Principles for living
Discipline: practising before it is needed
In shortWhat is practised a little and often becomes the expected thing, and stops needing willpower.
The idea
The Stoics spoke of askesis, daily training. From the point of view of the predictive brain, discipline is turning something into a prediction so often repeated that it no longer needs willpower. What is practised regularly, in small doses, becomes the most likely thing to happen when the day is hard. Discipline does not live on big moments of effort; it lives on what is done when no one is watching and nothing is at stake.
What to try
- Choose one small practice and do it every day, at the same time, for weeks.
- Start below what the person can manage, so that failing is rare.
- Keep a record of days done, and value regularity over size.
The common mistake
Confusing discipline with harshness or punishment; what is practised out of fear tends to be avoided when no one is enforcing it.
Want to know more?
Start here
Short, plain pieces by the researchers and good writers.
Books
How memory and thinking work, and what that changes in teaching and studying.
See on Amazon ›Amazon links are affiliate links: if you buy, Bounded Uncertainty receives a small commission at no cost to you.
The science behind itHow strong the evidence is, the model, videos and references.
How strong the evidence is
Well established Many studies, with results that repeat.
Habits form through repetition in a stable context and come to be cued by it (Wood and Rünger, 2016); in active inference they become precise priors over policies (FitzGerald et al., 2014). Lally et al. (2010) found that the time for a behaviour to become automatic varied widely between people (18 to 254 days, median 66), and that missing a single day did not harm the process. This supports small, regular practices, tolerance of occasional misses and attention to context. Discipline, understood this way, lowers the cost of deciding in the hard moment because the policy already has high precision.
References
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.
- Wood, W., & Rünger, D. (2016). Psychology of habit. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 289–314.
- FitzGerald, T. H. B., Dolan, R. J., & Friston, K. J. (2014). Model averaging, optimal inference, and habit formation. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 457.
Found this useful? Buy Ricardo a coffee