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This is the second article in the Betterment series. Whereas in The Aimless Pursuit of Self-Improvement we looked at how to set yourself up for success in your goals through high-level mental strategies, in this article we dive into why some behaviors undermine our productivity and well-being and what to do about it.

A Word on Discipline

When we think of successful people, we attribute their productivity to different reasons. Maybe they are smart or otherwise talented. Maybe they inherited most of their wealth. Or maybe they’re simply really hard-working. While the first two reasons are clear enough, I have a bone to pick with the last one.

There is a weird contradiction with how we look at hard-work or discipline. On the one hand, it is popularized as a virtue that everybody automatically gains at birth, kind of like breathing. “America is the land of opportunity” basically means that anybody can become successful if they work hard, and is the reason why many aspiring immigrants come to the USA, myself included. It is cliché but it’s actually deeply ingrained in the American mentality. Therefore, you have no excuse for failure when something requires you to be disciplined — you simply have to turn it on and hustle and you’ll be a millionaire in no time!

On the other hand, discipline is deeply personal and attached to our self-worth. “How did she become so successful?” might be responded with “Well, she worked very hard,” and the conversation often ends there as if discipline were a reason you could not break down any further. In the rare cases when someone digs deeper, typical responses include “everybody in her family is a doctor or a lawyer so she has to keep up,” or “she has always been super competitive since high-school.” From this perspective, discipline seems very subjective.

How can discipline be both inherently present in all of us and at the same time require some dramatic life circumstance to bring forth? I believe that this conflicting duality is what makes many people feel inadequate about their own discipline, or lack thereof. When somebody fails to complete some 30-day training program, they can’t look at it objectively and say “discipline is a resource I don’t have right now, but let me brainstorm some ways to cultivate it.” Instead, we feel guilty for being unable to utilize this resource that apparently everybody else has unlimited access to. As a coping mechanism, we bury it in the back of our head and indulge in hedonistic pursuits like food, TV shows and cat memes to make us feel better.

As we will see later, these very “consolation prizes” we permit ourselves are in fact damaging the very willpower we wish to have. If you instead think objectively about discipline, you will see that it is NOT a resource freely available to anybody who just decides to use it. It is not only a muscle that needs constant activation to grow, but even the most mundane activities we engage in throughout the day affect how disciplined we are in our most important pursuits.

Before we jump into the details, I hope that we established that hard work and discipline can be improved and manipulated, and are NOT attached to your worth as a human being. Give yourself some grace. After all, if you’ve never run a marathon in your life and did not prepare for it, you shouldn’t feel too bad that you could not finish one on a whim. In the same manner, if your demanding life goals are marathons and discipline is your leg muscle, we might as well train that muscle first.

Example: College Student

You must be wondering by now how on earth this post’s title relates to our discussion so far. What I will try to demonstrate is that dopamine, or more precisely the reward circuit in our brain, is the oil that keeps the machine of discipline running. In fact, it is what motivates us to do many things in life, like being competitive, courting potential partners and so on.

Let’s look at how a typical college student might prepare for an exam:

1. Wake up and check your phone while still in bed to look at all the notifications that arrived overnight.
2. Grab some coffee while walking to the library.
3. Print out a ton of study materials and get determined to cover ALL of it.
4. Upon sitting down at a desk that smells vaguely of sweat, reply to texts and emails for the next 20 minutes.
5. Finally open your notes and spend 30 minutes looking them over.
6. Being pretty overwhelmed by the amount of ground to cover, open reddit or facebook just to “take a small break.”
7. An hour later, realize how much time was wasted and panic yourself into doing some exercises for 45 minutes.
8. Not even feeling very hungry, get lunch with some friends and go back to your desk.
9. The food coma sets in and the next 30 minutes of studying feel sluggish.
10. Go for another cup of coffee and respond to messages for another 15 minutes.
11. A couple more cycles of off-and-on studying later, go home mentally drained, disappointed with the amount of progress made and not even confident about the material that was covered.

I know this to be pretty accurate because I did this, as did many of my peers. One could say, “if only this student could sit still for a few hours and stop getting distracted, they’d get more stuff done,” and it would be true on so many levels. Here’s why.

Enter Dopamine

Our reptile brains are not adapted to the modern world filled with instant gratification of many kinds: social media approval, internet memes, porn a click away, junk food just around the corner, etc. What all these have in common is that they cause something called dopamine to be generated in our body. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that makes us feel pleasure. When we win the lottery, climax during sex, or take meth, dopamine is produced in large quantities in our brain.

However, too much of a good thing is bad. Consider these key symptoms of addiction:

1. Numbed pleasure response: everyday pleasures are felt less and less.
2. Hyper-sensitivity: we are very sensitive to the object of our addiction, and everything else pales in comparison.
3. Willpower erosion: we lose the ability to resist our craving for the addiction. [1]

These are all shared by an increasing number of addictions [2] and are each of them associated with structural changes in different brain regions. Do you see the snitch yet? Every like you get, every meme you see, every type of instant gratification we allow ourselves are slowly eroding our brains and turning them to mush. And it’s no wonder. When we keep giving our brains reward signals that it took our hunter/gatherer ancestors actual hard work and a long time to achieve, our brain thinks that we’ve reached an evolutional peak, so why be motivated to do anything anymore? In fact, I would argue that most of our society is suffering from a mild form of dopamine addiction.

We have grown to take it for granted that we must check our phones every 15 minutes and that there’s nothing wrong with that, but what we don’t realize is that we are doing the equivalent of constantly shooting heroin up our arm, and then we wonder why we can’t focus or be disciplined. Not only that, but these undeserved rewards are perfectly timed to sabotage progress in things that actually matter to us.

Armed with this information, let’s go back to our student and consider what’s wrong with such behavior.

• Using our phone in the morning is one of the worst things we can do for your brain. It has been shown to negatively impact our ability to prioritize tasks [3] and even to increase risk of depression. [4]
• Getting a dopamine hit from texting and social media after we just primed your brain to do an important task makes it think that the studying went well, so our attention for the rest of that session suffers.
• By constantly switching attention between a cognitively demanding task and other distractions, not only do we reinforce unproductive reward circuits, but because of something called context switching, our brain is constantly “warming up” over and over again. This is also what causes us to feel drained at the end of the day.
• Having trouble resisting the urge to check our phone, browse random websites, or do anything but the important task at hand gets worse and increases in frequency over repeated use.

The good news is that not all is lost. Our brains are malleable, even as we get older, and the damage can be reversed.

So what should we do about it?

It should be clear by now that before we fix our discipline, we must first fix our brains. The road ahead will be perilous and challenging. I suggest writing specific quantifiable goals and doing your best to stick to them. Give yourself grace and instead of beating yourself up over failures, objectively come up with improvements and iterate.

Here are some habits to get your reward circuit back in shape:

1. Don’t use your phone right after waking up or before bed. Charge the phone in a different room from where your bed is. When you wake up, get into a routine like making coffee or listening to the news. Your bed is made for resting (exceptions apply).
2. Reduce context switching by limiting how often you check DMs and emails to a few times a day. Group multiple small tasks into one session and work on long, cognitively demanding tasks for longer, uninterrupted periods. Try the pomodoro technique, then challenge yourself to push the working period out by 5 minutes from time to time.
3. Train your brain like a Pavlov Dog and only reward yourself when you want to reinforce that circuit. Do a (productive) trick, get a (dopamine) treat. However, instead of zapping yourself with electricity when you do something undesired, simply don’t reward that action with any reward and learn from it.
4. Practice meditation. Meditation is basically a bench press for your attention span. You clear your mind of other thoughts and focus on something mundane. Every full breath that you do without your mind wandering is one rep for your focus muscle! I find that >20 minute sessions using the Headspace app helped me improve focus, be mindful of how my body feels and reduce brain fog.
5. Avoid common dopamine pitfalls. Don’t brag to your friends about that gym subscription you bought before actually using the gym for a month. Don’t post stories to Insta about the book you just bought before actually reading it. Don’t EVER give in to internal arguments like “just this once.” That is a slippery slope and it’s never worth it. Worst case, compromise for something else. For example, if you really really want to check Facebook, clean up some stuff around your room and look outside your window instead.
6. Go on dopamine fasts. Spend a day or two without any screens AT ALL, and whatever else your poison might be. Above all, cut out porn use because all of the above negative effects are multiplied tenfold [citation needed] when you watch porn. Watch this amazing Ted talk called The Great Porn Experiment Coincidentally, all kinds of deprivation are good for you, and in my next article called holistic metabolism, we will look at how all kinds of deprivation are good for our health.

In Parting

Train your brain to have a healthier reward circuit, and you will start seeing longer maintained focus at the micro (more hours of focus) and macro (persevering on a month-long project) scales, reduce brain fog and stress, and start living in the moment. Only then will you see how accomplishing your goals becomes so much easier.

[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323459#psychological-symptoms

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5328289/

[3] https://www.elitedaily.com/p/is-it-bad-to-look-at-your-phone-right-when-you-wake-up-it-might-be-sabotaging-your-day-8437383

[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21281471/

12/23/2018: initial version

12/19/2020: complete rewrite, add citations