Mind Over Matter: The Self-Discipline to Execute Without Excuses, Control Your Impulses, and Keep Going When You Want to Give Up (Live a Disciplined Life Book 11)

by Peter Hollins

If you’re a grizzled veteran seeking new methods, these five areas may provide new perspective on familiar issues. Below are the five mental hindrances: giving in to the five senses animosity and malice apathy and laziness anxiety and remorse hesitation and doubt

Giving in to the five senses. Control over our thoughts is usurped when we are distracted by our physical surroundings.

To attain self-discipline, we need to put sensory information in its proper context: allowing ourselves to indulge in and experience those senses fully but also keeping aware that they are temporary, distracting, and ultimately hindrances.

Animosity and malice. Emotions have the ability to completely override our thoughts of self-discipline, and anger is one of the strongest emotions. People are adept at unconsciously ingraining all emotions adjacent to anger, such as resentment, bitterness, and animosity, into their thought patterns. The destructive power of malice isn’t just about what other people do to us, either—it can also be directed toward ourselves in the acts of guilt or self-loathing. They have the ability to undermine all of our thoughts and render us practically blind in fits of rage.

We obsess over past miscarriages of justice or fairness that hurt us: the ex who broke your heart, the company that fired you for stupid reasons, or the drive-thru restaurant that got your order wrong. These feelings activate our impulse to exact retribution or punish the people or institutions who have “done us wrong.” It’s draining at best and self-sabotage ...

Apathy and laziness. The simple act of doing is not usually preferable. Being human takes a lot of work. For many, it’s easier to allow themselves and their bodies to seek an escape from constant mental and physical activity by shutting down and feeling nothing. Whatever it takes to get along in the world is just too much for them to deal with, and the end...

Humans tend to enjoy the path of least resistance and will seek i...

Anxiety and remorse. Like anger, anxiety has the ability to completely overpower your more productive thoughts.

The previous three hindrances show how one can be immobilized by inner thoughts—but anxiety causes you to be mentally overactive and do too much. Anxiety is the fear of a bad or less-than-perfect outcome leading to agitation and worry, making one become overwhelmed with stress, worry, and then finally remorse after the fact. How can you function if you are crippled with fear? It becomes clear that

Hesitation, disbelief, and uncertainty. Why would you engage in self-discipline if you believe it is all for nothing? For somebody who struggles with doubt, low self-esteem, or insecurity, self-questioning can be a debilitating factor that goes well past the point where introspection remains valuable. “I don’t know if I can do this,” “Am I doing this right?” “What’s the point of this anyway?” “What the heck is this?”—all these questions serve as barriers to disciplined action.

Planning and powering past these doubts is a key to restoring self-discipline.

not as easy as self-awareness, as you’ll learn in the next section. Though you may be able to solve a couple of your mental hindrances through stopping and pausing, you’ll need to address some deeper, biological issues as well.

Why do we fight against our own self-interests when it comes to instilling discipline into our own lives? Is it just that we don’t want to eat our vegetables? Not quite. Unfortunately, a major reason—a more general reason that directly or indirectly causes each of the five mental hindrances—is the brain itself.

Self-discipline is especially tied to a specific neurotransmitter: dopamine.

Dopamine is one of the agents that work on the brain’s pleasure and reward centers.

Every decision we make is based on gaining pleasure or avoiding pain in some way.

If you trace all of our decisions back, whether short-term or long-term, you’ll find that they all stem from a small set of pleasures or pains.

Self-discipline corollary: doing what we need to do is often painful and devoid of pleasure, so we don’t do it.

Your behaviors will skew toward pain avoidance more than pleasure-seeking. The instinct to survive a threatening situation is more immediate than eating your favorite candy bar, for instance.

Self-discipline corollary: giving up is often less painful than persevering. So we give up.

Our perceptions of pleasure and pain are more powerful drivers than the actual things. When our brain is judging between what will be a pleasant or painful experience, it’s working from scenarios that we think could result if we took a course of action. And sometimes those scenarios can be flawed. In fact, they are mostly flawed.

But you haven’t actually tried it. All you have are perceptions and assumptions, and that’s enough to magnify the pain of sky-diving to extremes. Incidentally, sky-diving has an incredibly low rate of accidents and is over within a series of minutes. Your brain deals in the business of worst-case scenarios.

Self-discipline corollary: unfamiliarity breeds fear, which breeds avoidance. So you avoid acting.

Pleasure and pain are changed by time.

Immediacy is king.

Self-discipline corollary: the rewards we seek are rarely immediate, and often, the longer-term they are, the greater they are. But we’re stuck in the now, so we avoid action.

Emotion beats logic.

Self-discipline corollary: logic doesn’t control our behavior nearly as much as we would like to believe it does.

We’ve always been biologically wired to not think ahead and care most about the present moment—essentially the opposite of what self-discipline focuses on. This is the same reason that delaying gratification is difficult. However, we can skirt around this by changing the way we think about pleasure and pain.

In the pursuit of self-discipline, we want to increase the pleasure in every long-term duty or obligation we have and lessen the pain. There are a series of steps we can use to do this strategically. 1. Decide what you want. What is your goal that requires self-discipline? It can be as simple as working out more. 2. Take inventory of your pain and pleasure. This is where you take aspects of the pleasure principle and start massaging them to your benefit. Here’s what you do: Take two sheets of paper. Draw a line down the middle of each page. At the top of the left column on both pages, write down “PAIN AVOIDED.” At the top of the right column on both pages, write down “PLEASURE GAINED.” Now, at the top-center of one of the pages, write down “BEING DISCIPLINED.” At the top-center of the other pages, write down “NOT BEING DISCIPLINED.” By now you probably know what we’re up to. You’re going to list the pain and pleasure you expect you’ll experience when you take a step toward accomplishing your goal or when you decide not to. To motivate yourself psychologically, you’re going to amp up the pain associated with not being disciplined, and the pleasure associated with being disciplined. This may seem elementary, but it’s a level of perspective and insight that you can use to combat your impulses. Just taking stock of what happens in reality can help quell your impulses.

List as many pain and pleasure points as you can for each scenario. Be honest with yourself and try to think the potential through as much as you can. You should get some clarity about what your aspirations and ambitions are—not to mention your hopes and fears. 3. Tip the scales in your favor. This is a part where you get creative. Take the “NOT BEING DISCIPLINED” sheet and minimize the pains. They are minor; they are trivial. Convince yourself that these small things shouldn’t have such power over you. Tip the scales in your favor, so to speak. Now, for the “BEING DISCIPLINED” sheet, amplify the pleasures. Picture how utterly fantastic each of these situations could turn out. Think about the best-case scenarios that could result with each of these items. Take the positive possibilities and run with them. Don’t be surprised if you get a minor dopamine rush from this alone. This sheet is more than just an inventory: it’s a checklist for reinforcing your self-discipline. What you have just done is created a very tangible cost-benefit analysis that gets to the heart of what makes you act. Instead of waiting for our prehistoric brain to sabotage our efforts because of the lack of pie or television, we can tip the scales a bit in our favor when it comes to dopamine and make our brain work for us rather than against us.

With time orientation, in Stanford Professor Phil Zimbardo’s (the professor best known for the Stanford prison experiment) book The Time Paradox, it is theorized that each of us can view time in one of three ways: past, present, and future.

Our psyches tend to frame our experience using whatever orientation we’re most acclimated to. Put simply, there are actual differences between those of us who are mired in nostalgia, versus those who are continually looking for the next step in life.

The past-oriented person makes all of their decisions from historical information or recall, and by definition they are generally separated from current situations or events. People stuck in the past don’t have much use for the new and different, regarding them with suspicion, disdain, or even prejudice. Their thinking is almost inactive—which is not conducive to self-discipline. They will say, “Well, this is what I did in the past, so I’ll just keep doing that.” However, this type of thought is extremely rare, and we will spend more time on future- and present-oriented people.

Someone who focuses on the present lives primarily in “the now.” They react most powerfully to what their senses are showing them at the moment. They tend to be very concrete in their thinking, choosing to orient themselves toward “what is” rather than what happened in the past or what could happen in the future. The “present” mindset can be broken down even further into two distinct camps: those who embrace the possibilities of the present (we’ll call them “hedonists”) and those who don’t like the present but feel they have no other choice but to live in it (we’ll call them “fatalists”). The present-hedonistic person finds opportunities in the current time and is happy to indulge in what’s happening around them now. They’re the ones who go to parties, embrace adventures in unfamiliar places, or interact with society on an ongoing basis. They’re happy to take risks and don’t necessarily care too much about the consequences (or have plans to mitigate the results if they have to). The present-fatalist person doesn’t really want to be focused on the present, but they don’t feel the future holds anything for them. They sense that somebody or something else—whether it’s their social circle, financial realities, religion, or “luck”—is in control of their lives and consider the whole game of existence to be “rigged.” Their expectations and hopes have been dashed, and they don’t feel any need to work for the future because they don’t believe they have one. What both of the present...

Those with future mindsets frame their lives differently. They aren’t bound strictly to what the present has to offer (or deny) them. They are able to disconnect from it; concrete and empirical reality doesn’t bind them. They focus on the future with all its distant possibilities and consequences. The future-oriented first think about the outcome they want, then work backward to how their actions create it. They do so without the distractions of the present. And even though they frequently work with abstract ideas and no guarantee of positive results, they still organize their thoughts and actions toward fulfillment of some future goal. In other words, the future-oriented have no problem with delayed gratification. They don’t need instant affirmation or reward for their efforts. They understand that what’s most important to them might take a little time to develop. Sometimes that means working in something that feels like a vacuum (or might seem like a vacuum to someone living in the present). But all it means is that the futurist is willing to forsake immediate satisfaction now for a more fulfilling and meaningful satisfaction later—possibly. That mindset is perfectly suited to someone with strong self-discipline. The futurist develops patience as a plank of their long-range planning. They keep the greater goal in mind rather than the annoyances that eventually get them there. This meshes well with other research on the matter showing that thinking about a literal future ...

It should be noted most of us are a blend of present and future-oriented thinking. This means that we end up with two distinct selves that we have to attend to and keep satisfied. They are quite aptly summed up with the hedonist grasshopper (present) and blue-collar ant (future) from earlier. If you compromise the two equally, it results in an ant that takes breaks while diligently working toward a goal and the grasshopper that realizes that discomfort is required in life. That’s really the best we can expect in everyday life.

The concept of time orientations should force you to consider and skew your view toward the future. Future you is trying to build a foundation for their success. He’s the one that has your best interests in mind. Self-discipline is an irreplaceable part of that foundation.

As the saying goes, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” When it comes to developing willpower, the most important factor might not be your mental or physical abilities or the range of what you can accomplish. Rather, it may simply be your belief that you can develop willpower.

Across the board, the students who believed that their willpower was unlimited did better in several measures. They regulated their activities better, kept procrastination at bay, got better grades, and were even better at eating right and maintaining physical health. On the other side, students who said they needed to recharge themselves from time to time were especially beset by procrastination, often made poor dietary decisions, and found themselves easily distracted. They even spent more money—theoretically while they were distracting themselves with online destinations.

Job’s results indicated that those students who were convinced of their own abilities and really believed they had more willpower actually did.

By producing your own incentive and making self-discipline its own reward, you’ll see positive effects unveil themselves on a daily, gradual basis. These benefits include the following, which you can also feel free to factor into your pleasure principle cost-benefit analysis.

Avoiding temptation. The self-disciplined mind knows that fighting temptation is a Herculean task. Even the strongest-minded person might feel a tinge of enticement when they’re walking past the window of an ice cream shop where there’s a huge color display of a towering sundae hanging in the window. Unless you hate ice cream, you’ll feel a twinge. But what self-discipline helps you do is avoid the temptation—pass the shop by without feeling the need to indulge. This is because self-discipline helps you control and direct yourself when there are clashing internal forces at work. Your mind won’t focus on the deprivation aspect: it’ll concentrate on the good you’re producing. More life satisfaction. Those who practice self-discipline frequently report that they’re happier than people who don’t. This reality flies in the face the idea that self-discipline means not having any fun. What you’re trying to get on the pathway of self-control will be a thousand times more gratifying than the rewards of an immediate thrill—it’s just going to take a little longer. Patience can be frustrating. When you live in a society like we do, where instant pleasure is relatively easy to pursue, it can really be hard to walk a line of restraint and control, especially when you have friends who constantly live for the moment. But what you’re after is bigger than that: you want to create a more satisfying and contented lifetime.

You do more of what you want. On a similar note, those who take up a life of self-discipline are often imagined as “not doing” things. They’re not up to date on the current hit TV shows; they’re not hanging out with their bar friends on a nightly basis; they’re not traveling to Fort Lauderdale on spring break. In some way or another, they’re perceived as being left out—but that’s only according to other people’s concept of fun. In reality, the self-disciplined person is giving themselves more opportunity to do what they actually want to do. This comes about in two ways. First, you have the ability to position yourself for success and do what needs to be done. This leaves time for the interests you want to pursue, and it can even be just a lazy afternoon of television. Second, you have the discipline to do challenging things that you want. You might want to climb a set of mountains or run a marathon. Self-discipline is how you do them. They’re doing activities that are rewarding and enriching—and they’re doing them because they’ve disciplined themselves to be able to do them and appreciate them. You gain ultimate freedom.

Actually, you’re MORE in the moment.

Setting boundaries. Chances are, you have at least one or two good friends or relations who will be thrilled to support you in any way they can. But let’s face it: there will also be a few of them who will try—knowingly or otherwise—to knock you off your path to self-discipline.

Knowing yourself. Finally, self-discipline is one of the best ways to find out who you really are and what you really value—in a real-world setting.

Self-discipline is a means to reject the traits of reaction and retreat.

Takeaways:

We knew we had to wash the car that day, but we just never got around to it. Is that something that just tends to happen from time to time, or is there something deeper at play here?