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Neuro Discipline

Author -> Peter Hollins

Chapter 1 The Neuroscience of Self-Discipline

  • Our brains are simply programmed to do as little work as possible, seek maximum pleasure, and generally bask in the sun like a house cat.
  • The same instincts that make us human are the ones that make us binge eat, act against our own best interests, and keep us firmly rooted in a place that we don’t want.
  • The self-discipline you want requires your neo-mammalian brain to constantly win, but that’s tough to accomplish.
  • Self-Discipline is especially tied to a specific neurotransmitter: Dopamine
  • Dopamine is also released in anticipation of pleasure or reward, which ties it directly to motivation.
  • Every decision we make is based on gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. This is the common motivation for every person on earth.
  • People work harder to avoid pain than to get pleasure. While everyone wants pleasure as much as they can get it, their motivation to avoid pain is actually far stronger.
  • Our perceptions of pleasure and pain are more powerful drivers than the actual things.
  • Emotion beats logic. When it comes to the pleasure principle, your feelings tend to overshadow rational thought.
  • Homo economicus, aka the rational choice theory states that all of our choices and decisions spring entirely from self-interest and the desire to bring as much pleasure to our lives as possible.
  • If you are in a state of stress, anxiety, or overwhelm, then you are pretty much primed for self-disciplined failure.
  • Our emotions are “faster” than our more logical, rational thought and will always jump ahead and influence us if we don’t take specific action to respect our slower, more reasonable responses.
    • Act before your emotional monkey mind can jump in and try to stop you with complaints, fears ,or laziness.
  • The moment you feel an impulse to act toward achieving a goal, have the discipline to act withing the next five seconds.
    • This 5 seconds 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.
  • Instinct is all about what you know to be the correct or best action. You gut feeling tells you that something is right, and the pull of that can be incredibly strong and clear.
  • Instincts are those to act toward a specific goal. Instincts are not vague and pointless, they emerge in us as a response to deeply held desires and goals we want to achieve.
  • Even though the action is toward a self-identified goal and even though your intuition is strongly nudging you toward it, you must still push yourself to act. You might not want to, but the fact is, nothing will happen if you wait until you feel like acting.
  • Samurai Seven Breaths. Essentially, one should strive to make decisions withing the span of seven breaths, no longer.
  • Commitment. Commitment means the inner dedication to taking that one path that you know and trust to be the most worthwhile and meaningful for you.
    • Commitment comes back to sacrifice. Are you willing to sacrifice a handful of mediocre moments for one glorious one? A lifetime of less important things for the few things that truly matter to you?
  • Discipline means sacrificing the urge to constantly check your phone, lose your train f thought, or ditch a task before it’s finished.
  • When you focus solely on short-term goals, you may sabotage those longer-term ones.
  • Let go of being unhealthy. All this talk of the mind makes goal-setting seem abstract.
    • When you are in poor health, it doesn’t matter how lofty your goals are or how much self-discipline you can muster.
    • Have respect for your physical body and never sacrifice your well-being for a goal, think of nurturing your health as an investment in any goal you have.
    • this comfort zone is also a space where no growth or exploration can take place.

Takeaways:

  • The neuroscience of self-discipline is really a tale of two brains.
  • Humans are predisposed to seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, heavily reinforced by the neurotransmitter dopamine.
  • Five second rule, in which self-discipline action is best done within five seconds, or else primitive emotions are able to take us off course.

Chapter 2 Trick the Brain

  • If you wanted to treat your future self the best, how would you change your behavior in the present?

  • A final way to travel through time is to think in terms of 10-10-10.

    • The next time you feel you’re about to lose your self-discipline and give in to your temptations, stop and try to transport yourself 10 minutes, 10 hours and 10 days from the current moment.
    • This will help you realize how the short term pleasures can cause long term consequences to you.
    • “Your anger, depression, spite, or despair, so seemingly real and important right now; where will they have gone in a month, a week, or even a moment?”

  • Humans quickly adapt to a certain levels of stimulus, and it can take more and more of the same stimulus to achieve the same amount of motivation and pleasure.

  • The smaller, the better. When you break up the tasks that require self-discipline into as tiny pieces as possible, you are doing two things in particular.

    1. You are making it easy to simply get started.
    2. You are providing a multitude of opportunities for dopamine spikes, because as you cross each little task off your list you experience a sense of achievement and pleasure.
    3. Recognizing and celebrating little achievements in service of a large achievement kept people on track, in other words.

  • Without pausing to tally up how much you’ve already done, the mind can come to believe that no achievement has been made, after all the major end goal might just feel as distant. Thus, it is important to tally up and acknowledge the progress you have made so far.

  • The earlier the award is given out the more motivated people will act.

    • If we give people a $200 prize after 400 reviews they would be less motivated to do the task as it seems a huge task.
    • But, if we give people $25 for every 50 reviews, people are more likely to do the task as the goal is not as distant as it was anymore.
    • Moving the goalposts also lessens the probability that you’ll procrastinate.
    • It’s about a sense of constant motion and progress. The converse- standing still or even stagnating - is decidedly not motivating.

  • One of the biggest hurdles to self-discipline is looking at tasks as huge, inseparable boulders. It’s intimidating and discouraging and when the emotions arise it’s tough to avoid procrastinating.

  • Meeting more recurrent, lesser goals more often sends our psyche a positive message.

Chapter 3 Trick the Brain Pt. 2

  • The brain wants as much pleasure as possible, as fast as possible; an absence of pain and discomfort will also do in most cases.

Deconstruct Pleasure

  1. Decide what you want

    • Don’t limit yourself. Allow yourself to dream about what you most want to accomplish in life. If your idea sounds crazy or impossible, that’s even better.
      • This is the ultimate long term pleasure

    • Take inventory of your pain and pleasure.

    • 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 “TAKING ACTION”
    • At the top-center of the pages, write down “NOT TAKING ACTION” disciplineChartNeuroDiscipline.png

  2. Tip the scales in your favor

    • This is a part where you get creative and build up your emotional resolve.
    • Take the above created tables, and read them through.
    • Make statements or realizations based on the NOT TAKING ACTION table, that would make not acting more painful.

    • Visualize the positive effects of taking action.

    • Do the exact opposite of the previous step this time but with the other table, picture how utterly fantastic each of these situations could turn out.

    • Think about the best case scenarios for the TAKING ACTION table.

Environmental Assistance

  • One of the biggest influencers of self-discipline is the environment in which in which you’re implementing it.
  • Designing and maintaining an environment that’s conducive to self-discipline is one of the simplest ways to trick the brain.
  • An underrated part about self-discipline is about to having to exercise it at all, removing the distractions and temptations.
  • focus is an essential part of being disciplined.
  • If you’re constantly distracted, you succumb to temptations without even giving yourself a chance to exercise your self-discipline.
  • The two biggest facets of environmental change are reducing clutter and distractions and optimizing choices based on the default effect.
  • our brains have a limited number of decisions we can meaningfully analyze and make, and the more decisions we look at, the more fatigued we get.
    • Ego Depletion is the idea that our mental resources for activities are limited. When the resources drain or are decreased. those specific activities perform poorly.
    • Self-Discipline and decision quality decreased quickly as ego depletion started to take place.
    • Start by viewing your self-discipline as a battery that only has so much charge.
    • Trivial decisions should only be allocated a trivial amount of mental bandwidth, so just try to keep things proportional so you can preserve as much as possible for when you need it.
    • Instead of even dealing with some decisions, you could also choose to automate them - in other words, pick only one option and stick with it for consistency and ease.
    • Consciously having to think about 10 tasks in a day is mor mentally strenuous than thinking about two tasks in a day. The more you think about, the less self-discipline you will be able to muster up.

Shift your focus

  • Focus on the process rather than the outcome
  • The goal is the what, but to get there you would need a how
  • Goals are cheap - what matters is consistent action taken toward them.
  • When you focus on the endpoint, what you do is forget about the details of how you’re going to get there.
  • Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
  • Focus on what you can control, not in a n abstract, “one day” sort of way, but right now, every day.
  • Self-Discipline is the attitude we take to our day-to-day tasks in service of the bigger goal we care about.
    • Self discipline is 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.
    • Self Discipline is a habit and not an outcome, it is a code of conduct you adopt permanently.
  • When we look at goals it can be overwhelming, they are like a huge mountain, but in reality they aren’t, there is no mountain. We have to build the mountain to reach the goals. It’s a iterative step by step process. It can only be done bit by bit.
    1. What is your ideal Self
      • It is your best, most evolved version of you.
      • Take this version of yourself and imagine their life 10 months, 10 years after.
    2. What habits are associated with this ideal self?
      • What behaviors and practices go with the ideal self you imagined.
      • Maybe you decide that your self is fit and healthy
        • imagine the habits that they must be having, exercising, etc.
    3. Break these disciplines into tiny habits
      • Breaking habits such as for exercising, the ideal self might have his shoes ready at the door for jogging.
      • There are many tiny habits associated with this, such as making sure your shoes are ready, setting the alarm, showering when home again.
    4. Bring those disciplines to life
      • This is where you start doing the tasks and form habits as your ideal self.
      • You might not want to do it but you will do it anyways.

Self Discipline

  • Self-Discipline is the simplest thing in the world, but isn’t easy.
  • Expect that you’ll struggle and resist.
  • Embrace discomfort as a sign that you’re growing and press on, acting before you give yourself the chance to come up with excuses and doubts.
  • Shift your focus from the outcome and onto the process. An outcome is an end goal, while the process is the daily actions and habits that lead to that outcome.

Chapter 4 Mind Shift

  • Cells that wire together fire together
    • When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.
    • With habits, thoughts, decisions, reactions, behaviors, and anything else that the brain can notice patterns and trends in.
    • The more frequently that they occur together, the more they are likely to keep occurring, because the brain begins creating neural records to save time and energy
    • if certain neural pathways don’t get used, the brain eventually filters them out, including those that encourage positive behavior.
    • thoughts and internal monologue have real power. Whatever we end up telling ourselves time after time ends up reflecting reality.
    • Our brains change according to what they’re most familiar with - what happens the most in or lives.

Self Talk

  • Become your own best cheerleader and voice exactly what you want to happen. After all, if you repeat it enough, you will start to reprogram yourself to believe that that’s the reality.
  • Repeated self talk is a powerful motivator, and as with most of the suggestions this book offers, it can have real physiological effects on the discipline wiring of your brain.
  • The most effective talk and speeches are containing three main elements:
    1. They talk about uncertainty-reducing language.
      • This is when specific, actionable directions are given.
      • All you need to do is X and Y and watch out for Z.
    2. Empathetic language shows a degree of understanding and concern for other people’s needs and desires. When you validate people’s feelings, they will feel heard and appreciated.
    3. Meaning making language, explains why a task is important and the overall impact and benefits that the task is integral to.

Know Your Style

  • There are two primary approaches people take to self-discipline: moderation and abstinence
    1. Moderation
      • Moderation can give you freedom
      • The freedom of choice and flexibility to adapt to your circumstances and desires.
      • In moderation, you have to keep telling yourself no, a lapse in judgement is far more likely to occur here, than when you already know the answer is no.
    2. Abstinence
      • Abstinence 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.
      • 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”.

Excuses

  • Excuses are reflexive and instinctual ways in which we justify a lack of self-discipline and negative occurrences in general.

  • Excuses work by shifting blame

  • Whether it’s your fault or not, your initial impulse is often to find a way to deflect responsibility onto anything but you.

  • This ‘making excuses’ is obviously neural programming that we must utilize neuroplasticity to rewrite, and not just for self-discipline purposes.

  • Excuses are categorically lies.

    • It’s a harsh truth that needs to be exposed in order for you to become more accountable and disciplined.
    • Not just 99% of excuses, and not just the ones that other people use.

    • 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.

    Defense Mechanisms

    • To be more specific, this is when excuses become a defense mechanism.
    • Defense Mechanisms are unconscious, psychological reactions that rationalize or ease our anxiety.
    • If the first priority of what you’re saying is to make clear how you are not involved, you’re using an excuse, which is a lie.
    • Once you figure out that it feels great to not have to take responsibility for yourself, you’ll start using it more and more until you can’t tell the difference between the excuse and reality.

    • There are always elements outside our immediate control that can affect an outcome
      • But a legitimate reason centers our own roles in the situation and acknowledges the mistakes or misjudgments we made that prevented optimal results from happening.
    • Taking responsibility and emphasizing your agency in the matter is what transforms you from someone who gets knocked down and waits for help into someone who gets knocked down and find s a way to claw themselves up.
    • Failure is something to learn from.
      • Just allowing yourself to be defined by failure, without trying to figure out the adjustments you could make to achieve a better result, is a lifelong recipe for eternal procrastination.
    • Excuse making is the most temporary and fruitless method to feel better.
    • Instead of denying your excuses, try to dig below the surface and find three components:
      1. The objective truth
        • It is the neutral reality of the situation
        • Such as, you are exhausted.
      2. The undisciplined action
      3. The disciplined action
        • Recognizing what the right and most effective choice is instead of the easy choice.
        • It doesn’t demand that you exhaust yourself, but it ensures that you set yourself up for success.

Takeaways:

  • According to neuroscience, our thoughts, behaviors, actions, and habits become more natural the more we have them.

Chapter 5 Creating Space and Calm

Delay, Delay, Delay

  • Humans are hardwired to want things immediately.
  • This is called instant gratification and it is an extremely powerful force that winds its way through all aspects of life.
  • Instant gratification is the desire to satisfy these needs and wants without delay.
  • This is the opposite of what those with mental toughness practice - Delayed gratification.
    • Delayed Gratification is the practice of waiting for what you want.
  • Success and goal achievement typically come down to being able to choose the pain of discipline over the easier choice of rest or distraction.
  • If you find that you are indulging in instant gratification, Simply insert “I lack the self discipline to…” in front of what you are avoiding.

Test of importance or Urgency

  • Impulses and the urge for instant gratification are almost never thought through or founded on deep analysis, so you wouldn’t expect to be able to answer why more than once or twice.
  • Thus, only if you can answer why a few (five) times does it pass the test of importance or urgency.
  • Once you have asked yourself why five times, in five different ways, you have distilled the main pros and cons of why you should or shouldn’t buy the shirt.
  • We very rarely get something for nothing in life.
  • You will undoubtedly need to endure pain, deprivation and discomfort in the present, But that is a temporary state.

Keep Your Mind

  • Mindfulness is the practice of purposefully focusing all of your attention on the current moment and being completely aware of yourself, your emotions, and your thoughts.

  • It is quite literally the practice of emptying your mind- most frequently on your breathing.

  • The two worst things you can do for yourself are focusing on past events that you can’t change or focusing on present events and comparing them with your future.

    • When you’re continuously moving 24/7, this give s your brain and body very little time to recharge.
    • A stressed brain is the opposite of a disciplined brain.
    • Let go of the past, the future, and even what you’re feeling in the present moment.
    • Anything that you can potentially fixate on, just drop it and trust that it will be right where you left it in 30 minutes.

    • You’ll notice how easy it is for your anxieties to try to hijack your peace of mind and constantly jump into the mental space you’ve created.
    • Meditation was shown to shrink the amygdala, a major part of the emotional limbic brain and also the center of the fight or flight instinct.
    • Those who practice mindfulness are less susceptible to fear, emotional impulses, and stress.
    • It’s common to hear people say that they don’t have time for meditation, possibly even seeing this as scheduling a time to be unproductive.
      • But if meditating for a few minutes is increasing your focus and discipline while you are active.
      • It will be make up for the few minutes of inactivity.

The master of Discomfort

  • The brain can be tricked, mindsets can be shifted and we can manipulate our surroundings all we want.
  • Success in the bigger picture belongs to those who have mastered the ability to tolerate a degree of distress and uncertainty and who can thrive in situations of sacrifice in service of something bigger than their immediate pleasure in the moment.

No tips or tactics needed

  • Growth and development is about expanding, risking, exploring
  • Things will change around us, we will have to endure suffering at one point or another, and we will uncomfortable and forced to face things we wish we didn’t have to.
  • Learning how to tolerate distress, uncertainty, doubt, and risk while things are okay gives you the opportunity to practice and develop your discipline so you’re prepared for future discomfort.
  • 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.
  • Get more uncomfortable than you’d usually be. Give yourself the gift of the opportunity to grow stronger.
  • Train your will and discipline in the same way you would any other muscle: with repeated exercise
  • Deliberately engaging with discomfort sometimes shows you just how insignificant it sometimes is.
  • It allows you to enjoy the pleasures on a richer, deeper level.

Takeaways:

  • Our brains are reactive, fearful, angry, and highly impatient.
  • Our natural neurophysiology cannot be denier, but it also cannot be said that we can’t find ways to be less reactive, fearful, angry, and impatient.
  • Practice delayed gratification. This is simply abstaining from an indulgence for a set period of time.
  • A tip to help you gain perspective about your ability to delay gratification is to ask yourself why five times.
  • Self-Discipline is at its core uncomfortable, sacrificial, inconvenient, and difficult.
  • When you simply have the ability to put your head down and grind through what needs to be done. That is self discipline.