adapted through so many different goals that you're trying to achieve. But basically you're trying to minimise the level of friction between you not doing a goal and you actually accomplishing it by completing some of those interim steps. So like laying out your clothes, like laying out your shoes, like pulling up the contents of the essay that you're going to be writing in the morning the night before. That's also why a lot of people say that you should be writing your goals the night before, for example. Trick five is to understand the neuroscience. That's what this video has done. I hope it's super, super helpful for you If you have any questions, let me know in the comments and I'll do my best to respond. I'm currently trying to work my way towards 50K on YouTube. So I would really appreciate it if you enjoyed this video, give it a little thumbs up and subscribe to my channel and I will see you in the next video. Bye bye.