When Slowing Down Requires Discipline
There is a completely counterintuitive situation that happens when you’ve spent the majority of your time and energy becoming more disciplined, and it’s when slowing down and resting feels forced and unnatural.
When that happens, a new form of discipline is introduced, and it’s something that goes against everything you’ve considered discipline to be up until this point.
See, discipline is almost always equated with doing more. It’s gritting your teeth, keeping your head down and pushing through.
But do this long enough and eventually, you’ll run into a wall. This wall could mean getting injured from doing too much exercise, or being burnt out and no longer being effective at work.
Whatever it may be, no amount of ‘just keep going’ mindset will get you any further. From here, you’ll need to adjust your approach.
Adjusting can mean anything, but usually it’s doing the opposite of whatever has gotten you here, which, as it turns out, means less.
But you have to ask yourself why it is that you built such a strong form of willpower to begin with, what was the reason for building discipline?
The answer to that is pretty simple: to be effective. If you’re able to work even when you’re not up to it, you’ll have a higher chance of succeeding.
This is true, but it’s only true to the degree to which it works, as eventually, this approach causes more problems than it solves.
You needed discipline at the start; we probably all did. The time it takes to receive any form of gratification with most things makes it so. But at some point, you became exactly as disciplined as you ever needed to be, and instead of stopping there, you continued to work on the thing that produced such strong results, and you just kept going.
Becoming more disciplined worked out so well for you in the past that you started suffering from confirmation bias. You had tunnel vision on the power of discipline, whilst completely ignoring the warning signs that came along with it.
What To Do Now
From here, there’s only one real way of overcoming the hurdle, and that’s to re-align yourself with what you’re trying to achieve, come to terms with what’s killing your own progress, and to re-focus your energy on a new discipline.
This new discipline is to stop, slow down, and do less when necessary.
This is when you need to adjust your approach; this is when you need to slow down. Not because you no longer want the thing, but for the very reason that you do, and without pivoting, you’re reducing the chances of making it through.
It could mean resting an injury or putting in the boring and repetitive work of rehabbing it, or leaving your laptop at home when you go on vacation. You may not want to, but you need to.
Remember, the obstacle on the path becomes the path, and adjusting your approach is the best approach, regardless of how counterproductive it may seem.
No one likes to talk about this kind of discipline, because it sounds like a privileged problem. But doing what you hate is doing what you hate, regardless of what that may be.
If you’ve started dreading rest days or disliking the weekends, it might be time for you to start using that discipline in a new kind of way, the kind that forces you to do less.