Debunking the Myths of Self-Disc
Some people might dread hearing the sound of the word “self-discipline” coz they equate a disciplined life of structure to feelings of entrapment. Totally makes sense coz we can see with our eyes that our relentless desire for instant gratifications almost overrides every single case in our decision-making process: junk food over organic food, video games over physical exercises, and porn over books. Being the salves to those short-term pleasures gets us nowhere, to be honest, but the anticipation of most types of rewards increases the level of dopamine in our brain, which plays a major role in the motivational component of reward-motivated behavior, meaning that we are basically turned into a group of wasted drug-addicts who want nothing more than satisfying our addictions. And our brain is pretty much suffering from a temporary shutdown, not being able to think clearly, let alone to nurture its talents and potentials when it’s taken over by our primitive instincts. Isn’t that qualified as a new kind of imprisonment? Think twice.
So why do we end up like this? From the biological perspective, our ancestors’ scant odds to survive the jungles had made them constantly craving for fat and sugar that’s gonna support them for a longer span of time. The greater their fear of death was, the greater hunger they would have for energy, coz the greater amount of energy they obtained, the greater chance they would have to survive. This natural desire was entrenched over time and passed down onto us with our ancestors’ genes, making us hard-wired to seek out for food that’s rich in fat, sugar and salt. Worse even, companies and factories aim at fattening their market shares and commercial profits by promoting more genetically engineered food in the market to trigger a deeper and greater eager for them. And the social media and the Internet together pose another threat by capturing our biological intuitive to look for novelty, stealing minutes and hours of energy from us without our conscious acknowledgement. Such supernormal stimulus amplify our response and expectation towards the sources that meet our demands of staying static in the state of constant and immediate gratification. In a word, we are not only biologically and genetically but also economically and conventionally sabotaged to subside to our more primitive but less constructive desires.
Does that mean that we are beyond redemption? Not really. Ask people who’s been succumbing to their desires what they want most, the answers uttered often wow us when we hear them—a healthy body, a stable romantic relationship or a successful career, the list runs on with similar stuffs. What those targets have in common is
a). they aren’t what those people can get from their instant gratifications;
b). they are mostly long-term goals that’s more labor-intense and time-consuming to fulfill.
In other words, these tasks are naturally bound up with a higher level of self-control and cognitive precision, which aren’t easy at all.
When we are confronted with a more challenging task, in terms of both intelligence and endeavor, our brain processes it as a high-risk but low-gain investment that we’re prone to retrieve from, coz both our conscious mind and subconscious mind know that we don’t have much a shot at it, hence the surfacing of our invincible procrastination: the avoidance of doing a task that needs to be accomplished by a certain deadline. Unfortunately, in the case of our true desires, or life purpose, neither the deadline nor the consequence is assertive, provoking our deeply rooted risk aversion to attempt to lower the uncertainty by accepting a situation with a more predictable but possibly lower expected payoff, i.e. high-calorie junk food or time-consuming computer games that grant us peripheral but instantaneous rewards. Sadly, they always trump in our irrational decision-making process. And our lack of the capability to predict the outcomes makes our procrastination even more justifiable—it’s not gonna be done in a blink of an eye, so why the hurry? There are even percepts that put a halt to us in the midst of our pursuits, like “more haste, less speed”. They work well on us because we’re not even aware of our own conformation bias that we’ve been searching for, interpreting, favoring, and recalling information like that to confirm our preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. The sneakiest part of it is that we don’t know when is supposed to be the deadline, unlike what we have when we’re assigned a time-bound mission with a fixed deadline, a prevailing panic attack (mostly our fear of financial loss, unemployment, or disgrace) will kick in and alert our rationality to govern our task achievement. Such fear becomes invalid, more like a false alarm, during the process of our long-term pursuits coz it doesn’t last long enough to keep our sensible mind awake, an entailing hibernation is foreseeable.
Layers after layers of barriers arise along our journey and block our way to self-control, leaving us behind with the paralyzing conviction that it’s a lost cause—careful, not such a hasty conclusion yet. Neuroscientist and pediatrician Kimberly Noble claimed in her “Baby’s First Years” study that we might have a better chance to gain the ability to exert self-control if we grow up in a more affluent family coz it enlarges the surface area of our cerebral cortex that does most of the cognitive heavy lifting. That’s a piece of game-changing advice to the parents and governments. As for the adults, think carefully about what we really want and our priority based on our life purpose.
IDENTITY → SELF-CONTROL → FULFILLMENT OF IDENTITY
Affirming ourselves what we could be and what we should do in what kind of sequence allows our self-control to grow properly. We’re blessed to have the ability to practice self-discipline, which gives us the freedom to achieve what we truly want in life and allows us to break free of the biological or societal cages around us.
