CULTIVATING SELF-DISCIPLINE – PART I

A great place to start is by acknowledging your weaknesses. We all have them. Don’t pretend they don’t exist or minimize their negative impact on your life.

If your weakness is eating late at night or having dessert every day, write it down. Then establish a clear plan, action steps or a strategy. This will help you eliminate your bad habits and to get you through times when you are faced with your particular weakness.

Part of your plan may involve removing the temptations that you find difficult to overcome. You could write down a strategy like texting or calling a good friend when you’re tempted to help talk you through the moment of weakness.

Make the choice to not watch tv. Rather, pick up a book or go for a walk to remove yourself from the moment. Fill your mind with something other than that thought. Get involved in a hobby, work puzzles, or engage in anything that will interrupt your present pattern you have developed. It’s all about interrupting our patterns to break old habits and creating new patterns to establish new habits.

The key is having a strategy ahead of time so that you know what to do when temptation hits. Sitting on the couch fighting a mental battle is never going to sustain you and create the self-discipline you are looking to gain. It requires action – even in small increments… especially in small increments. It’s the little changes that make it doable and add up with time. You can always implement more as you go, but you have to start somewhere, no matter how small.

Those who are self-disciplined practice tolerating what we call emotional discomfort. It’s normal to want to avoid pain or discomfort, but trying to eliminate all discomfort will only reinforce that you can’t handle distress at all. The truth is that we can usually stand a lot more discomfort than we think we can.

It’s actually very helpful to even allow yourself to practice experiencing uncomfortable emotions like boredom, frustration or loneliness in order to increase your tolerance to the negative emotions you might experience as you increase your self-discipline.

One area in which food temptation might occur is when we have eaten dinner and then begin to feel hungry as we stay up later into the evening. We’ve had all the nutrition our body requires, but on occasion we may feel we are hungry. The first thing we need to do when this happens is to drink water. Oftentimes, our body is telling us we need water, not food. If your mind is still telling you that you are hungry after drinking water, assess whether or not you are really hungry or just want to eat because you have developed that habit. Eating when you are not hungry may be a habit that you have to redirect. It may be that your body has become used to you giving it something on a regular basis, so it now expects it.

We have often told our clients that one way to change a habit or pattern in our body is to actually embrace the discomfort. When you do this, you need to realize that your body is looking for food and that you now have a choice. You aren’t starving, but rather you are responding to a pattern you have established. If you allow that hunger to continue without eating, it will pass within 15-20 minutes.

Since there is no longer food in the stomach, your body has to tap into its fat stores for fuel. This is part of the process of becoming a fat burner vs. a sugar burner. Realize that this is a positive and not a negative. In other words, this is a very applicable aspect of self-discipline. You are actually training your body rather than allowing your body and emotions to dictate how it’s going to be.