Self-discipline lies in the space between stimulus and response.
A lack of self-control had me feeling trapped—like I had zero freedom to live out my best life. Things completely changed once I internalized and applied this quote: Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response and gain our freedom.
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Have you ever stopped to question why when, say there’s a big bag of chips open in the kitchen pantry, you find yourself repeatedly moseying over on autopilot? Have you ever really questioned that behavior? Gotten down to the root cause?
We tend to joke about such a things. “I literally have zero self-control or willpower; if there’s a bag of chips open, I’ll kill it in a day despite any promise I made to ration it for the week.”
Fine, so you avoid buying family-sized bags of chips—gotta just stick to the dang perimeter when I shop at the grocery store—but what about all your other vices which can’t be so easily avoided? This is where things get less jokey as a workable solution evades us.
Let's get back to the original question. When we procrastinate; when we waste hours and hours on Reddit or YouTube despite knowing we’re screwing ourselves over, what do we tell ourselves? What do assume is the root cause of our dreadfully lousy actions?
It’s all on us. It's on our lack of self-control and self-discipline. It's on our non-existing motivation and drive. We have some deficiency—we’re somehow broken, lacking some basic inner quality that seemingly every other functional human was born with.
I wish I could tell you it’s not your fault, because it is. Actually, that’s only half correct because here is the biggest life truth that—once internalized, once applied—changes everything.
Unbeknownst to you, the concept of 'you', who ‘you’ are, is comprised of two separate entities.
First, there’s the Physical self. It's composed of your body and it's spongy brain kept safe and warm in a hard skull. This organ, with it’s neuro-wiring and billions of chemical squirting cells, works to influence your behavior with the sole purpose of you surviving and hopefully replicating.
And there’s the Observing Self; the ‘you’ that doesn’t exist with a physical dimension, but who can, nonetheless, observe.
I feel like I’m about to lose you, so let’s use an example. It’ll seem ridiculous at first, but it’ll make it crystal clear what the heck I’m talking about. And this ain’t a philosophical lecture, so straight after we'll get to where this gets practical; where and how this can be applied to yield self-discipline.
Ok. I want you to say out loud (or whisper) the phrase: “there is a goat in the yard”.
Repeat it a few times… there is a goat in the yard,there is a goat in the yard,there is a goat in the yard…
Now, stop saying out loud, but keep repeating it in your head… there is a goat in the yard, there is a goat in the yard, there is a goat in the yard…
Keep going. See if you can observe those words. ‘Look’ at them, point your attention to it as if there was a Bluetooth speaker behind you harping out those same words on loop.
Boom. That right there was the two parts of ‘you’ at play. The Physical Self was physically active, as in millions of neurons were fired so that those mental ‘sounds’ could be made. There’s nothing spiritual or metaphysical about this; a scientist could have probed your brain and mapped out the exact sequence of events that were needed to produce that thought.
The 'you' observing all that, the thing removed from it, witnessing the mental sound, that was the Observing Self.
Here’s the kicker. The Physical Self is, and only is, responsible for all your ‘willpower failings’. Not the real you, not the Observing Self.
You see, the Physical Self... is an idiot. It still thinks it's the year 72 000 BC. It still thinks we're all somewhere in the wild Savanna's of Africa where food is extremely scarce and threats are coming at you from every angle. So the Physical Self does stuff—literally, it secrets chemicals like dopamine—all with the intent to help you survive in a world we've long ago abandoned.
For example, you eat tasty chips on autopilot because they contain carbohydrate. Where/when the brain evolved, carbs were ridiculously rare and available temporarily (fruiting plants are seasonal). So when you taste some, it triggers an alarm that announces, “Hey! It’s harvest time!! Go go go! Eat as much as possible before the source dries up; more than we need right now so that we can store the excess glucose in some fat cells to have a chance at making it through the long, cold winter.” But the winter never comes. There never was a reason for us to evolve a stopping mechanism; so when our species was thrown into a new era of abundant and cheap starchy foods, the obesity epidemic was the inevitable outcome.
Then there's social media. You peruse social media on autopilot because by thumbing through images of people displaying their fabulous lifestyles, your brain associates yourselves with them. It doesn’t know what a ‘screen’ is, it just takes in visual data and thinks you are there with them; like you are part of their entourage. And being part of an in-group of high status people would be awesome for survival, so we evolved to crave and seek more of it constantly. The brain doesn’t know it’s all fake; that it’s all vicarious.
The same thing goes for porn. I could go on with countless examples but the point I'm making is that all your irrational behavior; all your rationalizing, procrastination and binging; all these things are orchestrated by the Physical Self doing what it thinks it's supposed to do.
But we forget that. Or we don't want to hear it. Instead we blame the core of ourselves, we blame the Observing Self.
So we all have some ridiculously outdated wiring aiming at influencing out behavior, thinking it's ensuring our survival, when really it's making us sick and miserable. So how do we get it to stop?
There is nothing we can do directly to make it stop. But we can give it space. As Steven Covey writes:
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
This is how I work that quote in my day to day life:
At some point in my day I'll get a craving or an impulse to check Reddit. When that happens, I stop. I sit there and I do what I can to just observe the impulse. I there is a goat in my yard the shit out of it until I'm completely detached and just watching it without judgement. Next, with the 10 000 watt lightbulb of awareness, I scrutinize it and question it from every angle.
99 times out of 100, I end up easily rejecting it. I know too much. I know where these impulses are coming from. I know it's just faulty programming, so I just don't trust it. I almost never trust these impulses. I hear the rationalizations and excuses and I call them lies. Manipulations. Trickery.
To be clear, sometimes I forget. Sometimes I still act on impulse. Literally, as I write this, not a couple hours ago I was scrolling through Reddit rather than paying attention at a work meeting. Autopilot is still autopilot and in that periods I was mindless, as in my Observing Self was dissolved into the experience. It happens.
But still, when I catch myself, it's becoming more and more of a habit to detach and take a step back (and I have set up numerous reminders to 'plug into the present moment'). I am able to be compassionate with myself when I falter; to remind myself that I have a brain that simply evolved for a totally different environment, so it did what it was supposed to do (but it's still an idiot).
I can even step back and away from the negative emotions that swells when I falter, and still, I do my best not to identify with all that. I look at those emotions and I say, ah, there it is… the feeling of stress and regret for procrastinating. Thanks ol’ brain for secreting all that cortisol like a sabretooth tiger is behind me, but it’s actually not needed. And I wait until it all dissipates. And it always dissipates.
So again:
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Be well,
- Simon ㋛