You don’t need more discipline - you might just need a nicer experience.

🎧 Prefer to listen? I’m experimenting with audio versions of my blog posts - you can listen to this one here. Think of it as a little 5-minute voice note from me 🤗

My main cardio exercise used to be running. I absolutely hated it. But that’s what I thought I “should” do in order to lose weight. Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t stick at it for more than a month or so at a time.

Lately I’ve been thinking about this again - not because I’ve taken up running (absolutely not 😂), but because I’ve noticed how much easier it is to do things when I make the experience of doing them nicer.

This shows up in my work, too. Reading scientific papers is something I genuinely want to do more of, but sitting in front of a screen reading them feels like such a slog - especially when the dopamine hit of my LinkedIn feed is right there.

There are two slightly different things going on here. Sometimes, the answer is to choose a different activity altogether. And sometimes, when it’s something we genuinely want or need to do, the answer is to change the experience of doing it.

Choosing a different activity

The first option is to simply choose something you actually prefer to do.

You might be thinking: “what a revelation Rosie - doing things you enjoy 🙄”

But I think sometimes we neglect to think about enjoyment. Especially when we’re thinking about all the things we “should” be doing: losing weight, getting our cardio or weight training in, eating vegetables, being a good employee. Often, in service of these goals, we choose the thing we think we should be doing (or the thing that seems most “effective”) without giving much thought to whether we actually like doing it.

And when it comes to health, I think often we associate “healthy” things with stuff that we know is good for us, but we don’t enjoy as much as “the bad things”. But the theoretically “best” option isn’t very useful if you stop doing it after three weeks. A change you stick to is far better than a perfect change that you don’t. And there’s good evidence that how we feel while exercising matters for whether we keep doing it. 

So if there’s something you’re struggling to do consistently, it might be worth questioning the “should” before trying harder to force yourself through it. There might be something else you could be doing that would meet the same goal. If that thing is exercise, for example, I’d encourage you to drop the idea that it needs to be the right number of minutes, or the right “kind” of exercise - focus instead on one thing you’d actually enjoy doing. 

Change the experience of doing it

Of course, we can’t simply swap out everything we don’t enjoy. Some things matter to us, or need to get done, even if the activity itself isn't particularly appealing (I certainly don't always enjoy my physio!)

So it’s also about finding ways to make the things you need to do, feel…nicer. 

A key trick here is temptation bundling: pairing something you enjoy, with something you want or need to get done. It might be only watching your favourite show at the gym, or only listening to your favourite podcast while you’re cleaning the house. Research shows that it’s a great way to help us to do those things that we’ll really appreciate once we do them - but we struggle to start in the moment. 

But I think the principle can be broader than that. Sometimes it’s simply about asking: what would make the experience of doing this more pleasant?

This isn’t about bribing yourself with treats to force your way through something you despise. If you genuinely hate the thing, go back to step one and ask whether there’s another option. This is more useful for the things you value, enjoy once you get going, or feel glad to have done - but struggle to start in the moment.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve found that doing things outside has been a really good strategy for making them feel more lovely. I started doing my morning physio and Pilates outside, and printing off papers to read in the garden with a cup of tea (or a cold drink, depending on how big the current heatwave is 😅). In both cases, it made me feel like they were things to look forward to, and I enjoyed them more - rather than just being “things on my list that I have to do”. Nothing about the task itself had really changed, but my experience of doing it had.

And yes, I need a backup plan for the end of summer when the weather gets worse 😂

So if you’re struggling to get something done: before asking how to make yourself more disciplined, ask how you could make the behaviour nicer.