How I Used A Crisis to Master Discipline
Destroy resistance to developing new habits. INSERT: [CRISIS].
What can you do when you have no choice left?
“Do I really feel like getting out of bed at 5 AM? HELL NO.”
“Will I? Well…Why the heck should I?”
A master of excuses, debate, rationalizing, and justifying — I could always get myself to come up with some logic as to why I could — WOULD not do what would benefit me most.
They say discipline is tough because of the effort and concentration it requires. It engages a part of the mind that prefers to be lazy — the part of our brain that we use for analysis, prolonged thought, and concentration. We exert a lot of energy that way, burning sugars with our cognitive machine (Kahneman 2015).
I found myself with so much freedom at times that with the ability to do anything, I could so easily resort to laziness or the easy choices. What oftentimes got sacrificed was my physical health, a significant part of my self-care.
Knowing I should stretch, run, do yoga, or do ANYTHING that got my muscles and joints moving with an increase in heart rate was easy. Getting myself do it at times was a REAL struggle.
It was so much easier to roll back over in bed, or “accidentally” distract myself with social media for one to two hours.
But then a crisis appeared.
Wildfires were springing up everywhere in California, and I was sent an urgent summons to assist in the disaster recovery of the town of Paradise. The next day, I was on a plane flying to a place of which 95% of it had burned down.
This post-apocalyptic experience had me working between 72–84 hours a week, where the majority of my time was spent supervising and managing the operations and logistics of +2,000 people and $50M of heavy equipment.
My body spent 95% of this time sitting in a truck or at a computer desk.
Within days, I could already begin to feel my lower back and my hamstrings tightening up. I knew, from working seven years in finance at a computer desk, that if I did not commit to loosening and strengthening my muscular body, I would find myself with sciatica — again.
“Never let a crisis go to waste.”
It amazes me still how I decided that I had one of two options:
- Let this job physically destroy my body, and in consequence, my mental and emotional health.
- Start exercising daily, religiously.
How the heck was I supposed to find the time now?
Just before this contract, I had been working 25–35hr weeks freelancing and could have easily made the time to exercise, and yet I regularly struggled to do so.
Now, I’m working the equivalent hours of two full-time jobs in seven days.
I knew two things and I decided to make a FIRM commitment:
- I was not going to let this work opportunity up.
- I was not going to sacrifice my health for this.
And for the first time in my life, I found myself waking up as early as 3 AM (averaging about six hours of sleep each night) to start an hour-long yoga routine.
THAT saved my life.
Each morning (felt like night, really), I would literally roll out of bed to my alarm and flop onto the floor.
The hard scratchiness of the carpet of the inn I was put up in was sufficient to keep me awake long enough to put on a YouTube yoga session that saved me each day.
With my “back against the wall,” feeling like I had no options left, I knew I had to do something. I pushed off that “wall” to launch myself into developing a stronger self-care discipline.
I found it is easier to do something difficult when the consequences of not doing so were made clear.
At the operations base camp, every day, I was witnessing colleagues neglecting their physical health (the junk food they regularly ate, the lack of exercise, and so on). Grabbing at their lower backs and their pain and blood pressure pills had become their reflex.
I decided that my reflex would be exercising and whole food.
As the weeks turned into months, I watched the progression of consequences from daily choices manifest. I was consistent with more energy, humor, patience, and ability to think critically, as many of my colleagues began a rapid descent in cognitive decline, energy, and overall good health.
Working 72–84 hour weeks is tough. REAL tough. I do not blame them.
Yes, every day, they would need more coffee, more pain pills, and so on in feeble attempts to maintain their functional status quo.
They were the Angels of Reminders to me.
If one cannot learn from their mistakes, we can honor them by learning what we can from theirs.
REFERENCES
Kahneman, D. (2015). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
