How to Be Disciplined: Avoid Temptation Instead of Fighting It

To be more disciplined, stop planning to resist temptation and start arranging your day so you meet it less often. That's what people with high self-control do: in studies that tracked them through the day, they reported weaker temptations and resisted less often than everyone else, because they spent less time near what tempted them.

What disciplined people do differently

The best look at self-control in daily life comes from a study that beeped 205 adults several times a day for a week and asked what they wanted at that moment (Hofmann et al., 2012). People felt some desire about half the times they were beeped, and about half of those desires clashed with another goal. Resisting worked when people tried it: desires were acted on about 70% of the time without resistance and about 17% of the time with it.

The surprise was in the people with high self-control. They didn't have heroic willpower. Their desires were weaker, they felt less inner conflict and they tried to resist less often. They seemed to spend less time in situations that called for a fight.

Two other findings point the same way:

• People who score high on self-control say they avoid temptation more often, and in a lab task they were more likely to choose to work without distractions (Ent et al., 2015).
• Across six studies with more than 2,000 people, self-control predicted better grades and goal progress largely through good habits, not through effortful resistance (Galla & Duckworth, 2015).

So the disciplined person you admire is probably not winning more fights. They're having fewer of them.

Why willpower in the moment is the weakest tool

Psychologists group self-control strategies by when they act (Duckworth, Gendler & Gross, 2016). The earlier the strategy, the less effort it takes, because the urge hasn't had time to grow.

Most people try to be disciplined with the last row. It's the hardest place to win and the one that fails when you're tired, stressed or bored.

How to be disciplined: 8 steps

1. Pick one goal for the next month. Training four days a week, studying two hours a day, or going to bed by 11. One goal you keep beats five you drop.
2. Write down what pulls you away and where. Be specific: "YouTube on the phone in bed after 10 p.m." is something you can fix; "I get distracted" is not.
3. Remove the temptation from the place where the goal happens. No snacks in the desk drawer, no game console in the room where you study, no phone on the desk while you work.
4. Add friction to what's left. Log out of social apps, move them off the home screen, lock them at set times or places. A few extra steps are often enough to break the automatic tap.
5. Make the goal the easy option. Gym bag packed by the door, books open on the desk the night before, workout clothes on the chair. Same time and same place every day, so you're not deciding again each morning.
6. Use if-then plans for the hard moments. "If it's 7 p.m., then I open my notes at the kitchen table." "If I want to check Instagram while studying, then I write the urge on a sticky note and keep going." A meta-analysis of 94 tests found these plans had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 200638002-1)).
7. Shrink the start. "Open the book and read one page" is easier to start than "study chapter 4". Most days you'll keep going once you've started.
8. Review once a week. Which rule did you break and where were you? That's the next thing to change in your setup.

Let the phone keep the rule for you

LockTy locks the apps you choose by schedule, place or mode, so the decision is made before the temptation shows up. You can also set daily goals, like a workout or 30 minutes of reading, that unlock the apps once they're done.

Get

Example: a week of studying with less willpower

The numbers here are an example, not a recommendation. Say you want to study two hours a day for an exam and keep losing the evenings to your phone.

Nothing on that list asks you to be stronger. It asks you to decide once and let the setup handle the other six days.

Common mistakes

• Relying on motivation. It's high on Monday and gone by Thursday. Set up the week while you still have it.
• Fixing everything at once. A new diet, 5 a.m. wake-ups and no phone, all starting the same day, usually falls apart within a week.
• Leaving the temptation in reach "to test yourself". That's practising the hardest strategy on purpose.
• Treating one bad day as failure. In habit research, missing a single day didn't derail the habit (Lally et al., 2010). Get back to it the next day.

How long it takes

Expect the first two weeks to feel effortful. In the habit study above, people needed a median of 66 days for a daily behavior to feel automatic, with a wide range from 18 to 254 days (Lally et al., 2010). The habit formation calculator shows those dates from the day you start.

If the goal is to get your phone under control first, start with how to stop phone addiction. If you want a stricter 30 to 90 day block, read what monk mode is. A good place to practise all of this is the first hour of the day: here's a morning routine that starts without your phone.