How To Trick Your Brain To Make Discipline Easy - Dr Orion Taraban

Before we started, we were talking about the importance of setting yourself end dates for things that you're trying to do, new habits or goals that you're trying to achieve, or challenges and routines that you introduce, and how setting yourself an end time ensures that you spend sufficient effort, uh, uh, and duration to work out whether or not this is a good idea for you at all. And it's something that I've used an awful lot in my life, and you've done it with your YouTube channel.

That's right. You wanna give things enough time to succeed. And in general, things will take a lot longer than most people expect. It's almost, like, two to three times longer than most people think. Uh, that's why when I started out this project with the YouTube channel, I made a commitment to myself that I would publish regularly for three years before I even entertained the question as to whether this was something I would continue to do. According to my research, it might have taken that long for me to get some sort of, uh, positive outcome with respect to my efforts, and I knew that if I was committed to that process, if I made that commitment to myself, I could maintain discipline to that process independent of any kind of, or the absence of any kind of positive reward that was coming back at me. Which was definitely necessary, because without that commitment I, I might have given up well before anything of interest occurred.

Yeah. Certainly in my life, some of the examples that I think fit this, whenever I'm trying some sort of new strategy out, or a, a new supplement or a, a new type of training routine or diet or whatever, uh, setting myself a minimum amount of time that I'm going to stick to it for before then looking at something else allows you to actually accumulate some of the benefits that you get. And some of the benefits can be in realizing that this isn't for you. It's not always that it was something good. Uh, y- you, I'm gonna pivot and I'm gonna try training CrossFit for a while. So I'll do 90 days of CrossFit, and I'm not going to, no matter how difficult it gets, shy of me being injured, I'm just gonna continue to do it, and then at the end of the 90 days... Because that takes the job of guessing out, right? You don't have to make decisions, you're just able to follow. Another one, um, I have found great success going sober even though I don't drink that much, really that much at all. But I love focused periods of sobriety, because it means that you're never dealing with a hangover once every couple of weeks, which I had in my 20s 'cause I was partying a good bit. And, uh, it meant that I could be more consistent. One of the things that people ask is, "Oh, what sh- like, h- I'm thinking about going sober, like, how should I design it? I wanna just go sober, I'm gonna stop drinking." And I was like, "Stop drinking, but give yourself a deadline of when your sort of period of sobriety is completed, because it just allows you to feel like you're making progress." Now, YouTube has the timeline bar on the bottom to show you how far through a video you are. If the timeline bar bore no resemblance to how long the video, if it was just this unlimited timeline bar that just went off the edge of your screen, you'd have no idea how much closer you were getting toward the goal. Whereas if you say, "I'm gonna go sober for six months," or, "I'm gonna go sober for three months," or, "I'm gonna go sober for a year," it's like, there you go. Now you know I'm one month toward whatever goal it is that I'm doing, and I hope that that... It helps to mediate motivation a lot for me.