When I was in college, there were some people on the internet who claimed that you could train yourself to slumber equally little every bit two hours per day. Keep in heed, this was back in the early 2000s when we all however believed random shit we read on the internet.

Hither'south how the story went: There was a hyper-productive slumber schedule that had been discovered by military scientists. They were testing the limits of sleep deprivation on soldiers and made this startling discovery. Supposedly, great historical figures like Napoleon and Da Vinci and Tesla followed the same sleep schedule and it's why they were so productive and influential in history.1 Supposedly, everyone (i.e., you and me) could attain this state of daily hyper-productivity. Supposedly, all we needed was enough willpower to butt through days of slumber deprivation and "acclimate" to this new superhuman schedule. Supposedly, this was all true and verified and somehow made sense.

Supposedly.

The scheme was called "The Uberman Sleep Schedule," and here'southward how you lot did it:

  • Sleep follows the 80/twenty Rule—that is, fourscore% of your recovery comes from 20% of the time you're unconscious. Conversely, lxxx% of the time yous're asleep, you're a lazy slice of shit.
  • This uber-efficient portion of sleep is chosen REM sleep and but lasts approximately fifteen-20 minutes at a time.two That means for every two hours that your torso is asleep, really only the last 20 minutes or and so is "useful" sleep. Thus, when yous sleep viii hours during the night, only 80-100 of those minutes are actually causing you to feel rested and restored.3 People on the internet decided this was inefficient and needed to be fixed.
  • What the war machine scientists (supposedly) discovered is that if you lot're severely slumber-deprived, your body will immediately fall into REM sleep the 2nd y'all pass out. It does this in guild to compensate for its lack of rest. People on the internet decided this was incredibly efficient.
  • The thought of the Uberman Slumber Schedule was that if you took 20-minute naps, every 4 hours, around the clock, for days and weeks on end, you would "train" your brain to fall into REM slumber instantly the moment you lay downwards. Then, once your REM sleep was over, you would experience rested and restored for the next 3-4 hours.
  • Every bit long as yous connected to accept 20-infinitesimal naps every four hours, you could effectively stay awake forever. Congratulations, you were now an Uberman. Hither, have a gold star.
  • But at that place was a catch: supposedly it took ane-two weeks of intense sleep deprivation to properly "adjust" to the Uberman Sleep Schedule. You had to stay up all night, every night, forcing yourself to only sleep for 20 minutes at a fourth dimension, six different times per day. And if at any betoken you screwed up and overslept your nap, all would be undone and you would take to start over.
  • PS: Caffeine is not allowed. And booze might equally well be suicide.
  • Therefore, the Uberman Slumber Schedule became this kind of decathlon of willpower amid internet self-assist people—an ultimate examination of one's self-discipline with the ultimate pay-off: an extra 20-30% of productive waking hours per day, every 24-hour interval for the rest for your life. That's like having an extra two days each week, or an extra three and a half months per yr. That's insane! Over the form of one's life, that's over a decade of extra waking hours. Imagine everything you could attain with an extra decade of life, all while everyone else is asleep.

Like an idiot, I tried to do this. Multiple times. For years, I obsessed with achieving the Uberman Slumber Schedule.

And for years, I continually failed at it.4

Yous have probably pulled an all-nighter before. Not sleeping for i nighttime is not that difficult. Particularly if there are deadlines and/or drugs involved.5

What'south difficult are the 2nd and third and fourth nights. Extreme sleep impecuniousness is a crash course on how fragile our mind actually is. By day 3, you will get-go falling asleep standing up. You will doze while walking down the street in broad daylight. Y'all forget basic facts like your mother's name or whether you had eaten that day, or—fuck, what solar day is it?

By day 4 you become delirious, imagining that people are speaking to you when they're not, assertive that you're writing an email when you're not, and 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, only to go on myself awake. When nap time came, I would crash, falling unconscious instantaneously, and proceed to have intense, fucked upwardly dreams that seemed like they lasted for 5 hours. Then, twenty minutes after, my alarm would wake me up, where I would spend the side by side iii hours and change desperately lying to myself, trying to convince myself that I felt rested and couldn't await to go back to—wait, what was I supposed to be doing again?

In the end, I could never make it through the quaternary solar 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 practise. Information technology pissed me off that some random people on the internet could supposedly exercise this affair that I couldn't. I felt similar information technology meant there was something wrong with me. That if I didn't have the cocky-field of study to slumber deprive myself for weeks on terminate, and then what the fuck, Mark? Get your shit together!

So I tortured myself. And the more than I tortured myself, the more unrealistic my expectations of myself became.

***

Chances are, at some point in your life, you've tried to change your beliefs through sheer willpower. And chances are, yous also failed miserably. Don't feel bad! This is what happens most of the time.

Virtually people think of self-discipline in terms of willpower. If we meet someone who wakes up at 5 AM every solar day, eats an avocado-chia-fennel-apricot-papaya smoothie each meal, snorts brussel sprout flakes, and works out for three hours before fifty-fifty wiping their ass in the morning, we assume they're achieving this through directly-up self-abuse—that at that place is some insatiable inner demon driving them similar a slave to do everything right, no thing what.

But this isn't truthful. Because, if y'all actually know anybody like this, you lot'll discover something really frightening about them: they actually enjoy it.6

Seeing self-discipline in terms of pure willpower fails because beating ourselves upward for not trying hard enough doesn't work. In fact, it backfires. And, as anyone who has e'er tried to go on a diet will tell you, it commonly only makes it worse.

The problem is that willpower works like a musculus. If you work it too hard, information technology becomes fatigued and gives out. The start calendar week committing to a new diet, or a new workout regimen, or a new morning routine, things go great. Merely by the 2nd or tertiary calendar week, you're dorsum to your old late-night, cheeto-loving ways.7

The aforementioned way you can't just walk into a gym for the get-go time and lift 500 pounds, you can't just starting time waking upwardly at iv AM on a dime, much less do something ridiculous like an Uberman sleep schedule. To accept a risk at success, your willpower must be trained steadily over a long period of time.8

But this leaves us in a conundrum. If we view cocky-field of study in terms of willpower, it creates a chicken-or-the-egg situation: To build willpower, we demand self-discipline over a long period of fourth dimension; only to take self-bailiwick, we demand massive amounts of willpower.

So, which came first? What should we practice? How practise we start? Or, more than chiefly, where the fuck is the Ben and Jerry's?

Viewing self-subject in terms of willpower creates a paradox for the simple reason that it'southward not true. As we'll see, building cocky-discipline in your ain life is a completely unlike exercise.

Our behaviors are not based on logic or ideas. Logic and ideas tin can influence our decisions, merely ultimately, our feelings determine what we practise. ix

We practise what feels skillful and avert what feels bad. And the only way we can ever NOT practise what feels adept, and exercise what feels bad instead, is through a temporary boost of willpower—to deny ourselves our desires and feelings and instead do what was "right."

Throughout history, virtue was seen in terms of this sort of self-denial and cocky-negation.10 To be a good person, you not only had to deny yourself whatever pleasure, just you too had to show your willingness to injure yourself. You had monks hitting themselves and locking themselves in rooms for days and not eating or even speaking for years on end. You had armies of men throwing themselves into battle for little or no reason. You had people abstaining from sex until marriage, or even for life. Shit was not fun.

This classical approach is where our assumption that "willpower = self-subject" originally comes from. It operates on the belief that self-discipline is accomplished through denying or rejecting one's emotions. You want that taco? BAD MARK! YOU DON'T Want SHIT! You ARE SHIT! YOU DESERVE TO STARVE YOU INGRATE!

Self-discipline tacos
The root of all evil.

The classical arroyo fused the concept of willpower—i.e., the ability to deny or reject one's desires and emotions—with morality. Someone who tin say no to the taco is a good person. The person who can't is a failure of a human.

The Classical Approach to Self-Discipline

Self-Discipline = Willpower = Self-Denial = Practiced Person

This fusion of willpower and morality had proficient intentions. It recognized (correctly) that, when left to our own instinctive desires, we all become narcissistic assholes. If we could get away with it, we would eat, fuck, or kill pretty much anything or anyone within a ten-meter vicinity. So the dandy religious leaders and philosophers and kings throughout history preached a concept of virtue that involved suppressing our feelings in favor of rationality and denying our impulses in favor of developing willpower.

And the classic approach works! …kind of. Well, okay, while information technology makes for a more stable society, it also totally fucks us up individually.

The archetype approach has the paradoxical issue of training us to feel bad about all the things that make u.s.a. feel good. It basically seeks to teach u.s.a. self-discipline through shaming united states of america—past making u.s.a. hate ourselves for but existence who we are. And the idea is that once nosotros are saddled with a sufficient amount of shame about all the things that requite the states pleasure, we'll exist so self-loathing and terrified of our ain desires that nosotros'll just autumn in line and do what we're told.

Disciplining people through shame works for a while, but in the long run, information technology backfires. Every bit an example, let's employ perhaps the virtually common source of shame on the planet: sex activity.

The encephalon likes sex activity. That'southward considering a) sexual practice feels awesome, and b) we're biologically evolved to crave it. Pretty cocky-explanatory.11

At present, if you grew up like most people—and especially if you're a woman—there'south a good chance that y'all were taught that sex was this evil, carnal affair that corrupts you and makes you a horrible, disgusting person. Y'all were punished for wanting it, and therefore, have a lot of conflicted feelings around sex: it sounds amazing just is as well scary; it feels correct only besides somehow so, and so wrong. Equally a result, you however want sex, but you also drag around a lot of guilt and anxiety and doubt almost yourself for wanting it.

This mixture of feelings generates an unpleasant tension within a person. And as time goes on, that tension grows. Because the desire for sexual practice never goes abroad. And equally the desire continues, the shame grows.

Somewhen, this tension becomes unbearable and must resolve itself in i of two ways.

The first option is to overindulge. The tension has get so groovy that we feel the only way to resolve it is by going all out in a spectacular fashion. Hooker orgies. Compulsive masturbation for days on end. Rampant infidelity. And, sadly, oft sexual violence.12

But indulgence doesn't really resolve the tension. It just kicks the can downwards the road. Considering after you put the cock rings away and the hookers have gone home, the shame and guilt come up back. And they come back with a vengeance.

And so, if indulgence doesn't piece of work, what about the other option?

Well, the only other choice to escape that internal tension is to numb it. To distract oneself from the tension by finding some larger, more than palatable tension. Alcohol is a common i.thirteen Partying and drugs, of course.14 Watching 14 hours of television each day can be another choice. Or just eating yourself half to decease.15

Sometimes, people do find productive ways to distract themselves from their shame. They run ultra-marathons or work 100-hour work weeks for years on end. These are, ironically, many of the people nosotros come to admire for having inhuman willpower. Simply self-denial comes piece of cake when, deep down, you fucking detest yourself.

Because shame can't exist numbed away. Information technology just changes form.16 The person who exercises religiously to escape their self-loathing volition eventually find means to loathe themselves for their exercise habits. And soon, what started out as a remarkable work ethic in the gym morphs into some form of trunk dysmorphia, like those guys who inject Synthol into their arms to brand themselves await like Popeye.

self-discipline-Valdir-flexed-his-huge-biceps
Prototype: Barcroft

Similarly, the businessman who transmutes his shame into stellar work at the office eventually develops shame about his productivity to the point where he literally can't go home. He's terrified to practise information technology. Any non-productive infinitesimal feels similar an untenable failure. And while the rest of his life falls apart effectually him, he'due south only worrying about spreadsheets and quarterly numbers.

This is why the most hardcore, uncompromising people are usually the ones who are virtually compromised. It's why the most fundamentalist religious leaders who rail against the immorality of the world are always the same leaders who are ordering fuckboys off Craigslist.17 Information technology's why the almost "spiritually enlightened" gurus are also the ones blackmailing and extorting their followers. Information technology'southward why the politicians most song nigh party loyalty and patriotism are always the ones shooting up meth in the airport bath. They are running away from their demons. And 1 manner to do that is to create shinier, more socially acceptable demons.

Self-subject field based on cocky-deprival cannot be sustained in the long-run. It but breeds greater dysfunction, and ultimately results in self-devastation.

The Truth Most the Classical Approach

Cocky-Denial = Emotional Dysfunction = Self-Destruction = -(Self-Discipline)

Here's the trouble with all this—and it's and so obvious once you hear it, I can't believe we have to say it. You can will yourself to get to the gym if you don't feel like information technology for a few days. Simply unless the gym ends upward feeling good in some manner, you lot will eventually lose motivation, run out of willpower, and stop going. You can will yourself to stop drinking for a day or a week, but unless you feel the reward of non drinking, then you will somewhen become back to it.

This is why my polyphasic sleeping nightmare consistently ended in disaster. Staying up all night and sleep-depriving myself produced no tangible benefits. It produced no expert feelings. It produced goose egg but misery and delirium. It was an exercise in self-abuse. Therefore, my willpower eventually ran out and my emotions took over, driving me to pass out for near xvi hours straight.

Any emotionally salubrious approach to self-field of study must work with your emotions, rather than against them.

Ultimately, cocky-discipline is not based on willpower or self-deprival, but information technology's really based on the reverse: self-credence.

Let's say you lot're trying to lose weight and your big hang-up is that you run through about three liters of ice cream each week. You're an ice foam fiend. You lot've tried stopping through willpower. You lot've tried diets with your friends. You've told your partner to never ever buy ice cream once more in a desperate endeavor to arraign them for your own shortcomings.

Merely nothing's worked. Non a day goes past that you don't down about a 1000 calories of flossy goodness.

And you hate yourself for it.

And that's your first problem. Step ane to self-discipline is to de-link your personal failings from moral failings. Yous take to have that you cavern to indulgence and that this doesn't necessarily make y'all a horrible person. We all cave to indulgence in some shape or form. We all harbor shame. Nosotros all neglect to rein in our impulses. And we all like a good fucking bowl of ice cream from time to time.

This sort of credence is way more complicated than it sounds. We don't even realize all of the means that we judge ourselves for our perceived failings. Thoughts are constantly streaming through our heads and without even realizing it, we're tacking on "considering I'm a horrible person" to the end of a lot of them.

  • "I fucked up that project at piece of work, because I'm a horrible person…"
  • "The whole kitchen is a mess and my parents will be here in 20 minutes, because I'm a horrible person…"
  • "Other people are good at this, but I'm non, because I'm a horrible person…"
  • "Everyone probably thinks I'one thousand an idiot, because I'm a horrible person…"

Hell, y'all might even be tacking on these self-judgments right now while reading this! Man, I gauge myself like this all the time… because I'm a horrible person.

Self-discipline - Batman slapping Robin Meme

Here'southward the thing: in that location's a ill sort of comfort that comes from these self-judgments. That's because they salvage us of the responsibility for our own actions. If I decide that I can't give up ice cream because I'yard a horrible person—that "horrible person-ness" precludes my power to change or improve in the futurity—therefore, it's technically out of my easily, isn't information technology? It implies that at that place's nothing I tin do about my cravings or compulsions, so fuck it, why endeavor?

There's a kind of fearfulness and feet that comes when we relinquish our belief in our ain horribleness. We actually resist accepting ourselves because the responsibility is scary. Considering it suggests that non only are nosotros capable of change in the future (and change is e'er scary) but that we have perhaps wasted much of our by. And that never feels good either. In fact, some other little trap is when people have that they're non a horrible person—but then make up one's mind that they are a horrible person for not realizing that years ago!

Just, one time we've de-coupled our emotions from our moral judgments—in one case we've decided that only because something makes usa feel bad doesn't hateful we are bad—this opens us upwardly to some new perspectives.

For one, it suggests that emotions are but internal behavioral mechanisms that can be manipulated similar annihilation else.18 Just like putting your floss next to your toothbrush reminds you lot to floss every morning, once the moral judgments are removed, feeling bad because you relapsed on the cookies and cream can simply exist a reminder or motivator to address the underlying event.

We must address the emotional problem the compulsion is trying to numb or cover up. You compulsively eat tubs of ice cream each week. Why? Well, eating—especially sugary, unhealthy food—is a form of numbing. It brings the body comfort. Information technology's sometimes known as "emotional eating" and the aforementioned way an alcoholic drinks to escape her demons, the overeater eats to escape his.xix

So, what are those demons? What is that shame?

Notice it. Address it. And most chiefly: accept it. Discover that deep, nighttime ugly part of yourself. Face information technology, head on, allowing yourself to feel all the awful, disgusting emotions that come up with it. Then accept that this is a part of you and it's never going away. And that's fine. You can work with this, rather than against it.

And hither's where the magic happens. When you lot stop feeling awful virtually yourself, two things happen:

  1. There's naught to numb anymore. Therefore, suddenly those tubs of ice foam seem pointless.
  2. Y'all encounter no reason to punish yourself. On the contrary, you like yourself, and then you desire to take care of yourself. More importantly, it feels good to take care of yourself.

And, incredibly, that tub of ice cream no longer feels good. It's no longer scratching some internal itch. Instead, information technology makes yous feel sick and bloated and gross.

Similarly, exercising no longer feels like this impossible task that you'll never be up for. On the contrary, it replenishes and enhances you. And those skillful feelings start showing up that make it experience effortless.

***

Simply you don't necessarily have to exercise this deep therapeutic work to gain self-discipline. Merely understanding and accepting your emotions for what they are tin can allow you lot to work with them rather than against them.

Here'southward one fashion to do this: call up your all-time friend and tell them to come over. Accept out your checkbook. Write a check for $2,000 to them, sign it, and give it to them. Then tell them that if you always consume ice foam again, they can cash information technology.

Done.

Eating water ice cream will now cause a much greater emotional problem than the one it solves. And, every bit if by magic, refraining from eating water ice cream volition begin to experience really fucking adept.

Social accountability works in the same way. Information technology's much easier to meditate for a long time when you lot're in a room total of people than it is to do it past yourself. Why? Considering when you're in a room full of people, you lot don't desire to exist the solitary asshole who gets up and walks out after three minutes, like you practise at domicile! The social pressure makes it then that not meditating causes a bigger emotional problem than meditating for the total amount of time.xx

Yous tin besides do this through positive reinforcement: find ways to reward yourself for doing the correct behavior. Inquiry shows that this is really how new habits are formed: you practise the desired behavior so reward yourself for it.21

Once you resolve much of your shame, and once you've created situations to provide greater emotional benefits from doing the desired beliefs than not doing it, what y'all end up with is the appearance of closed self-discipline, without actually putting forth whatever effort. Y'all cease up with discipline without willpower.

You lot wake upward early on because it feels adept to wake upward early.

You eat kale instead of smoking crack because it feels good to eat the kale and feels bad to smoke cleft.

You stop lying because it feels worse to lie than to say an important truth.

You exercise because it feels improve to do than it does to sit around, covering yourself in a thin layer of Cheeto dust.

Information technology's not that the pain goes away. No, the hurting is nevertheless there. Information technology's just that the pain now has meaning. Information technology has purpose. And that makes all the difference. You piece of work with the pain rather than confronting it. You pursue it rather than run from it. And with every pursuit, yous get stronger and healthier and happier.

And somewhen, from the outside, it volition look equally though you're putting forth monumental try, that you have this endless reservoir of willpower. Yet, to you lot, it will feel like nothing at all.