Overcoming A Lack Of Self Discipline 

• Behavior is strongly influenced by pleasure and pain.
• Too much pleasure or pain will prevent action.
• Measure your comfort/discomfort levels to improve discipline.

You can’t talk about self discipline in a vacuum, it has to be related to a specific goal. Your ability to be self disciplined, is therefore determined by the pleasure or pain you associate with certain activities.

In this article, we are going to be taking a closer look at generating positive pleasure associations, no matter what your goal or task.

Reward And Punishment

Everything we do in life is done to receive a reward, or avoid a punishment. For example, when you were a child you may have been rewarded with sweets or praise when you did something well. Or, you may have been spanked or grounded when you did something bad.

Your behavior is therefore strongly influenced by the pleasure or pain you associate with a given task. The more reward or punishment you receive, the more you are motivated towards or away something.

However, too much pleasure or pain can immobilize you, and prevent you from taking further action. This would occur when you experience so much pleasure you don’t feel like doing anything else, or so much pain that you can’t do anything else.

Self discipline therefore requires a balance between pleasure and pain, too much or too little of either, will destroy any attempts at living a more disciplined life.

Motivation And Self Discipline

The people who tend to have problems with self discipline, are those who struggle to move away from bad feelings they may have experienced in the past.

This is known as aversive conditioning, whereby a bad experience in the past is associated with a certain activity. This then motivates the person to avoid experiencing that same activity again.

For example, if you touch a hot stove and burn your hand, it is very unlikely you will touch a hot stove again. You have learnt to associate the stove with pain, and so become motivated to avoid receiving that same pain again.

What this means in terms of self discipline, is that if you are the type of person who struggles to put bad experiences behind you, then anything you may have tried and failed at in the past (such as your personal goals), you will most likely not try again.

The Push-Pull Of Self Discipline

The opposite to people who are motivated away from self discipline by pain, are those who are motivated towards self discipline by combining pain and pleasure.

These people use pleasant and painful emotions to main self discipline, and feel better about themselves in the process. This is the classic push-pull of pleasure and pain, which enables them to remain disciplined.

These people motivate themselves to start a task, by thinking about how bad things would be if they didn’t do it. To motivate themselves to finish the task, they then think about how good things will be when it is over.

As you can see by these examples, everyone is motivated by something. People are either motivated to sit at home and watch TV, or they are motivated to read a book.

Motivation is not the issue here, what really matters are how the emotions of pleasure and pain are associated with a certain task or activity. Pleasure motivates us towards something, whilst pain motivates us away.

Measuring Your Level Of Self Discipline

A good exercise to do when trying to maintain a more self disciplined life, is to measure the level of discomfort you feel when presented with a certain task.

To do this, you simply need to give a score between 1 and 10 to represent the amount of pain (resistance) you feel towards a task.

1 represents the least pain (i.e. lying on a couch watching TV) and 10 the most pain (i.e. working in a Siberian slave labor camp).

The idea here is to gauge you current mental attitude towards a task. Remember, if your level of pain is too low (for example, you give yourself a score of 1 because you are watching TV) then you will not be motivated to do something you know you should do.

Conversely, if you give yourself a score of 10 because you are in extreme pain, then again you will not be motivated to do something you know you should do.

Of course, I am using extreme examples here to demonstrate the points on the scale. So you don’t have to be in a slave labor camp to rate your level of discomfort as a 10! But I think you get the idea of how to use this scale.

A good way to determine if you are experiencing discomfort, is to look for feelings of anxiety, worry, feeling tense, sweaty hands, shortness of breath or increased heart rate. Also be aware of any avoidance behaviors that may come from these fears.

If you are feeling too much pleasure, this will usually come in the form of laziness.

In the next article, you will learn some simple techniques for decreasing the level of discomfort you feel when presented with a particular task.

Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 12 | 13

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