Taking a closer look at self-discipline and why it matters for daily life.
What is self-discipline? I think everyone has at least a hazy picture of what it means to be self-disciplined. From the outside, self-discipline looks like suppressing impulses to do things you shouldn't do. Self-discipline means not eating too much, not succumbing to the temptation to check your phone every two minutes, ignoring what you want to do and doing what you should.
Everyone has experienced being self-disciplined—that time when you valiantly resisted an impulse you thought you shouldn't follow. But, more often than not, we have the opposite experience: failing to be self-disciplined, succumbing to temptations.
This outside-view and numerous experiences would make it seem likely that we should all be experts in self-discpline. If not in practice, then at least in theory. We should know why we persist when we do, why we give up and what's going on inside our heads in both cases. After all, experiences of self-discipline—both in failure and in success—happen every day.
Yet, I think this familiarity doesn't necessarily equate to understanding. I've written about self-discipline for years, but recently I've had some experience that make me rethink what it might be all about.
Is Self-Discipline a Resource?
The easiest metaphor, and the one I've operated on implicitly for most of my life is that self-discipline is a kind of resource. Use more self-discipline and it will get used up and you'll feel tired.
Intuitively this seems to be the case. With few exceptions, most people can't endure indefinitely in a situation that requires constant willpower. Eventually we give up, and when we do, it seems likely that there was some kind of fuel that was used up in the process.
Scientifically, this also seemed to be the case until recently. was seen as a pretty solid edifice to the idea that there is a bottleneck in the amount of willpower you can expend, and when it gets used up you succumb to whatever temptation you're facing.
However, Baumeister's work has also fallen victim to the replication crisis in psychology. Whether this is truly an invalidation of his theory, or the presence of statistical complications that go over my head, I think remains to be seen. For the moment at least, it appears that science doesn't have a definitive answer to the question of what is self-discipline.
Although less scientific, the concept of dovetails nicely with ego-depletion. The fundamental idea is that there are different stores of an abstract quantity of energy and that managing this resource, and not time management, is the key to productivity. This has also been a foundational idea in my own thinking on productivity and I've written in support of it quite often.
What if Self-Discipline Isn't a Resource?
I just got back from an intensive 10-day silent meditation retreat. Some of the experiences bordered on insanity, and perhaps I'll share more about them when I've had time to process them. But one of the aspects of my life it shed light on was this concept of self-discipline.
Going on a meditation retreat is like becoming a monk for ten days, except instead of even the duties one would have as a monk, there's just more meditating. There's no speaking, no phones, no computers, no reading, no writing, no exercising and no sex. Instead you wake up at 4am, meditate for ten hours per day, with short breaks to stretch your legs and eat two meals a day.
The outside-view of the meditation retreat is that all of the worldly pleasures you're giving up will be the temptation. That you'll be tempted to speak, want to eat in the evening, crave checking your phone or do something fun.
I can't speak for others' experience, but in my case, none of that was hard at all. The thing that's hard about a meditation retreat is the meditating. Because even when you have nothing to do, there's still a lot you can do: you can look around at things, walk around a little, scratch your face, change your position. When you meditate, even those minor pleasures are discouraged. Instead you're to sit as still as possible and focus on some object of meditation, say your breath or sensations in your body.
