Discipline and Habits

What is Self-Discipline?

Self-discipline is the ability to get things done despite distractions and boredom.

It is a part of a broader idea of self-regulation.

The ability to control your impulses and change how you react to them. (Baumeister et al. 2007)

Procrastination is a self-regulation failure. Self-regulation theory provides us with a useful understanding of how our self-control works. (Baumeister et al 1994)

Self Regulation Theory

There are 4 components in Self Regulation Theory.

• Standards (of desired behaviour)

- This is the goal that you set for yourself. eg. writing 1 page of an assignment a day

• Monitoring

- eg. checking how much you’ve written today, being mindful of distractions

• Willpower

- eg. Controlling urges to distract and continue working

• Motivation (to reach the goal or meet the standard)

- eg. getting a good grade on the assignment to graduate. (Baumeister et al. 2007)

Strong motivation can effectively compensate for the lack of willpower and make us work more than we normally would. However, motivation might not be enough to compensate for absent standards.

At any point, we have a lot of desires and cravings that clash with each other.

For example, you have an assignment to write but the moment you sit down to work all other urges come to you.

“Oh, I want something to eat or play PC games or go for a walk or suddenly a bookshelf that you have not cleaned in months is in urgent need of cleaning”. It is at this moment, your willpower is able to control other urges, suppress them and allow you to work on your project. We use willpower to resolve clashing motivations to do different things.

However, willpower is not infinite. It is like a muscle. It gets tired with repetitive use and if you keep straining it, it will not be able to do much at all.

This is called ego depletion. Whenever you resist your urges and distractions you use up your willpower and will eventually no longer be able to resist them.

Self-regulation often means that we have to sacrifice something we want to do, in order to do something else that we want even more. The more we want something the easier it is to sacrifice other things for it. (Baumeister et al. 2007)

Forming new Habit Systems

The starting point of being productive and overcoming procrastination is forming a habit system that allows you to work consistently.

Forming a habit requires the following:

• Frequent Repetition

• Associated Cues

• Intermittent Rewards (Wood 2016)

Frequent Repetition

There is no mystery about it. To form a habit of doing something you need to do it repeatedly.

If you want to solidify a habit you need frequent repetitions over prolonged periods of time.

The time for a habit to form is variable and will take some time. The key is to find a way to ensure that you keep doing it long enough to build a habit. Overwhelming emotions and self-limiting beliefs prevent you from forming a habit in the first place. If that is the case it might be better to start by working with your beliefs first. However, the act of repetition of action can decrease your overwhelming emotions if done right. This will be discussed in the Task Aversiveness post.

Associated Cues

You need stable context cues. Things that would trigger your brain to recognise that now is the time to perform a habit.

This includes the time of the day, location, starting ritual, etc.

The most important thing is to keep it constant and specific to the habit. If you keep changing cues then your brain will not associate them with the activity that you are trying to do.

Another useful way to use cues is by piggybacking a new habit to the existing one. This way old habits can serve as cues for the new habit.

Intermittent Rewards

We repeat behaviours that give us rewards or help us to avoid punishment.

Rewards are especially important at the beginning of habit formation. They compensate for the loss of other enjoyable activities. The rewards need to be specific to the exact selected new behaviour.

A continuous reward is when you get a reward each time you do something.

An intermittent reward is when you don’t get a reward each and every time you do something.

The best way to reward yourself for a lasting habit is intermittently. Give yourself a reward after a random number of repetitions of the wanted action (variable ratio reinforcement schedule). This is the same way a reward is given in gambling with slot machines. You put the coin in and spin, but you are not guaranteed a reward each time. This type of reward is resistant to the habit dying off - extinction. (Wood 2016)

Breaking unhelpful habits

What you don't do is as important as what you do. So kicking the old unhelpful habits is an important task that should not be overlooked.

There are three things you can do to kick a habit.

• Disrupt cues

Remove things that trigger your old habits.

• Re-engineer the environment

Make old habits harder to do (add friction).

Make new habits easier to do (remove friction).

• Vigilant monitoring and control

Increase awareness of cues that trigger your old habits and find ways to stop yourself from performing old habits. This is the most likely method people use to control unwanted habits. (Wood 2016)

Conclusion

The most fundamental lesson from Discipline is to become regular and consistent in your actions. What we do regularly becomes a habit and it is the habit systems that we do day in and day out that make or break us. Underlying healthy habit systems lay a foundation for overcoming Procrastination.

References

Baumeister R., Vohs K. Self-Regulation, Ego Depletion, and Motivation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00001.x

Baumeister, R. F., Heatherton, T. F., & Tice, D. M. (1994). Losing control: How and why people fail at self-regulation. Academic Press.

Wood W, Neal D. Healthy Through Habit: Interventions. January 2016. Behavioral Science & Policy 2(1) DOI:10.1353/bsp.2016.0008