You have probably pulled an all-nighter before. Not sleeping for one night is not that difficult. Especially if there are deadlines and/or drugs involved.
What’s difficult are the second and third and fourth nights. Extreme sleep deprivation is a crash course on how fragile our mind actually is. By day three, you will start falling asleep standing up. You will doze while walking down the street in broad daylight. You forget basic facts like your mother’s name or whether you had eaten that day, or—fuck, what day is it?
By day four you become delirious, imagining that people are speaking to you when they’re not, believing that you’re writing an email when you’re not, and then discovering that you don’t even remember who you were supposed to be emailing. I used to walk in circles around my living room for an hour, just to keep myself awake. When nap time came, I would crash, falling unconscious instantaneously, and proceed to have intense, fucked up dreams that seemed like they lasted for five hours. Then, 20 minutes later, my alarm would wake me up, where I would spend the next three hours and change desperately lying to myself, trying to convince myself that I felt rested and couldn’t wait to get back to—wait, what was I supposed to be doing again?
In the end, I could never make it through the fourth day. Each time I failed, I felt intense disappointment at my own lack of willpower and self-control. I believed this was something I should be able to do. It pissed me off that some random people on the internet could supposedly do this thing that I couldn’t. I felt like it meant there was something wrong with me. That if I didn’t have the self-discipline to sleep deprive myself for weeks on end, then what the fuck, Mark? Get your shit together!
So I tortured myself. And the more I tortured myself, the more unrealistic my expectations for myself became.
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Chances are, at some point in your life, you’ve tried to change your behavior through sheer willpower. And chances are, you also failed miserably. Don’t feel bad! This is what happens most of the time.
Most people think of self-discipline in terms of willpower. If we see someone who wakes up at 5 AM every day, eats an avocado-chia-fennel-apricot-papaya smoothie each meal, snorts brussel sprout flakes, and works out for three hours before even wiping their ass in the morning, we assume they’re achieving this through straight-up self-abuse—that there is some insatiable inner demon driving them like a slave to do everything right, no matter what.
But this isn’t true. Because, if you actually know anybody like this, you’ll notice something really frightening about them: they actually enjoy it.2
Seeing self-discipline in terms of pure willpower fails because beating ourselves up for not trying hard enough doesn’t work. In fact, it backfires. And, as anyone who has ever tried to go on a diet will tell you, it usually only makes it worse.
The problem is that willpower works like a muscle, if you work it too hard, it becomes fatigued and gives out. The first week committing to a new diet, or a new workout regimen, or a new morning routine, things go great. But by the second or third week, you’re back to your old late-night, cheeto-loving ways.
The same way you can’t just walk into a gym for the first time and lift 500 pounds, you can’t just start waking up at 4 AM on a dime, much less do something ridiculous like an Uberman sleep schedule. To have a chance at success, your willpower must be trained steadily over a long period of time.
But this leaves us in a conundrum. If we view self-discipline in terms of willpower, it creates a chicken-or-the-egg situation: To build willpower, we need self-discipline over a long period of time; but to have self-discipline, we need massive amounts of willpower.
So, which came first? What should we do? How do we start? Or, more importantly, where the fuck is the Ben and Jerry’s?
Viewing self-discipline in terms of willpower creates a paradox for the simple reason that it’s not true. As we’ll see, building self-discipline in your own life is a completely different exercise.