Struggling to Have Discipline? Try These Habits

The first thing that comes to mind after hearing the word discipline is armed forces and their effectiveness in whatever they do.

Discipline comes when some action is repeated without interruptions and regardless of whether you want to do it or not. It's crucial because there is no consistency without discipline.

Just like armed forces, if you put yourself in a stimulating environment for discipline and train yourself every day, you will reach your peak effectiveness through self-discipline.

Since the pandemic started, many of us have had to work from home, and some are still doing so. Having self-discipline is more crucial than ever because you want to be productive at work and maintain a personal life. The line between personal and professional life has blurred over the past few years, especially in the last year and a half.

Without discipline, the chances of giving up increase drastically. Aware or not, the natural course of life heads towards chaos, and you need discipline to fight back.

But the question remains: How do you develop discipline? The perfect answer remains elusive. However, I can tell you that it's a trial and error approach; whatever might work for you might not work for someone else.

It's also worth remembering that discipline doesn't come overnight; you embody it gradually over a period of time. Also, it takes an instant to lose all discipline, but if you focus on habits that bring it, it's bound to stick with you for a long time. Here's a list of the habits I've developed to bring discipline into my life.

Journal

This is a very easy way to make yourself more disciplined. There are a lot of ways to journal; you can select your preferred way. The goal is to sit down every day and commit yourself to writing (or whatever you prefer to do), even if you don't have much to say. You can decide if you want to journal in the morning or in the evening, but whatever time you decide, stick with it.

I maintain two journals:

• 5-Minute Journal

This journal mainly focuses on the gratitude aspect of my life. I write whatever I'm grateful for, what I want to achieve that day, and how my previous day went. It provides a two-fold benefit:

1. I get to journal and be disciplined

2. I get to reflect daily on how my life is going

• Morning Pages

This journal, in a nutshell, is all about putting unfiltered raw thoughts on paper - regardless of whether they make sense or not - until there is nothing left lingering in my head.

Sleep Matters

You should have a somewhat fixed sleeping cycle. Try to wake up and go to bed at the same time every day. This allows the body to form a natural rhythm that helps maintain a proper distribution of hormones in the body, which, in turn, reduces tiredness, sleepiness, or exhaustion and improves your mood and energy levels.

Recognize Enjoyable and Unenjoyable Tasks

Figure out things you enjoy and don't enjoy doing, and recognize your most productive and least productive times of the day. Perform tasks that don't require much mental energy, such as checking emails, during least productive times, and engage your mental faculties more for creative or office work in your most productive times.

To take this a step further, you can also start doing your tasks at the same time and same place to create muscle and mind memory.

When it comes to discipline, the goal is to reach a point where you don't have to think before doing anything. It should become second nature to you.

Example: I have two desks in my room. I use one for university work, and I use the other for writing blogs, a book, etc. I never switch their roles.

The way this works is, whenever I'm sitting at my writing desk, my brain is aware that this desk is analogous to going into creative mode. And when I sit at my university desk, my brain is aware that I'm about to do some analytical work.

The above example incorporates what James Clear calls environment design in his book Atomic Habits. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to design their life to be lived at its full potential, starting on an atomic level.

This article barely scratched the surface of what is possible to do to bring discipline, but I wanted to provide very straightforward and actionable advice that can be implemented without being overwhelming.

Thank you for reading.