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If you could take a magic pill that made you disciplined, would you?
1 in 3 college kids say "fuck yes". That's the proportion of university students who admit to using stimulants to help study (warning: PDF). Chief among those stimulants is, of course, Adderall.
For the few who've never heard of it, Adderall is an amphetamine-based prescription drug officially used in the treatment of ADHD and narcolepsy, widely employed off-label to aid with concentration and focus. Adderall works by stimulating the release of dopamine and related neurotransmitters. Their effect is to activate the brain's reward system, which is the mechanism responsible for making you want to keep doing whatever it is that you're doing. The reward system is normally activated by actions which we have evolved to instinctual recognize as advantageous: eating, drinking, fucking, taking care of your kids.
Adderall (and amphetamines in general) forces the reward system to activate on command, making you interested in any arbitrary activity. In other words, it hacks your brain chemistry to make you want to perform any arbitrary task, giving you artificial discipline. The effect is potent and general: the task doesn't have to be actually useful or sensible for you to want to do it, on Adderall; amphetamine users could be put to digging a trench and they'd work away at it as if that were the most interesting project they've ever worked at.
Unfortunately, taking amphetamines is not a sustainable alternative to developing real discipline. They have a host of side effects, tend to be addictive and are heavily restricted in most jurisdictions. I do not recommend using them, and avoid them myself. But they do provide us with key insight into how humans operate: on a base, animal level, we act because our neurochemistry tells us to.
The question then becomes: can we hack our neurochemistry to facilitate discipline, without resorting to dangerous drugs? the answer, as is obvious from the title of this thread, is yes, yes we can.
The method is completely outrageous, flying right in the face of TRP orthodoxy, because it's based on your fee-fees: we're going to work with your emotional response to make you hack your own brain chemistry and make you disciplined. It's not that hard, it's not stoic, it doesn't take heroic willpower. Ready? let's go.
Once in a while, any undisciplined person has a good day. On that day, the undisciplined person manages, by some fortunate alignment of the planets, to not be a lazy asshole and actually do what he should have. At the end of that day, the undisciplined person goes to bed with a smile on his face, an incredible feeling of relief washing over him, and the sad thought in his mind: "if only I could do this every day".
Undisciplined people often fantasize about what their life would be like if they were disciplined. It goes a little like this: they would wake up at an early hour and immediately get out of bed to start their morning. They would do some stretching or workout, take a shower (washing all the nooks and crannies, even the soles of their feet), shave to perfection, make a good breakfast, get dressed in their best, and stroll out with a smile on their face. They would dedicate themselves to their craft with attention and precision, taking opportunities throughout their day to network and socialize with colleagues, especially over lunch when they would eat a nutritious, healthy meal. On leaving work, they would promptly attend to whichever activity the evening calls for, be that buying groceries, going to the gym or engaging in a hobby, before enjoying the social pastime of the day, be that with friends or a woman. They would go to bed (which they had neatly made in the morning, forgot to mention that) early, guaranteeing them enough sleep to wake up refreshed the next day.
The funny thing is that you can have all of this and it's neither hard nor complicated, provided you know how. I myself have sought after this elusive trick all my life, resorting to draconian time-management and self-motivation measures to deal with my chronic procrastination: pomodoro timers, app lockouts, habit trackers, even a commitment system where I would give money to a trusted person and ask them to forfeit it if I didn't complete an assigned task by a certain time. Every day was a constant struggle against myself to do what I needed to do. So how did I get out?
The answer came to me after a particularly bad day, when I had failed across the board to be a functional human being. I had gotten to bed too late the night before, woken up terribly tired, eaten like shit, been an asocial time waster on the job, and bailed on a social engagement to stay home and read reddit. I had even failed to brush my teeth, and felt in no mood to do anything except wallow in self-pity at my continued struggles with discipline. I had tried every method in the book(s) and I still failed.
A serendipitous thought struck me, a thought so simple as to sound simplistic: "just do it because it makes you feel better". Brush your teeth? go do that, you'll enjoy the freshness and won't feel like a disgusting slob. Make your bed? do it, you'll thank yourself later tonight when you're not fighting with the covers and getting cold because half of them have inexplicably fallen off. Do your evening stretches (I had at least managed to work out, and had long since tried to do regular evening stretches to cut down on next-day soreness), you'll feel much better sleeping and waking up tomorrow. You get the idea.
Surprisingly, this simplistic method worked. I got off my ass, brushed my teeth, made my bed, did my stretches and went to sleep. Of course, all of the advantages that I had foreseen materialized, and I slept far better than I would have otherwise. In the morning, still grasping some tendrils of the idea from the night before, I encouraged myself to go through my proper morning routine (which I typically skipped through in laziness), thinking each time about how much better I would feel for having gone through each step. At work, I dispensed with my array of timers and concentrated how much better I would feel if I didn't have to work through lunch break because I had lazed off during the morning. I found myself finishing my allotted tasks and even completing some leftovers from the previous day, all well before mid-day. And so on during the day... you get the idea.
Awestruck with how such a simple system apparently could work better than the plethora of devices I had previously used, I kept experimenting with it, at the same time doing research on whether anything like this had been tried before. It had indeed, in a sense, been tried in certain psychological studies, where people were induced to visualize their rewards to stimulate them into completing a non-rewarding task; but those results were left there as ink on a page, never developing into a proper method (at least not to my knowledge). So I did my best, refining my observations and experiences into what I'm presenting to you now.
The key to this method is hacking your reward system to trigger whenever you need it to. On its own, it would only activate at the moment you actually get the reward: not when you're dieting but weeks later when you look at yourself in the mirror, not when you're working but when you've finished and realize you now have guilt-free free time, not when you're crashing doing sets but when you're plowing that tight pussy thanks to all the experience you've accumulated.
We need to back-shift your reward response to the moment when you need to act. How? by consciously evoking the feelings of relief, pride, pleasure, self-respect, satisfaction etc of completing the task. Remember earlier, when I talked about how every undisciplined person has a good day once in a while? use that feeling as a reference point. Tell yourself: "do this because you'll feel X" and summon clearly, in your mind and in your body, the specific feeling of reward for that activity.
In my experimentation, there are two main groups of reward-feelings you can use:
My experience suggests that the first category is easier to think of (anyone can immediately see the practical reward of a sensible activity), but harder to concretely evoke and less potent; the second type occurs to you with more difficulty (undisciplined people are rarely used to taking pride in their actions), but once it does it's far more potent in actually stimulating you to action.
That sounds too good to be true
I agree, but that doesn't erase the fact that it works. It's the system I've been living on for the past few months, and it has not only made it much easier psychologically to manage myself, it has led to practical improvements in various areas of my life where I had lagged behind due to low discipline. The theoretical foundation is also sound.
But it's feel-good bullshit
No, it isn't. I know why you think it is: it works by manipulating positive feelings. But the key difference is that feel-good bullshit manipulates completely unwarranted positive feelings to make you forget about your shitty situation and convince you everything's fine. Here we do the complete opposite: we start by acknowledging that everything is not fine, that there's a specific course of action that you should take to fix it, and use the knowledge that fixing it will make you feel better to spur you into action. We cut through all the sophistication and high-minded thinking and go straight to your most primitive hindbrain.
This psychological trickery is simply a reinforcement of the natural mechanisms that are the basis of delayed gratification behavior. The beaver doesn't build the dam because it knows through rationality and planning that it will create a useful refuge, but because instinct has programmed it to feel good while building a dam. When a dog performs a difficult series of tricks for you, it's not because he has a complex rational understanding of your psychology and knows you'll reward him, it's because you've conditioned him to feel anticipation and eagerness while he's performing the tricks, which is why he performs them even when there isn't an actual food reward.
We are not so far from these animals, and our problem with discipline stems, in my opinion, largely from the fact that we need to engage in so much more delayed-gratification behavior than we evolved for, in situations we definitely didn't evolve for, with rewards shifted forward in time much further out than we evolved for. But the mechanism is still there, it can still be exploited, and I believe that is precisely what disciplinarian systems do: by dispensing prizes (praise, rewards) and punishments (push-ups, pain, shame), they condition people to associate positive feelings (pride, relief, ambition) with necessary activities, enabling them to perform them in a disciplined manner. What we do here, in the evident absence of disciplinarians doing it for us, is to condition ourselves manually.
There is much more that I would like to say about this topic, but this post is already long enough. A future topic of discussion that I will almost certainly write on will be the evolutionary origin of discipline and how looking into it can help us further understand our own mental mechanisms.
For every 100 dollars a man makes, 77 articles are published on bullshit statistics showing how women are oh so underpaid. If you've spent any time around TRP at all, you must have seen a dozen threads about it.
What you probably don't know, because there's a veritable dearth of articles published on it, is that there is actually a gender gap: the tax gap. Men, you'll be shocked to know, pay a massively disproportionate amount of taxes compared to women. But more than that, men pay a massively disproportionate amount of taxescompared to what they get back in government spending.
The data I'll use comes from a New Zealand study [PDF warning]. That's not because I'm a Kiwi but because, very unsurprisingly, gender tax gap studies are very hard to come by, due to how incredibly un-PC their conclusions are. I could find the raw data for the United States and my home country, but no elaboration as thoughrough as the one I'm going to present. I invite you to be as skeptical as you feel like and verify these conclusions for your country if you like.
So, first item:
This graph is pretty self-explanatory: at every point in his life, the average man will pay more tax than the average woman of the same age. In fact, from age 24 until age 65 (i.e. during the average graduate's working lifetime), the average man will pay more tax than the average woman in any age group. Only before beginning to work and after retirement are men surpassed in tax paid, and only by working women.
On to the next:
As you can see, once men hit graduate working age they pay more into the system than they get back, and only revert to taking out more when they hit retirement. Women, on the other hand, take out more than they put in all their lives, except for the 45-65 period (i.e. after they've stopped having and caring for young children and before retirement). Also, the net contributions by men are much larger than those by women: a 30-year-old man will on average give an average annual net contribution higher than a typical woman in any age group.
And for item three:
Those two decades of net positive contributions by women mentioned above do not come close to repaying all the tax money spent on a woman: on average, there's no point in a Kiwi woman's life when she'll be in the black towards her country. The average man, instead, pays his dues by age 40, and stays in the black unless he lives to be 85+, in which case he will be a little in the red. Still, even those men will cost a net cumulative loss of about $10,000; by the same age, a woman will have cost state coffers fifteen times as much.
Conclusions
I'll note that this was probably always the case throughout modern history; the difference between now and 50 years ago is that today men are no longer socially and institutionally recognized and rewarded for their larger role in sustaining the community, and are in fact berated and accused of discrimination even though they work more and contribute more than women.
