How I trick myself to be self-disciplined

if i don't do anything this is what my day looks like ah okay time to get up let me just see what's happening for five minutes maybe another five minutes oh my god it's already 9 30. oh man i really don't feel like doing this feels bad man now if i do my self-discipline tricks this is what my day looks like okay i guess it's time to get up the fridge is locked right okay well i think i might as well get on with my day let's get dressed oh maybe i'll go for a walk well everything is still locked so i better get to it okay now let's talk about each of these trickeries that i do to make myself more self-disciplined and i say self-discipline like this because it's not really self-discipline it's more like environment designing so that i don't need to rely on being self-disciplined so the first big difference between the before and after actually starts the night before which is locking my fridge and my phone there's this thing over here this is called a kitchen safe what it is is actually really simple it's just a box and it has a lock on it so you just put stuff in the box and then you change the dial into however long it is that you want to put it for and then you just lock it and it doesn't unlock until that time happens let's ignore the fact that i actually broke my butt it's still fine it works so your initial reaction might be the same as the initial reaction of the sharks on shark tank i'm listening and it says i'm a piece of crap so you might think this is funny but don't laugh too hard because they did end up cutting a deal for 20 of the company for 100k but you gotta guess how much it's worth now it's worth five point six million dollars and that's because it specifically exploits a part of human psychology which is willpower and willpower is defined as control exerted to do something or restrain oneself from impulses now the key thing is that willpower is expendable as you're going throughout the day and you're kind of forcing yourself to do things that you may not want to do like go to work or study and you're resisting temptations like not eating a cookie not like laying in bed and watching anime things like that slowly your willpower starts being chipped away and as the day goes on you become tired and it becomes harder and harder in order to get yourself to practice willpower because you're literally putting things in and just locking it away you no longer depend on willpower anymore at night time i lock away my phone and my fridge so phone pretty easy you know just stick in the phone but for my fridge i have to be a little bit more creative because you cannot put your entire fridge into the lock box so what i do is i actually got these fridge locks um and i lock my fridge using these locks and i put them into the box lock it and then set it for 12 p.m and this has literally changed my life because it eliminates two of my biggest procrastination devices the first one is eating random things like i am the kind of person that just randomly eats things when i'm bored randomly eat things when i'm stressed i just eat random things in general and the second one is my phone which is just full of distractions but because i no longer have my biggest procrastination vices i'm like there's nothing for me to do so i'm just like okay i guess i better start my day then because i set the timer for 12 p.m i'm able to spend that entire morning working really deeply in the most important things that i have to do and there's another reason i set it for 12 p.m as well and this is because i do intermittent fasting from 10 o'clock until 12 o'clock i am a big believer that if you can get your mornings correct your entire day is much much better like you're kind of setting yourself up for success so at this point you might be like uh tina that sounds all great and stuff but how can i possibly lock my phone away until 12 p.m like what if something comes up what if there's an emergency i get it i have the same concerns which is why it took me so long to actually start doing this but what i finally convinced myself of the reality is that i really don't need my phone like for me personally i have an ipad over here and really my ipad can do everything my phone can do and for those of you who don't have an ipad you can always consider switching your phone to a dumb phone some other ideas if you're living with someone else you can lock with your phone and borrow their phone or you could just like give them your phone so you can't access it i know many of you guys watching this are going to be super skeptical but just try it for like one night or like just try for a few hours how about that try it and let me know in the comments how that works out for you so next thing the next trickery i do in order to be more self-disciplined is to get an alarm clock is it focused i don't know but this is my alarm clock so this came out of necessity so because i don't have my phone anymore because i locked it away i needed a way to set an alarm i do have to share something pretty embarrassing when i first got this i was so paranoid that for some reason it's just gonna break and it's not gonna work and i'm not gonna be able to wake up on time and then i'm just like tina seriously people have been using alarm clocks like manual alarm clocks for centuries like it is not going to fail and i'm happy to report that my paranoia was completely uncalled for and this alarm clock is still works has worked every single time for the past six months now in order to put all these trickeries of the mind in place you have to make sure that you put them in place as habits where else it would not work everything would just fall apart which today's sponsor of the video can help us do that thank you fabulous for sponsoring today's video fabulous is the number one self-care app to help you build better habits and achieve your goals fabulous is like a digital coach that uses behavioral science to help you develop great habits and routines 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people who click on this link over here also linked in description will get a 25 off fabulous subscription all right back to the video okay so now after i wake up stumble out of bed the next thing i do after going and washing my face brushing my teeth all those different things is to get dressed i like to wear the same thing pretty much every day i like to do this mostly because it really reduces my cognitive load and it also just reduces decision fatigue which decision fatigue is defined as refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making so i don't know about you but for me personally i'm not really a big fashion person so i don't really want to be spending my few precious brain cells on things like choosing what clothes i'm gonna wear so i just own multiples of the same clothes so i don't have to choose this t-shirt this black t-shirt i have like 10 of them i also have a couple shorts i used to have a lot more pants but beep decided to eat my pants baby bad boy so every single day all i have to do is get up in the morning grab my uniform and then get ready if you are a fashion person then definitely feel free to skip this step um for those of you who also don't really care that much try it out i think you will streamline your morning so much alright so at this point i have managed to get dressed and stumble out of my bedroom the next thing i'm going to do is to plan my day i do something called a brain dump on sundays and that's how i plan my entire week i'm not going to go into too much detail here but you can check out the video over here where i go into the entire system but um so i plan my week and then for each day i would have a couple tasks one were two tasks generally one task that i deemed to be the most important for that day so for each day i would double check to see if that is still the most important task and then i would write out the rest of my day there was a research study that was done on people who got hip replacement surgeries so for those of you who don't know hip replacement surgery is extremely painful but ironically in order to recover from the hip replacement surgery you need to be exercising you need to be moving and it's excruciatingly painful i hear at least so a lot of people end up not recovering as much as they could be because it just hurts so much in order to do this thing and they just keep pushing it off some researchers came in and wanted to see how it is that they can get people to exercise more and so they did a study the control group is just left to their own devices the test group was assigned to write down what it is that they're going to do what are the exercises they're going to do and what it is they're going to do it one of the examples in the study was i'm gonna go pick up my wife at 5 00 pm after her work and just by doing that writing down the action and the time in which you're gonna do it they found that people who did this was significantly more likely to do the exercise and therefore were able to heal much faster and better so what i do here for my day planning is based on this research study and what i do is write down the action and the time so today for example um i have over here 2 pm is the film at this video and for 8 pm over here i have write the proposal both of which are gonna be at home i just keep this around with me at all times have my pocket you know next to dust when i'm working i've really been embracing the analog thing because i don't have my phone anymore um it's been really great because i just have this paper with me that exactly tells me what i should be doing at whatever time it is so whenever i catch myself like not knowing what i'm supposed to be doing or procrastinating i'm like yes that's what it is i should be doing so no excuses after i plan my day and i look around my desk i very conveniently see this strategically placed shoes and that gives me a reminder that i can go for a walk this is a decision point because sometimes i do go for a walk sometimes i look at it and i really want to work but the whole purpose of it being here is that i do notice it and it reminds me that i could be going for a walk and this is the trickery that is colloquially known by out of sight out of mind there's been a bunch of studies as well that show that if you leave things in prominent places that you're more likely to use those things and do those things and vice versa i absolutely love this so much because it's literally based upon the two human tendencies of us being lazy and us forgetting stuff make it easier to do and you're more likely to do it make it hard to do then you're less likely to do it this combination of things is usually enough to get me to 12 pm so i would be working and when i get sick of working i would go and take a walk because there's no phone there's no food there's nothing better to do and then i'll come back and then i would just do that for the next few hours until 12 o'clock and my box unlocks and i am able to eat things after i eat generally my day becomes a lot more chill i would work on some other tasks that don't require as much deep work because i already got that done in the beginning of the day and after that i would just go to the gym kind of chill watch some anime for example so major takeaways from this video so these trickeries to be more self-disciplined is really about designing your environment so that you are able to not rely on your self-discipline also if you get your mornings right your entire day is just going to be so much smoother you get the things that you need to get done early throughout the day and then you can just you know do other things after that well i hope this video was helpful for you let me know in the comments what you think about these things is there a specific thing that you would like to try were there specific things that you do to have more self-discipline and i will see you guys in the next video or live stream you

Channel: Tina Huang

Views: 122,096

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Id: O90PZJUljOA

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Sat May 21 2022