Discipline is not Freedom

The lost art of making deals with your psyche.

Your mind is a warring system with competing stakeholders. Many of them are petulant or domineering. Your sovereignty depends on your ability to negotiate compromises where they all feel represented.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

People violate their values because they’re really good at compartmentalization and really bad at making deals.

Compartmentalization allows us to package away unwanted thoughts and feelings. It’s a psychological defence mechanism that provides short-term fixes for cognitive dissonance.

It shows up when part of you values being healthy and another part desires sugar. On Monday you set a goal to “never eat refined carbs” but on Friday there’s free cake in the office. Internal tension. What do you do?

1. Compartmentalize the “healthy” voice and eat sugar

2. Compartmentalize the “impulsive” voice and abstain

Both of these are bad long-term solutions to cognitive dissonance. Both of these require a ton of mental energy. Neither approach is an effective path to personal sovereignty. However, most of us call option 2 “self-discipline” and modern culture endorses it. This is a mistake.

Self-discipline is actually self-domination.

It’s when you privilege one of your internal stakeholders at the expense of all the others. Inevitably your psyche generates a coup and disrupts your life.

This is why people live in dramatic pendulum swings from chaos to excess order and back again. Elimination diets lead to impulsive snacking. Monk-mode gives way to bacchanals. Abstinence generates new sexual fetishes. Etc.

Some of us draconian types can sustain the despotism for our whole lives. But there are always consequences (e.g. getting sick or having a multibillion dollar divorce).

Yes, there is a time and place for despotic self-discipline. Sometimes you need to white-knuckle willpower your way through weakness.

Similarly there’s a time and place for a wartime CEO. But you wouldn’t run a startup forever as a wartime CEO. People would leave.

So maybe we shouldn’t run our lives like this. Maybe there’s a better way.

Make Deals With Your Psyche

“Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.” - Jesus, Matthew 12:25

Carl Jung said the psyche likes making deals. Dealmaking is the process by which differing parties find alignment. This is more sustainable than domination.

Consider that the impulsive “lower” parts of yourself actually have some wisdom. Consider the possibility that you can negotiate with them and they aren’t as intransigent as they seem. They’ve just dug their heels in because you’ve been such a bully.

Often your psyche will cooperate if you just ask it what it wants. Maybe you actually have motivation to go the gym or do your taxes. Maybe all you need to do is let yourself watch 20mins of Netflix when you’re done.

The next time you are tempted by something that violates your values and goals, pause and make a deal with yourself. Understand the trade-offs on both sides and make sure all parties are content. Let yourself eat cake but sign up for the sugar crash too. Or avoid the cake entirely and sign up for the feeling of discomfort and hunger when everyone around you eats it.

Dealmaking allows you to address cognitive dissonance without self-deception. It keeps you aligned with yourself and it frees up energy otherwise spent on compartmentalizing. Self-alignment is more effective than self-discipline.

Like anything worthwhile this is a practice. There’s no such thing as a quick fix. No one will ever air-drop you to the top of the mountain — but some paths are more worthwhile and less dangerous.

- Daniel

PS - If you’re curious about the topic of self-discipline and practice, Peter Limberg and I are running Cohort 3 of Beyond Self-Discipline this September 3rd. You can learn more about that here.