5 Habits to Build Self-Discipline in 30 Days

Habits you can start today to train your brain to do the hard things

Published in

Change Your Mind Change Your Life

3 min readJan 11, 2024

Exercise your mental toughness

Exercise your mental toughness. Convince your brain to tackle challenging tasks, relying on discipline over motivation. I read books on mindfulness, or discipline and try my best to put their teachings into action.

Exercise your body

Exercising (consistently) is challenging. But it is the one habit that definitely promises results. You will see the benefits physically, and mentally. Once you build the mindset to do one hard habit consistently, it will help you grow in other areas too.

3 non-negotiables — every. single. day.

It doesn’t matter what the day of the week is or if you’re busy with other urgent tasks, these habits/tasks are supposed to be done every day. Everybody has different definitions for non-negotiables, but I define them as activities where I’m investing time in myself — exercising, journaling, and planning my day.

Non-negotiables, weekly and monthly

You could set up a time for this, or just ensure you do it before the deadline. My monthly non-negotiables include —

Writing on medium
Staying organised and ensuring everything is in place physically and digitally

Weekly negotiables include —

Going on a walk
Reading 50+ pages

Do your best to avoid time wasters and distractions

Once we get in the loop of giving in to distractions, it’s easy to completely shut off the difficult tasks and waste time by giving yourself an excuse. But, if you look at it the other way around, once you get in the loop of not giving in to distractions, you’re basically unstoppable. Even if your phone keeps buzzing right in front of you, if you are disciplined, you will work on what you know is important. That is the kind of discipline we want to aim for.