Motivation vs discipline

The difference between motivation and discipline is whether you feel like doing the thing. With motivation, you feel like doing it. With discipline, you do not feel like it, and you do it anyway.

Here is an example. Ana signs up for a race in the spring. In the first week she runs every morning, because she is excited and she wants to. That is motivation.

In the third week it rains, she has slept badly, and she does not want to run at all. She puts on her shoes and runs anyway, because she told herself in the first week that she would. That is discipline.

Ana needed both. Without motivation she would never have signed up. Without discipline she would have stopped in the third week.

Discipline is more important for anything that takes longer than a few weeks. Three researchers who study habits wrote about this for doctors. Advice that only makes people want to change usually works for a short time, they wrote, because motivation fades (Gardner, Lally and Wardle, 2012).

But discipline has a limit too. Studies suggest that pushing yourself harder is not what gets people to their goals. In one study, the people who reached more of their goals were the ones who met fewer tempting things, not the ones who tried harder to say no (Milyavskaya and Inzlicht, 2017). In another, people with more self-control had stronger habits, such as exercising and going to bed at regular times (Galla and Duckworth, 2015). The page on self-discipline goes through both studies.

So rely on discipline more than on motivation, and then set things up so that you need very little of either.

You need less motivation and less discipline when the thing is small and the time is fixed. Then there is little to push yourself through, and nothing to decide each day. Four steps get you there.

1. Make it small. Cut the thing down until you would still do it on your worst day. Read for ten minutes, not for an hour. Walk around the block, not across town. You can always do more once you have started.
2. Fix the time. Pick a clock time, or tie the thing to something you already do every day: “After I pour my coffee, I will read for ten minutes.” That second way is called habit stacking. When the time is fixed, you do not ask yourself each day whether you feel like it.
3. Take away what distracts you. Put your phone in another room before you start. Then there is nothing to say no to.
4. Keep going until it is a habit. A habit is something you do without deciding to. In one study, people did one small thing every day at the same point in their day. The person in the middle of the group needed 66 days before it happened without much thought (Lally and colleagues, 2010). You only have to push yourself until the habit forms. A habit tends to keep going after the motivation is gone (Gardner, Lally and Wardle, 2012).

If your trouble is getting started at all, see how to stop procrastinating and how to stop being lazy.

Every finding on this page links to a source below. We read each one for this page, the whole text or its summary. Ana and her race are made up.

1. Gardner, B., Lally, P. and Wardle, J. (2012). Making health habitual: the psychology of 'habit-formation' and general practice. British Journal of General Practice, 62(605), 664 to 666.
2. Milyavskaya, M. and Inzlicht, M. (2017). What's so great about self-control? Examining the importance of effortful self-control and temptation in predicting real-life depletion and goal attainment. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(6), 603 to 611.
3. Galla, B. M. and Duckworth, A. L. (2015). More than resisting temptation: Beneficial habits mediate the relationship between self-control and positive life outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(3), 508 to 525.
4. Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W. and Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998 to 1009.