Discipline

The best way to re-introduce discipline into your life is raising the baseline. i.e. imagine a depressed person who struggles to brush their teeth, making it their goal to do it 7 days a week. Let’s say they fail on day 2. Now that failure could hurt a lot, “what? I couldn’t even make it past 2 days, why even try?” 

They could either take that failure wholly and quit entirely, or in a much healthier way, they could treat that ‘failure’ as their new baseline. They could tell themselves “okay, I can’t handle 7 right now, but at the very least I’m going to brush my teeth at least 2 times a week; I’ve proven I can handle two”. Eventually, 2 times a week will become easy enough that it will feel like breathing. At that point, 3 times a week will become their new baseline. And then they will try to do it at least 3 times a week until that becomes as easy as breathing. 

The whole point of a baseline is to make sure that even on your worst days, you can still hit your minimum. If you can do more, great! Anything more than your baseline is a bonus, but what’s most important is never going below the baseline. That’s why it needs to be easy enough for you to be consistent. Once hitting that minimum becomes as easy as breathing, you raise it. At least 3 times a week turns to 4 times a week; 4 turns to 5, and eventually, you’re at 7 times a week. 

Great discipline isn’t about the heights you reach, it’s about what you fall back on. How far down do you fall? The aim of the game is to raise the bar of what you fall back on ever so slightly until it’s a new comfort and eventually it’ll be as high as your goals. Never forget that discipline isn’t about raising the ceiling, it’s about raising the floor.

Going from 0 straight to 7 is too high a jump. 

“I have always liked going to the cinema”