We’ve all been there; you decide one day that you are fed up with the way things have been going. You promise yourself this time that things will change – except it doesn’t! We roll up our sleeves, resist all temptations to distract us from our goals, and begin working on ourselves – only to return to the same point days, weeks, or even a few months in the future. We acknowledge that we were trying to better our lives, but why is it so hard to commit to something for a long period of time? I know…it sucks.

The good news is that there are plenty of examples of people out there who do enforce consistent discipline in their lives on a regular basis. Because they are human just like you that means you also can acquire that same tenacity and commitment. All it takes is some awareness about what’s going on under the hood in your brain when you make decisions. This will unlock the secret to understanding how to become more disciplined for longer stretches of time – even allowing you to create habits that will allow you to bear the fruits of your persistent effort.

Your Brain Is In Constant Conflict

Think about what happens when you are in the process of deciding. The very word itself means that you choose one option out of several others. Whenever you’re in the process of choosing what you’re going to do next (for example, should I go the gym or stay home and watch TV?), your brain is going crazy with neurons firing left and right. The network of how these neurons are connected is incredibly complex. These neurons excite or suppress each other in unique patterns to recreate the experiences, memories, and information you have about everything you’ve ever lived, known, or experienced.

In the simple example of going to the gym or staying home to watch TV, your brain’s neurons will fire in a specific pattern all across your brain to draw information from all senses (taste, smell, vision, touch, and hearing), all memories, and all information of each choice. One unique pattern of excited neurons represents the experience of going to the gym and another, what it means to stay at home and watch TV. At this point you can feel yourself almost battling in your head, can’t you? Thinking about the discomfort you experience when you exercise, the sweat dripping down your face, and smelling that musty guy next to you who really needs a 30 minute shower – or what about sitting on that soft leather reclinable chair and watching Riverdale on Netflix, sipping on your rosé wine because you’re bougie. Without any other context, the choice is clear about what you should do.

Life is all about rewards

Except, we don’t always pick to stay home and watch TV. Why not? Why drive through traffic, spend an hour lifting heavy weights and consume all that energy for? Unlike other animals that spend their whole existence pursuing basic needs like food and water, those needs are generally easy for us to satisfy, which allows us to focus on greater needs like purpose, goal setting, and growth. This allows an interesting thing to happen in our brains, where we assign a “reward” value to every single decision that we make.

As we’re deciding what to do, the frontal cortex area of your brain is activated. Your mind starts simulating scenarios about what would happen in the future should you choose each option. If you’ve ever had to seriously weigh a decision, you can even consciously become aware of yourself thinking about all the consequences, the what-ifs, and the pros and cons of your options.

As you weigh the options, this “reward” value, which is a quantity of dopamine, gets released from the substantia nigra, and VTA (vental tegmental area) and flows through your frontal cortex, as shown by the image above, courtesy of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. The frontal cortex battles it out between the logical side of you that wants what’s best for you, and the emotional side of you that wants to relax and chill, and it uses this dopamine rush provoked by the mental simulations of the future to determine what will create a larger dopamine rush in the future. This means that your mind uses the same rush you get when you gamble, you feel love, or you feel accomplished because you finished a difficult task, to make decisions.

But that’s not it! There’s another component. Every option produces a physical response in your body – your hands start sweating, your heart pumps, you get a knot in your stomach – and your brain uses these responses to confirm or change the decision based on the dopamine that is produced from each option. As you’re thinking about the future, your brain is performing emotional state and body state checks of all the options you’re considering before making a choice – without your awareness. This explains why some people go with a decision because, “they have a good feeling about it,” or because they have a gut feeling. Your decisions definitely rely on your feelings more than you would expect. All of this about decision making is true, except for one caveat:

Nothing in the future beats the power of now

This is a fact that has stumped good decision making for as long as humans have been around: what is in front of us is always valued higher in our brains than it would if we were considering it as an option in the future.

Have you ever gone to the store and a salesperson approached you and said, “buy this right now! It’s 50% off if you purchase this today and only today!” Granted you have the money, this is a very enticing decision. You realize you do want the item, and if you were to purchase it in the future, you’d miss out on that 50% off special…but that money that you could save by not buying the item could get you closer to that vacation to Bali…oh, what should you do?

Instant gratification is the reason we make decisions in the moment that we may regret later. As said on this post, 6 Scientifically Proven Ways To Boost Your Self-Control, by Belle Beth Cooper of Fast Company, instant gratification “refers to the temptation, and resulting tendency, to forego a future benefit in order to obtain a less rewarding but more immediate benefit. If you are a person who would have taken the 50% off sale, don’t feel bad! Many people make the choice according to a statistic by Forbes that says that 70-80% of all retail transactions are discretionary, meaning that they are purchases that we want but don’t need.

The power of now is so powerful that it can throw all of our discipline out the window if we are oblivious to it. There’s debate about why we experience this phenomena. Some say it developed as an evolutionary advantage to make decisions that prioritize options in our sight for survival benefit – such as finding food out in the wild and consuming it immediately in our hunter-gatherer days. Others say the certainty of now beats any possibility of uncertainty of the future.

At this point it’s important to reflect on all that’s been said to find three key reasons why we make undisciplined choices. When we experience a lapse or lack of discipline:

1. The dopamine rush we get from future possibilities of our choices cause the emotional side of your frontal cortex to win over the logical side that wants what’s best for you.
2. You have a negative emotional reaction to the possibility of taking the more disciplined route.
3. You put yourself in the situation where it’s hard to remain disciplined because the easier, less-rewarding, or more comfortable option is already in front of you and would require little to no effort to realize.

Can we do anything about this?

WITH Dopamine

While our brains do use dopamine to aid in decision making, how does it come up with how much of it to release for each choice when running simulations about the future? What happens is that every time you decide to do something, the actual outcomes in the real world produces a precise amount of dopamine in your head that your brain remembers and uses in the future when it comes time to make a similar decision. This means that our minds are constantly getting feedback about our choices through the real world. This dopamine rush can grow or shrink over time based on real outcomes.

For example, let’s say you are choosing between hanging out with a friend you haven’t seen in a while or staying in to work on a personal project. Even though you think you’ll feel guilty about the loss of productivity by going out, you decide to go anyway since you haven’t seen this person in a while. After a couple of hours at the bar, you go home; on the car ride back, you realize how awesome it was to see your friend again, worthwhile of the hours of lost progress that you could’ve made on your project. Because neither yourself nor your brain expected this outcome, your brain makes a mental note of the increased dopamine rush you got from this decision and will use it next time you have to make a similar choice. This means that you are now more likely to catch up with friends in the future if you haven’t seen them in a while versus staying at home.

It’s important to note that the opposite can happen. If you hung out with your friend and all you could think about was how much you’d rather be working on your project, the lack of dopamine you’d get from that outcome would cause you to be less likely to hang out with friends in the future if you have work you need to do. The more consistent the response to an outcome, the more likely or unlikely you become to make that decision.

What we can do about this is manage our expectations with positive thoughts and attitudes. If you want to go to the gym, you have to believe that it is good for you and that it is what you want. If you want to stop engaging in toxic behavior, you must assign a negative value to it and really feel bad about engaging in that behavior. Your attitude and mindset towards a specific task and activity can really sway the amount of dopamine that you produce when you experience the consequence of a choice, and it all starts with your thoughts and feelings about something. Change that, and you can start steering your own mind in the right direction to become more disciplined and make better choices for yourself.

With Instant Gratification

To tackle instant gratification, we need to understand that decisions can almost make themselves when an option is available to us now. Making decisions that will benefit us in the long run is much easier to make when either the disciplined choice is available now, or when no options are available now – like deciding to work out because you’re already at the gym, drinking water because it’s right next to you versus getting up to get juice from the fridge, or setting the Screen Time option on your phone to limit social media consumption to 15 minutes, instead of deciding to stop consuming social media after 15 minutes with no Screen Time set or anything to hold you accountable.

Don’t get me wrong. Making the right decision in any situation is never impossible. However, it becomes a lot more difficult to do so when you feel the temptation of something because it’s right in front of you.

Something else we can do is to use the power of social pressure or creating a contract with ourselves to keep us more accountable – like paying a penalty when you don’t follow through with the best choice, or letting an accountability partner down by not being accountable. These things can really motivate you to remain discipline when it gets tough otherwise.

In summary, let’s create some simple tips to remember to become more disciplined:

1. Foster a positive mindset that views disciplined choices favorably, and firmly believe that it is what you need. After you make disciplined choices, reflect on the positive experiences you’ve felt to be more likely to make that decision in the future.
2. Understand the power of now. Put yourself in the environments that will make you choose the better option in the moment, or prepare yourself in advance by making decisions for your future self now, so you don’t have to make the same decision in the future when it’s more difficult to be disciplined.
3. Your emotions play a huge part even if you are a very logical person. Know that whether you’re aware of it or not, your emotions can imperceptibly tip your decision making one way or another. To combat this, harbor positive emotions towards fulfilling and challenging tasks that require discipline, and attribute negative emotions to unhealthy or unproductive activities with your thoughts.

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