Do you lack self discipline?

If you’ve ever tried to break or make a new habit you know how challenging it can feel. The first couple of days you are motivated and excited, but slowly as time passes your old habits just seem to creep back into your routine.

But why? Why, even though I actively want something different for myself, old routines find their way back? Oftentimes we start to believe the story we tell ourselves. I wasn't strong enough to resist that urge for a cookie. I just don’t have enough self-discipline. I’m not disciplined enough to work out every day.

But what if I were to tell you that’s not entirely true. I’m going to share with you two key concepts in understanding why self-discipline is not the reason your attempt at new habits fails.

Environment. Environment. Environment.

If you can control your environment you can control the type of situations you will be put into. The people who seem to have the most self-discipline when it comes to things like exercise, healthy eating, and other useful habits are just masters of their environment.

Do you want to exercise more? Create an environment that allows exercise to be easily accessible. Leave your running sneakers by the front door to remind yourself to run.

Want to read more? Leave a book by your bedside table to make getting in 10 pages before bed easy.

Want to spend less time on your phone? Keep it in a different room while you are working or studying.

Want to eat less junk food? Keep healthy foods in the house and don’t bring unhealthy ones home!

If you can create an environment that is favorable to the habits you want to build or break you will be setting yourself up for success. Now, this doesn’t mean you don’t need any willpower just because you’ve set out an ideal environment. You will still need to take that next step and put the sneakers on once you see them, but at least you are already one step closer because you’ve set yourself up with a successful environment.

The next important concept is understanding how habits work in our brains. Habits are an evolutionary miracle. Over time, we were able to systemize certain behaviors that are favorable to us.

What this means is that as time goes on and we develop a habit, we require less and less conscious thought to perform these tasks. Daily activities such as eating, brushing your teeth, turning the lights on, and other useful tasks become automatic. We no longer have to waste conscious energy deciding whether or not to perform these tasks, because they have become routine.

Now, this is both a blessing and a curse. For something useful like brushing your teeth, it’s awesome to have that habit. But something like having a candy bar after dinner is not so great.

What’s important to understand is that when these habits are formed we develop deep grooves in our brain known as pathways. The more frequently you choose a certain set of behaviors in a certain pathway, the easier that pathway becomes to travel down. Much like a real path in a forest, at first, there might be a tall brush when you walk through, but as you continue to take the same path it becomes flatter and easier to travel through.

This is just like our brain’s pathways. Thankfully our brains are also known as neural plastic. What this means is that even if you’ve created a deep neural pathway, you can always change it. Each time you choose an alternative behavior you begin to weaken the old pathway and strengthen a new one.

For example, each time you choose to indulge in a cookie after dinner you are reenforcing that brain pathway, and therefore making it easier and easier for you to continue that behavior. But each time you choose to brew yourself a cup of tea instead, you are strengthening a new pathway and simultaneously weakening that old pathway to the cookie.

This is important to recognize because creating new habits is not just about self-discipline, it’s about strengthening new pathways and abandoning old ones. Once you can distinguish the desire to fall into an old pathway as just a default brain response and not a personal lack of self-discipline, it allows you to consciously take control of that behavior.