Why Discipline and Motivation Aren’t Just On/Off Switches
Wish you could just flip a switch and suddenly feel motivated? Unfortunately, motivation and discipline don’t work like that—but here’s what does.
I’ve become more active on Threads in the last several weeks, and something that I see a lot of is making me a wee bit crazy. People will post that they’re lacking motivation, and are looking for help. Other people will comment (unhelpfully) something to the effect of: “you don’t need motivation, you need discipline.”
As if that’s a lever that you can easily pull. Our brains don’t work that way. If I’m lacking motivation to do something, I can’t suddenly fire up the discipline engine and be on my way. The issue with lack of motivation is that we literally aren’t motivated to do anything! We are sitting in a state where we’d rather exist or keep doing whatever else it is we’re doing (often like sitting on the couch, watching tv, playing games, sleeping, etc) vs doing the work that we want to do (running, exercising, starting a new project, replying to emails, cleaning the house).
Motivation is usually thanks to dopamine. Dopamine fires internally after we do something that is ‘rewarding’. The most powerful example of this is when we’re playing a slot machine, or a game that mimics a slot machine. We keep pressing a button or pulling a lever hoping for a reward (points or dollars). We don’t always get it, but we do get it randomly sometimes. When we do, our brain fires off some dopamine to make us feel good/happy about receiving the reward, and more importantly, it encourages us to keep going. It wants to keep getting that happy moment! We begin to feel hooked to the process.
Think about how many things in our life are programmed that way — when we are swiping on Tinder, our thumbs keep swiping happily away until we get the ‘you got a match!’ page which comes in animated and is all happy looking. We never know when we’re going to get it, but we keep swiping hoping we will. On Instagram and TikTok, we keep swiping up hoping to find a video that makes us laugh or cry or elicit some kind of feeling that our brain enjoys or is consumed by. There are now endless ways for us to chase dopamine hits, and unfortunately, very few of them are productive or healthy. They usually trap us in some comfortable state. We’ve become the rats in the experiment pressing the button over and over hoping for a food pellet to come down.
With all that in mind, it’s no wonder that we often lack motivation to do something hard like going for a run. Stepping outside our comfort zone (or quite literally our comfortable bed) requires a HUGE amount of effort biologically and emotionally speaking:
We have to get up / get vertical. Standing is way harder than lying down.
We have to get dressed to go for a run.
We (should!) warm-up and get ready to use our muscles. Muscles need to wake up and become engaged. Our heart rate needs to increase to help support this.
We have to start a workout on our watch or device (because we want to know the results, right?? and possibly chase some kudos on Strava?)
We have to either step outside our door and start our run, or we have to get in a car and drive somewhere to run. And it might be very cold or very hot or very humid or snowing or raining or any other number of uncomfortable things outside. That may require us to run on a treadmill which we may not enjoy, or even have access to.
All of this is playing out in our brain when we’re considering our motivation to run. Pretty much none of it is rewarding, and none of it will give us a dopamine hit if we’re approaching it as a “do all these things first, and then maybe we’ll feel good afterwards”. It’s a ton of steps! Instead, our brains are programmed to chase it faster — with things like social media or food or television.
Telling someone to ‘be disciplined’ in these moments isn’t helpful. It’s not going to solve the issue that our brains have already done the math and have decided this is a net negative for us. All that movement and energy at a small shot of feeling good. No thank you! Of course we choose staying in bed, or letting autoplay on Netflix start the next episode of something.
Discipline is like a mental muscle. We gotta build it up. It’s learned over time. And even when we’re convinced we’re the most disciplined person of all time, we will still struggle with getting ourselves up and out the door for all the reasons above. Discipline is training a new part of our brain to do things without reward. It’s a contract we sign with ourselves to be uncomfortable, and to deal with the crappy feelings anyway. But I promise it’s not something that happens overnight or instantly from a Threads post.
What’s the better way then, to approach the situation when you want to go for a run but are finding it hard to do so?
I have found there to be two approaches that help me out.
Shrink the task considerably. Instead of trying to convince myself to go for a run, I convince myself to at least get out of bed. If I can do that, then I convince myself to pull out my workout clothes and lay them on the bed. Once I’ve done that, I convince myself to at least put on my shirt or my shorts/leggings. Etc etc. I keep shrinking the task required so that I eventually heading out the door seems easy enough to do because I’ve already done everything before! This is a bit of a bio hack, because I’m potentially creating tiny little dopamine hits off completing easy tasks, and being rewarded to keep going.
If that doesn’t work for whatever reason, because maybe you really can’t even motivate yourself out of a warm bed, then sit with that feeling. I find that journaling is helpful here. I explore my feelings, why I’m not feeling up for it, and why I’d rather sit in bed today. I explore how I might feel if I do go, vs. if I don’t go. If you don’t want to journal or can’t find a pen/paper/Notes app to do this, force yourself to have this conversation in your mind using full sentences. I think the magic of writing is that it forces your brain to slow down and coalesce thoughts into complete sentences (something that is difficult to do! Our brains move fast). When you think with complete sentences, it acts like journaling or talking to someone else. It requires you to go deeper, and organize everything. You may be surprised at what you feel.
With strategy #2, if you arrive at the conclusion that today you genuinely aren’t feeling it, and you need the rest, that’s great! As long as you’re comfortable with that decision, that’s what matters in my opinion. There are many days when I genuinely don’t feel like running, and I allow myself to not run. That becomes the right choice that day, and I have no regrets about it. But more often than not, when I’m not feeling motivated, my brain is just being difficult and tantrum-y, and I would regret skipping the run. I’m usually more than healthy enough, more than willing enough, but I am suffering from inertia to get moving. That’s when strategy #1 helps.
Again: discipline isn’t something that you just “use instead of motivation”. It’s built up. It gets easier, but it never gets easy.
Want more real talk on building motivation and discipline that lasts? Join us on the Super Awesome You podcast, where we unpack practical strategies to keep you inspired and on track. Listen now!