r/getdisciplined

I used to think the people who were doing well all had some kind of plan that they thought out from start to finish. Like there was a version of things where you just knew what you were doing and everything followed from that. I spent a long time trying to be that person and it just made everything more stressful than it needed to be.

For the longest time I was obsessed with having every part of my life locked in, even when everythin was going okay I'd stay up second guessing decisions I'd already made, double checking on everything at midnight as if anyting had changed since the last time I looked. Money, what the next few years were supposed to look like, feeling like everyone else had a clearer picture of where they were headed than I did.

At some point I just got tired of it. Not in a giving up way, but like I run out of energy to keep overthinking everything. But then I just decided to be disciplined and kept doing the work, kept showing up, but stopped trying to map out every possible outcome before it happened. I run a small ecom store on the side among other things and even with that I stopped obsessing over every metric, every Shopify notification, every Zendrop update at weird hours of the night. At the gym stopped making sure I get the perfect amount of reps and sets and just did my best and went to full failure. With some friends we like to play sunday league soccer, stopped rethinking every mistake and wishing for things I don't have and just played and improved.

Things got better pretty much immediately. This new mindset by just not trying to maximize everything and just taking it at my own pace has helped me out so much.

I don't have it all figured out now either, I just stopped pretending I needed to before I could move forward. Kinda wish I did this earlier though. Hope someone out there finds this helpful at all.

I saw a video by Andrew Huberman about morning routines, and one day I woke up waaaay earlier than normal, so I decided to take a walk instead of what I would have normally done (games/porn/doomscroll/etc). It felt really good, I was way more alert by the end of the walk and I was motivated to get something done. Fast forward two months and daily morning walks have triggered a domino effect. I have more time every day to get some chores done, so I've been able to consistently make myself breakfast and keep the kitchen clean when it used to feel impossible to finish more than one load of dishes. I started on all sorts of projects I've been fantasizing about in my head and now I've published 2 substack articles, and I'm having a blast writing them honestly. I was able to think harder about everything because I wasn't distracting myself with my phone, and that helped me figure out how to improve my financial situation, so now I've doubled what my previous job was paying me.

My living space is cleaner, I'm up early enough to really seize the day, I'm working a better job, and I'm eating healthier all because I decided to get some sun first thing in the morning. The domino effect of it has been insane, I cannot recommend short morning walks enough if you haven't already started. I hope this post motivates someone to start changing their life for the better a little bit at a time

It's a 10 minute job. I've done it a thousand times. Every single day I look at it and go "I'll do it after this one thing," and then it's night again and the pile's still there, now with my work hoodie on top of it.

What gets me is it's not even that I'm doing something fun instead. I'll walk right past it to go stare at the fridge or scroll standing up in the kitchen. The laundry isn't hard. Picking it up just feels physically impossible in a way I can't explain to people who don't have this.

The weird part is the rare times I do start, I finish it fine and feel great. So it's not the task. It's something about the starting. Like there's a gap between me deciding to do it and my body actually moving, and most days I just never cross it.

Does anyone else get this with one specific dumb task that haunts them? And has anything ever actually helped you cross that gap, not "just break it into steps," I mean the physical not-moving part?