To maintain a good state of health and well-being, everyone agrees that discipline is needed. But have you ever wondered what “discipline” really means? Not just what it is, but how it feels to be someone disciplined.
Its meaning and experience may seem obvious, but it is not. Each person interprets it differently. Here I share a different perspective.
My first job was as a personal trainer in the typical gym. One of my first clients was a psychologist who later became a mentor and friend. During his breaks between exercises, we would talk, of course, about aspects related to his training, and also about life in general.
When I asked him for psychology book recommendations, he directed me to those by Erich Fromm. The first one he recommended to me was The Art of Listening , then The Authentic Life (my favourite), then two more, until finally The Art of Loving .
In this latest book, Erich Fromm talks about what “discipline” means to him. His description is brief, and yet it transformed the ideas I had at the time about what discipline meant. I thought that “being disciplined” implied sacrificing yourself, forcing yourself, resisting, suppressing impulses, advancing by force (what many understand by ” willpower “).
This way of thinking resulted in constant inner pressure and a sense of obligation to meet a demanding standard of behavior, such as getting up at 4 am, never missing training, always eating “well”, working on Sundays, or not letting yourself rest and pleasures.
And not meeting these standards (as tends to happen), in turn represented feeling that you are “undisciplined” or that you are not trying hard enough.
But Fromm argues that this is not the case:
«It is essential that discipline is not applied as a rule imposed from outside, but that it becomes an expression of one’s own will; that it feels like something nice, and that one slowly becomes accustomed to a type of behavior that one can come to miss if he stops practicing it.
[…] What is good for man – for his body and for his spirit – must also be pleasant, although at the beginning some resistance must be overcome».
Rollo May, another humanist psychologist and a contemporary of Fromm, expresses a similar idea in his book Man’s Search for Himself :
You accept discipline not because you are ordered to, but because you have more freely chosen what you want to do with your own life.”
With this vision of discipline, you do not take care of your body and health “as a rule imposed from outside”, or as a “discipline from the outside”.
You don’t do it because you “should” or “have to” do it, because you are “ordered to,” or because your friends, family, partner, or society expect that of you.
You do it because you want to, as an “expression of your own will”, “because you have chosen more freely” what you want to do with your life.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, scientist and meditation teacher , puts it this way:
“It’s just the new way you choose to live.
It is not a “should”, it does not imply forcing yourself.
Your values and your actions have simply changed.”
Yes, changing your habits is required, and, as Fromm says, at first it is necessary to “overcome some resistance” or discomfort .
However, because they are changes that you yourself want to implement in your life, they eventually feel “like a nice thing” and you slowly get used to a type of behavior that you can come to miss if you stop practicing it. It becomes a part of you.
This is the kind of discipline you seek to cultivate.