How to Start Wanting Things Again?

Let me start by saying that you are not alone in this I-don’t-feel-like-doing-anything mood! Everyone sometimes feels powerless and unwilling. The amount of duties at work and home make it hard to find the will to act in the evenings. So you go to sleep hoping to wake up in the morning in the land of motivation and productivity, with well-fitting leggings on and 10 kilometers run in 50 minutes. Tomorrow I will motivate myself, do the cooking and training, and lose some weight …

And I will repeat once again that you are not alone in this, and although MOTIVATION is a cool word, unfortunately, we can’t rely on it only. It would be similar to promising yourself that you will always be cheerful and joyful while it turns out that not everything depends on us.

But fortunately, there is something we can control and, what’s more, we can even practice it: SELF-DISCIPLINE. Now I’m sure some of you have made unhappy faces. I know self-discipline sounds scary, but the cool thing about it is that it’s not some kind of magical power, it’s not something we’re born with or without. As I’ve already said – you can work on your self-discipline, exercise it so that it works to your advantage.

Just don’t start thinking now that you and your self-discipline must be a miss bikini fitness. You, with your trained self-discipline, can be a fit accountant, teacher, architect, doctor. It is enough for you and your discipline to be in good shape at a sufficient level. It may mean different things for everyone, but if you remember about a tailored, regular activity, healthy diet (where you make room for a 20% margin of error for cravings), it really will be a lot!

How to Exercise and Strengthen Your Self-Discipline?

In a nutshell – we just have to realize our intentions and do what we have planned. It doesn’t matter if our plan is about something as big as writing a book, running a marathon, going on a dream trip around the world, buying your own apartment, or starting a family and raising children in accordance with your values, or as small as hanging up the laundry (rather than waiting two more days for it to be washed again), drinking a large glass of water with lemon, ginger and guarana every morning, a 30-minute evening walk around the neighborhood, regular vitamin supplementation recommended by our doctor or dietitian, reading 5 pages of a book in the evening and visiting our aunt on her birthday.

Achieving our goals builds our sense of agency and this in turn has a great impact on our self-discipline.

Good condition of the self-discipline muscle equals acting in harmony with ourselves, with our values, with the priorities we set, and leads to achieving the goals. Your own goals.

Make the plan specific enough to fail visibly

“More exercise” is not a plan, it is a wish, and a wish cannot be kept or broken, so nothing ever comes of it. “Training on Tuesday and Thursday at six, in the living room” can be kept or broken, and that is precisely what makes it work: you know by Tuesday evening whether it happened. Self-discipline needs something countable to attach itself to, and a vague intention gives it nothing to hold.

The same applies to the small things on the list above. “Drink more water” survives no contact with a busy morning; “a glass of water before the first coffee” does, because it is tied to something that already happens every day without any decision on your part.

Start smaller than your motivation

The mistake is almost always the size of the first step, not the willingness. On the evening you feel like it, an hour of training looks reasonable, and it is the evening you do not feel like it that decides whether this becomes a habit. Pick the version you could do on the worst day of the month: ten minutes, five pages, one walk around the block.

A small thing done twenty times builds more of the sense of agency Anna writes about than a big thing done twice. The repetition is the point, not the size of each instance, and it is the repetition that makes the next one easier to start.

Plan the miss before it happens

You will miss a day. The 20 per cent margin of error in the text above exists for exactly that reason, and it is worth extending from food to everything else. What decides the outcome is not the missed day but what you do with the next one: one miss is an accident, two in a row is the beginning of a new habit in the opposite direction.

So decide in advance what the reduced version looks like on a bad day, and use that instead of skipping. Ten minutes instead of an hour keeps the streak; nothing at all ends it. If the harder part is deciding what to do rather than finding the time, the Diet & Training by Ann app has the week already planned, training and meals together, so the decision is made before you get to it.

There is more on the mechanism itself in the posts on why we prefer to start tomorrow and on how not to lose motivation, and on the first step in how to find the motivation to change.

Frequently asked questions