The Science of Self-Discipline: The Willpower, Mental Toughness, and Self-Control to Resist Temptation and Achieve Your Goals (Live a Disciplined Life Book 1)

by Peter Hollins

Jim Rohn once said, “We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.”

These fMRI studies demonstrate that the ability to make healthier long-term decisions and engage in self-discipline comes more easily to some people than others as a result of the activity and structure of their prefrontal cortex.

The phrase “exercise your self-control” is an accurate way of thinking about your ability to be disciplined in the face of temptation, as that ability can be built up if you consistently exercise it by making healthier choices, and it can also be stripped down by constantly

Self-discipline and willpower can be consistently exercised to achieve sustainable improvements over time. As with any skill, the more you practice being disciplined, the better you become at it.

These studies also provide fairly strong evidence against spoiling children. Always getting your way in childhood means that the brain structures that underlie discipline are neglected and underutilized, culminating in an adult that isn’t familiar with controlling urges and thinking about long-term

term consequences.

It’s clearly desirable to have more blood flow to those regions of the brain that are responsible for executive functions in order to improve and refresh discipline. For many years, meditation has been touted as a panacea for all sorts of problems, including a lack of focus and discipline. Somewhat surprisingly to the skeptics out there, studies have confirmed that the practice of meditation does indeed have a real effect. MRI scans were taken of volunteers before and after they participated in an eight-week mindfulness course, the results of which make a strong case for meditation being a useful tool for “strengthening” the areas of the brain that are responsible for executive functions, and thus self-discipline.

Moreover, meditation was shown to shrink the amygdala, which is generally responsible for the primal emotions, instincts, and drives that keep us alive. It is also the center of the “fight-or-flight” instinct, which heightens our arousal

This means participants who meditated would be less susceptible to fear, emotional impulses, and stress. Self-discipline is often

sabotaged by emotional impulses and stress, so keeping these under control is helpful to setting ...

meditation can both reduce the feelings and emotions that make us lose self-control and increase our ability to manage those feelings by physically improving the brain structures responsible for them.

The brains of people who resist the cookie once are different from the brain of someone who has had to resist a cookie 10 times.

This means that no matter how great somebody’s willpower may be, if they are subjected to enough temptation over a long enough period of time, they will eventually give in.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University conducted a study in 1996 measuring the phenomenon of what’s known as willpower depletion. He gathered 67 study participants in a room with freshly baked cookies and other sweet confections, as well as some bitter radishes. Some lucky participants were allowed to indulge in the sweet treats, while the subjects in the experimental condition were asked to eat only the radishes—they had to exercise their willpower. Unsurprisingly, the radish-eaters were less than pleased. Once they had been subjected to enough temptation as deemed by the research group, the participants went to a new location and were given a persistence-testing puzzle as a supposedly unrelated task. The effects of the forced willpower exercise were clear. The participants who had eaten only radishes made far fewer attempts at solving the puzzle and gave up in less than half the time relative to those who had been allowed to eat the sweets. Their willpower was depleted—exhausted—and they were ready to just take the path of least resistance.

The subjects who were forced to resist the sweets had depleted their willpower in doing so, and so when they were asked to engage in another difficult task they were already worn out.

survival mode is essentially a green light for instant gratification and binge eating, as well as a myriad of other failures of self-discipline.

Whenever we are under a lot of stress, we are thrown back into our panicked “fight-or-flight” mode and are more likely to act instinctively and irrationally.

There are plenty of opportunities for you to conserve your willpower on a daily basis so you can prevent it from ever reaching dangerously depleted levels. All of those opportunities boil down to decreasing the amount of willpower you have to use by being smart about the decisions you have to make and being smart about the temptations you have to resist.