Neuro-Discipline: Everyday Neuroscience for Self-Discipline, Focus, and Defeating Your Brain’s Impulsive and Distracted Nature (Live a Disciplined Life Book 6)

by Peter Hollins

Given enough time, your monkey mind can convince you of nearly anything.

What’s the rush? Well, Robbins understands that this five-second window period is crucial. It’s the tiny gap you get before your mind steps in and finds excuses for you or jeopardizes you with indecision or fear.

You don’t give yourself time to dwell on your excuses, your avoidance, your doubts—you just act.

Getting started is better than being perfect. Start, even though you can’t be guaranteed of success.

Wanting a quick-fix is a sign of fear and laziness.

If you “don’t feel like it,” well, so what? The big sacrifice here is not really a sacrifice at all: wouldn’t you rather have your goal than another pointless afternoon spent wasting time online?

Let go of old excuses. The best way to know your emotional monkey mind is steering the ship is to notice the lengths you go to explain to yourself why you can’t grow or take action. An excuse is a nonsense “reason” your fear makes up to defend inaction and avoid responsibility. It feels comfortable but ultimately is self-defeating. At the bottom of every excuse is “I’m afraid.” But you can consciously decide that fear is not a reason to give up on your goals.

Let go of control. This may seem counterintuitive. Isn’t goal-setting all about control? Yes and no. When you focus and commit to a goal, you are naturally more enthusiastic and positive. You don’t need to control others around you when you can control yourself, your actions, and your attitude. Refuse to waste energy on things that are not in your zone of con...

Let go of instant gratification. When you focus solely on short-term goals, you may sabotage those longer-term ones.

Have respect for your physical body and never sacrifice your well-being for a goal—instead, think of nurturing your health as an investment in any goal you have. Eat well, exercise, and sleep properly, and you are in the best possible position to achieve the goals you want to.

Let go of the need for security. Our primitive minds evolved over the years to avoid risk and danger and move toward safety (i.e., what’s already known). Unfortunately, this “comfort zone” is also a space where no growth or exploration can take place.

Giving up on a goal that no longer serves you is one thing, but often the impulse to throw in the towel comes from fear and laziness. Instead, pause and remind yourself of why you’re pursuing your goal. What will the next five years look like if you give up now? And what about if you decide to push through your resistance and keep going? Be honest and ask whether you’re wanting to quit because you’re lazy and fearful or wanting to take the easy way out. You can always quit tomorrow, if you really want to. But quitting when you really should have carried on is harder to come back from. Moments like these are gold: they invite us to dig deep and get really familiar with not just our fears and personal demons, but also the heart of what we’re trying to build or create for ourselves.

The brain wants as much pleasure as possible, as fast as possible; an absence of pain and discomfort will also do in most cases. Speed is of the essence for the brain.

The brain never wants to sacrifice anything pleasurable.

The better we’re able to visualize and interact with our future self, the better we get at taking good care of it. This is because by visualizing and connecting with our future self, we feel the reality of the upcoming circumstances and recognize how the actions of our present self are bound to create a real impact on our future self. We are faced with stark reminders that our actions aren’t just taken in a vacuum and that most of them do have consequences. By paying attention to our future selves, we start to see how a lack of self-discipline now may be good for our present self but disastrous for our future self. As we empathize with the fate of our future self and the kind of life it will have to live through if we keep our negative habits up (e.g., sleepless nights trying to get caught up with work, turning in haphazardly done output, having to deal with career failures), we begin to feel motivated to change our present ways to be better.

The study asked 238 people in different organizations to keep daily experience diaries. The researchers analyzed over 12,000 separate entries on these people's inner perceptions, motivation at work, emotions, and performance levels. It was found that the biggest factor behind motivation and positive emotion at work was feeling as though one was making progress toward a meaningful goal.

Teach yourself to associate self-discipline with reward. The focus is always, however, on the process. An end result is never guaranteed, but we have a lot more control over the everyday processes right now. Whatever happens, you can look at your work at the end of the day and know that you’ve achieved. Turn toward progress and not outcome, and you engage yourself in the present and give yourself a chance to notice and reward hard work, even if it’s hard work that may seem minuscule in the grand scheme of things.

One of the biggest hurdles to self-discipline is looking at tasks as huge, inseparable boulders. It’s intimidating and discouraging, and when those emotions arise, it’s tough to avoid procrastinating because tackling a boulder is a tough sell. Unfortunately, this is a habit that plagues most people. They see only massive boulders and allow themselves to get emotionally thrown off track.

A key element of better self-discipline is the counterintuitive practice of deliberately turning to the small, everyday processes that eventually cumulate in the end goal, rather than the end goal itself.

You can choose to let those opportunities float by, using each moment to cement useless behaviors, or you can use each tiny moment to gradually build toward a future you care about.

behaviors. Focusing on the goal only makes you painfully aware of how you haven’t reached it yet. But when you focus on processes, every day that you can stick to your new habit is a cause for celebration.

Self-discipline is the attitude we take to our day-to-day tasks in service of the bigger goal we care about. It’s the how. It’s the process of routinely turning our awareness and actions away from distraction and instant gratification and toward building our dreams, one piece at a time. Sacrifice, hard work, resilience—all these are part of self-discipline, and every one of them takes place right here, in the present moment. Self-discipline is a habit, not an outcome. It’s a code of conduct you adopt permanently. This could mean routinely pushing yourself to stop procrastinating and put in an hour of piano practice, day in and day out. It could mean consistently telling yourself that you will not have a cigarette, no matter how badly you want one. It could mean developing the habit of waking up early, every single day, no excuses. The great news about all this effort is that even if they don’t actually land you the goal you want, you still benefit. In time, you may start to see discreet, measurable goals as less valuable to you than consistent behavior you can master over a lifetime. After all, which sounds better: losing a few extra pounds or maintaining a healthy diet and lifestyle for the rest of your life?

An outcome is an end goal, while

performance). I’m going

Abstinence, for some, is the simplest, surest, and easiest approach. You don’t have the struggle of trying to stop, rather just not starting. Abstinence can also offer you freedom—freedom from tough choices and freedom from punishing yourself for trying to moderate or control your behavior and potentially failing.

as was stated in the beginning of this section, there is a correct choice, and I believe it to be abstinence. The process of negotiating with yourself and cutting yourself off may work from time to time, but the most failproof method is to simply not indulge at all. It’s much easier to hear a flat “No” than “It depends; we’ll see.” The former creates proper expectations, while the latter keeps you fixated on regulating your self-discipline.

then we can consider moderation. This is otherwise known as going “cold turkey.”

But the people we make the most excuses to, almost without exception, are ourselves. While we tell excuses to others so we don’t look bad in their eyes, we tell excuses to ourselves to protect our own ego and self-esteem. This is by far the more important function of constant excuses, and unfortunately, it leads to living in a fantasy world where any reason for toughness is simply excused away.

Generally, if the first priority of what you’re

going. I could make a rough outline that’ll

Step by step, it’s just about realizing that

You might be consumed by thoughts of past regrets or by anxiety of a future that may never occur. Being in these states makes it easy to slip. It’s not so much that donuts will appear in your mouth if you’re unaware and distracted, but you won’t properly be able to assess whether you are thinking with your primal or logical brain.

brain that are responsible for executive functions and thus self-discipline—specifically

So prepare while the going is still easy. Don’t wait for life to force you to learn the lessons you must, sooner or later. Take the initiative by developing self-discipline right now. The shift is only a small one, but mentally it has great influence on how you approach yourself and life. The idea is straightforward: get more uncomfortable than you’d usually be. Give yourself the gift of the opportunity to grow stronger.

People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat.