I recently completed 100 days in a row of exercise.
During that time I set new personal bests for strength and endurance. It’s the most consistent I’ve ever been with exercise in my entire life, and at 41 years old I’m now measurably the strongest I’ve ever been too.
This all came about as part of an experiment into the effect of focusing on frequency.
For years I’ve been studying the psychology of discipline and motivation. Discipline is consistently doing what’s good for you no matter how you feel about it, and motivation is usually how we describe the feeling of wanting to do something.
The problem with motivation
The problem with motivation is that we come to rely on it for discipline. This means, of course, that when we don’t “feel like” doing something, we usually don’t do it. We have a basic underlying assumption that if something is right to do, we’ll want to do it.
Of course, we know this is untrue. We rarely “want” to exercise and yet it’s always a good idea, same with eating healthy, confronting difficult people to set boundaries, and doing the most important work tasks before the easy stuff.
Motivation is actually a barrier to discipline if you believe you need motivation to do things.
We all know how to be disciplined
The art of discipline shows us you don’t need motivation. Everyone already has this going somewhere in their life. They get to their job on time even when they want to quit. They brush their teeth and shower daily even though they don’t get any real pleasure from it. They change their children’s diapers even though they’d prefer not to.
No one needs motivation to be disciplined, and yet few people seem to understand how to get things done when they don’t feel like doing it, or even worse: when they are scared or disgusted or resentful of the idea of doing it.
Emotional hassle: Our biggest enemy
The main problem, I’ve discovered, is in the imagined SIZE and INTENSITY of the task. In other words: the amount of anticipated emotional hassle.
The more hassle we perceive a task to be, the less motivated we are to do it. And if we rely on motivation, we’ll end up procrastinating or never doing all the important things because we’ll always imagine them being a hassle.
This is a delusion. No task is actually a hassle unless it’s imagined in a specific way. The hassle is in the framing of the task, rather than the work itself.
Let’s say you feel that going to the gym will be a hassle. You imagine the entire process, the difficulty of it all combined. The getting ready; the transport; the warm up; the embarrassment of people watching you struggle with the machines; the uncertainty of what to do; the clean up; the transport back home. Etc.
But if “going to the gym” just meant you must put on gym shoes and drive there, and that’s ALL, is it still perceived as an impossible hassle? If “working out” simply meant doing 1 minute of deliberate movement and NO MORE, would you still feel that you couldn’t possibly fit it into your day?
Frequency is the secret
It’s this line of questioning – in my attempt to circumvent the mental barriers to discipline – which led me to see a clear mental hack that allows discipline to form: the focus on frequency.
Frequency is only about how OFTEN you do the task. The size and the intensity of the task comes with no serious obligations or hassle. There’s just a bare minimum you set as the absolute least amount of action required to have “officially” done the task, and that’s all that’s required. Anything more is optional.
Sounds like a cop-out, right? Am I saying you can just do a couple of push ups and that’s it – you’ve officially worked out for the day??
YES!! That’s exactly what I’m saying.
And this isn’t even a mental trick to force yourself to do more! You are actually allowed to quit after a few pushups (or whatever your bare minimum is).
Fear and pressure prevents progress
I know what you’re thinking (or more accurately, what the fear centre of your mind is trying to manipulate you with right now): that’s NOT ENOUGH.
The biggest trick fear (i.e. the thing that demotivates us) plays on us is to demand more than we can handle doing. It looks like encouragement but it’s really discouragement in disguise. It asks for too much and then calls it “not enough”, leaving you unable to satisfy yourself.
You’ll never work out “enough” to calm this voice. When you confront someone, even winning the argument will be met with your mind saying, “Yeah but you didn’t say it perfectly right”. Doing all the tasks on your work to-do list just prompts you to think of even more tasks to do.
This voice is not your friend.
The bare minimum
During the 100 days of exercise, the minimum standard I set was “just do a warm up”. This basically consisted of about 5 minutes’ worth of light movement to activate all the parts of my body.
After that, I was officially “done” for the day unless I wanted to do more. It’s what I could manage to do even if I was sick or injured or extremely busy. It was the amount for which there is no excuse not to.
That’s the key: you set a mandatory frequency (e.g. daily), and a minimum standard that would be embarrassing to avoid. Combine that with an inspirational frequency goal (e.g. 100 days in a row). You now have something to aim for without any real pressure.
Guess what happened when I started with a warm up? I always did more, of course! However, I knew that it wasn’t a trick, that I didn’t have to do more. It was always optional.
On my least motivated days, the most I did was 2 rounds of the warm up. On my most pumped and keen days, I did extreme gym sessions, beating personal bests and sweating through my shirt. And most of the days were somewhere in-between.
And I never missed a day.
Frequency and low pressure is the formula
Another way to put it, is rather than demanding that you “always do the whole massive thing”, demand that you “frequently start the thing with a tiny low pressure action with no further obligation”.
You don’t have to finish the whole workout, you just need to move your body. You don’t need to win the argument, you just need to state a single sentence about what you want. You don’t need to complete the whole tax return, just do 2 minutes’ worth of it every morning before starting other tasks.
Now, if you feel like doing more once you’ve already started, then you do more. A warm up might lead to a longer workout. Starting a debate might lead to setting a boundary. Writing a couple of lines on your tax return might end up with you completing the first submission.
Because what frequency helps us do is to reduce the hassle by seeing it was never really that much of a hassle anyway. The anticipated hassle is rarely matched by the actual effort required.
I remember once booking out 3 hours in my calendar to do my tax return. It only took about 40 mins. This kind of extreme prediction being destroyed by real-life is an experience which commonly occurs.
The motivation to get it done comes after you get started, not before, especially when the pressure is very low, because once you get into it you get a real sense of the finish line and see it’s not as far away as you first thought.
The combination of frequency and low standards means MUCH more gets done than when you pressure yourself to be perfect.
Try it and see!
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