You: "Time to get up and run."
Body-You: "Oh hell no. I'm tired. Plus we did a good job yesterday. And we have a lot to do today. Also, we don't want to over do it do we?"
You: (sighs) "Fine. Let's at least walk for 30 minutes."
Body-You (sighs): "Ugh. Fine."
10 minutes of walking pass.
Body-You: "This feels great! Let's run."
You: "Okay."
...
First notice that You said, "at least." You is not lying. If, at minute 30, Body-You is like "Ugh, still no," You can capitulate.
Second, notice that it is Body-You that makes the decision to turn it into a run. In your version, Body-You never gets what it wants. Both times You has to control the situation. The first time, to start the run, the second time, to enforce a more-or-less arbitrary contract for the sake of the contract, even though both parties want a new contract.
(also, I don't think body-you would say "we have a lot to do today"?)
As for the “lying”, Body-You knows it is not a lie but doesn’t care. If You believes You is lying, Body-You is more than happy to use that as yet another excuse.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/fire-light.html
Loong but great read
https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_mas...
""" The Two-Minute Rule can seem like a trick to some people. You know that the real goal is to do more than just two minutes, so it may feel like you’re trying to fool yourself. Nobody is actually aspiring to read one page or do one push-up or open their notes. And if you know it’s a mental trick, why would you fall for it?
If the Two-Minute Rule feels forced, try this: do it for two minutes and then stop. Go for a run, but you must stop after two minutes. Start meditating, but you must stop after two minutes. Study Arabic, but you must stop after two minutes. It’s not a strategy for starting, it’s the whole thing. Your habit can only last one hundred and twenty seconds.
One of my readers used this strategy to lose over one hundred pounds. In the beginning, he went to the gym each day, but he told himself he wasn’t allowed to stay for more than five minutes. He would go to the gym, exercise for five minutes, and leave as soon as his time was up. After a few weeks, he looked around and thought, “Well, I’m always coming here anyway. I might as well start staying a little longer.” A few years later, the weight was gone. """
You are, in effect, prioritizing (self-)discipline over short-term performance, learning or productivity gains.
I would surmise that your bodymind² has in effect realized, learned, that compound effect is the best strategy for long-term results; and/or that systems are better than goals. The invariant requirement of any long-term strategy is enough discipline to execute it.
“Never, ever break promises to yourself.” is the real lesson to learn and never forget. The usual rationale goes like this:
Imagine two people, one who always does what they said they'll do, and another who never does what they said. How do you feel about the first one? Trustworthy? Reliable? Someone you can count on? Now what about the second? Empty-worded? Unreliable? Unworthy of trust? Lazy, big mouth, etc?
Now consider how "you" (the "it", your third eye observing yourself) is going to feel about "you" (the "I", the one who carries all the emotional weight) if you behave like person #2 above?
You need to be able to trust yourself. And this is based on facts, not words, just like how you judge anyone else.
That's why it's important, critical, to pause and ponder before making any promise to yourself: make sure you won't break it, make sure you'll be excellent with your own word. Be person #1, the reliable, the trustworthy, for yourself. Give yourself the facts to back that belief, because words, well, they're empty, and you're the only one who can't lie to you.
[1]: Off the top of my head, you hear it from Stephen Covey in the 7 habits (honesty with yourself), you heard it from Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie well before that, you heard it more recently from Brene Brown (in Daring Greatly and her TED talk on vulnerability and courage). Iirc, don't quote me on these, check twice, but the gist is correct.
[2]: Bodymind = body + mind (no duality), i.e. "all of you", your being, your brain and all the things that connect it to the real world including its own, your entire body
Ultimately you might also find that the end result was totally not worth the effort sunk.
Or worse, there's no way to compare if you gained anything.
There are only relatively few ways that do change life significantly and most of them do not take intense effort or self discipline. (I'd love you to provide examples to the contrary. I know of two: training new skills when they matter and training children and pets.)
You mean that the world will only care if the gain is big, if I achieve "a lot"? If so, I question:
- Should I condition my happiness to something external that I can't control? (what the world thinks of me, of what I do/did)
- How can I ever be satisfied if I only compare myself to others? There's always someone better than me. Shouldn't I compare myself only to myself, past-me against present-me? Shouldn't I be making gifts to future-me by doing now what will make me happier / better / whatever?
- Why does "nobody care if the gain is small"? Can't a small subset of the world, e.g. people close to me that I know and who know me, care about me as I care about them? Isn't that enough, most days of our lives?
> “Ultimately you might also find that the end result was totally not worth the effort sunk.”
That would be the logical reaction of someone who only cared about the end result, and failed to reach their goal. But what if you care about the journey, the mission, the doing? What if "the effort sunk" was welcome, what if it was pleasure, growth, a good bone to grind for you? What if it made you happy?
Then you would find that the effort is well worth it every single day, because it is its own reward, because there is no further expectation beyond today's step, or because you learned to decorrelate your happiness from the satisfaction of expectations that lie beyond your control, your actions, your thoughts.
> “There are only relatively few ways that do change life significantly...”
Agreed.
> “... and most of them do not take intense effort or self discipline.”
Strongly disagree, with every fiber of memory and experience I can find. You would need to substantiate that, because it's an extraordinary claim... If one puts neither "intense effort" nor "self discipline", very little happens, and certainly not "significant life change". Quite the exact opposite is required for growth IME.
One key to all this is to stop thinking in terms of "goals" and instead design "systems" whose outcome gets you closer to where you want to go. In effect, building a vehicule and giving it a direction (or rather, recognizing that you are a vehicule, and take charge, assume full control). Whenever you put energy into this thing, it goes that way, your way, and you along with it (i.e. personality changes, evolves). Even your happiness, it's not a distant or abstract "goal", it's a very real, very practical system that you design to fit your life, values and aspirations. It produces your happiness whenever activated.
The ultimate goals are superb and never attained. The practical systems are tiny Legos but they work every time, and become huge in time.
And when you die, a "happy life" is often judged by a dumb sum of all moments, of all the little things, little bricks... That's the compound effect we get to see, but only retrospectively, unless we're told about it and we train ourselves to see the world in 4 dimensions, before it becomes too obvious/late.
I prefer this approach as it ultimately results in a greater output than forcing myself to stop at some prior agreed point I made with myself but would now prefer to renegotiate.
I never did not trust myself anymore if I did more reps than I "promised" myself before.
Would a child ever grow distrust against her parents if she changes her mind and wants to do more dishes than initially asked for and they allow her to do it?
So the trick I guess is managing which part of your inner monologue is the child and which is the parent.
I've been experimenting with telling myself "now that I'm at the gym, I'm really enjoying it, I'm really grateful that you dragged me out."
And this doesn't motivate you? For me it's actually more motivating: I only have to muster enough willpower to start walking, not to run, but I'll end up having a good workout anyway.
(If you want a good resource that synthesizes a bunch of modern psychology research relating to that suggestion into a single, entertaining non-fiction book, see “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior” by Leonard Mlodinow [0]).
[0]: https://psychcentralreviews.com/2016/subliminal-how-your-unc...
It might be better for your narrative to be that you're only gonna walk and see how you feel.
Give yourself permission to only walk. That way, if you later feel like running, you can still get that extra benefit as well, without breaking some promise to yourself, and if you just feel like walking the whole time, no problem there, either.
Note that if this relationship of explicitly limited commitments with yourself is preeminent, your goal should be "go out exercising each day" rather than "run 5km each day".
My "I'll just do 10 reps" always comes with an implicit "but I can do more if I feel like it." Then if I'm feeling strong and have another rep or two left, I'm allowed to do them.
For what it’s worth, most people I know feel pride and a sense of accomplishment if they’ve found motivation to do more than they promised themselves. But as I said, everyone’s psychology is different.