Discipline is overrated. Here’s what people are doing instead

By Gina Park, CNN

(CNN) — Now that it’s summer, I need to go to the gym and eat healthy — and I should probably add meditation to the list, too. Not only do I need to start these habits; I need discipline to stick to them.

Every time I check my phone, I see social media personalities like fitness influencer Camila Jaime and author and podcaster Jocko Willink spreading the same message of discipline and self-control. They say this is the only way I can make positive change a habit.

Or maybe not? I’ve recently discovered online creators like Liv Glitterbones, who say I can practice devotion and create rituals to establish those habits.

Devotion is often associated with showing commitment to a practice of your choosing, such as religion or that fandom you discovered when you were 13. This mindset has been around for a long time, but lately, it’s becoming more self-focused.

“I sometimes feel that discipline is kind of more driven by obligation or structure, and devotion rises from love and passion,” said Liv, an artist and content creator who has requested her real name be withheld for privacy reasons. “When I talk about doing things with devotion, it’s more about having this patience, kindness and respect for yourself and your purpose in life.”

Liv is devoted to cooking healthy meals and plating them nicely or following a self-care routine while showering. She takes the idea of discipline as a means of completing necessary chores and transforms them into acts of care.

What are habits?

When online users like Jaime and Willink talk about discipline, they often use the term interchangeably with “habit formation.” But they are not the same thing.

Habits are created through repeated exposure to a specific contextual cue. Say you wash your hands after using the restroom (and I hope that you do). After enough time, you no longer think about doing it because you will move to wash your hands automatically.

“You don’t have to try or make a decision to form habits,” said Dr. Wendy Wood, Provost Professor Emerita of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California Dornsife.

Discipline, on the other hand, is the process of training yourself to obey a set of rules and requires regulation of attention, emotion and behavior. While the conscious practice of discipline can serve as motivation for an action, discipline alone cannot create habits.

“You cannot have enough discipline to repeat a behavior you don’t like long enough to form a habit. Discipline and self-control and willpower just don’t work in that way,” Wood said. “They are short-term motivations that we can control in the short run. When you see people who seem to have a lot of self-discipline, what you find is they’re really not struggling with the decisions they’re making. They do so automatically.”

Is that a habit?

For people like Liv, the unthinking and automatic nature of habits takes away from the perceived purpose of the behavior and thus any connection to it. Her rituals are rooted in self-love and don’t rely on external influences or people — they are things she says she does entirely for herself.

“(R)ituals are often filled with a lot of emotion and a lot of meaning,” said Dr. Michael Norton, the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. “When we try to make everything automatic, sometimes we lose out on some of the benefits of that.”

If you want to imbue an action with more meaning and emotion, rituals may be the path for you. People typically create rituals with a scrupulous adherence to rules and link them to certain psychological elements. When the rules of ritualistic behavior are disrupted, it’s noticeable.

In fact, many behaviors that you think are habitual may be a ritual, and Norton says there is an easy way to differentiate the two: Most people wake up, brush their teeth, and shower without giving the actions much thought, but if you ask them to change the order of their routine, some may express discomfort.

“It’s still just brushing your teeth and showering, but you can feel in yourself that it’s a little bit more toward the ritual/devotion side and a little bit further from the kind of mindless, automatic side,” said Norton, who is also the author of “The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions.”

Should you pick discipline or devotion?

Both discipline and devotion are effective paths you can take to engage in specific behaviors.

Deciding between the two, however, can be as simple as personal preference. If you understand discipline as something that is imposed by somebody else, then that lack of control might drive you away from it. In that case, you may lean toward devotion, according to Dr. Pauline Wallin, clinical psychologist and author of “Taming Your Inner Brat: A Guide for Transforming Self-Defeating Behavior.”

There also isn’t one correct path for any one person. You may practice discipline at work by being on time and following protocol, but for a personal goal, you might devote yourself to it instead. It’s all about identifying your goals and figuring out what you want the result to be.

“I think it varies. Certainly, (it) varies from person to person, but I think even more, it varies from situation to situation, or task to task,” Norton said.

Although discipline and devotion are not habits, they can create a system that pushes you toward repeated practice, whether that’s creating an environment you enjoy working out in or giving yourself a reward for finishing a task.

“(S)aying I’m devoted doesn’t make me devoted. Why am I creating this ritual? Why am I going to the gym every day? That’s because, regardless of how I feel, this is what I do, and this is who I am, or this is who I am, and this is what I do,” Wallin said.

Want to try devotion?

Once you’ve identified why you’ve set a particular goal for yourself, you can start working toward either discipline or devotion.

If your motivation is internal, such as decreasing screen time so you can spend more time on hobbies, then you’re already one step closer to devotion. These behaviors, however, need to have a long-term purpose.

A lot of people set a weight loss goal before their wedding, for example, because they want to fit into their clothes, but those goals are set for the external reason of wanting others to see them a certain way.

“A mindset has a higher purpose than just the behavior itself. Why are you doing this? Well, I want to fit into my wedding dress. Well, that’s nice, but as soon as you’re done fitting into your wedding dress and after your wedding it’s not going to last,” Wallin said. “The lasting change will be more likely if you have that internal mindset of devotion.”

Rather than creating goals with a definitive deadline, it’s better to look at these tasks as continuously in progress. If your goal is to go to the gym, rewarding yourself for going twice a week, and then three times a week and so on can help you stay consistent in the long run. The key is to turn your goals into smaller, digestible units.

“It’s a kind of more sustainable way to live because it’s rooted in patience and compassion and showing up for yourself,” Liv said. “(T)here’s no sort of pride involved in it — and more really about aligning with the way that you want to live.”

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