Discomfort isn’t an obstacle—it’s a gateway to building discipline and mental resilience.
By embracing discomfort, you rewire the brain and cause profound changes in the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala. These areas are essential for emotional regulation, memory, and decision-making.
7 ways to build discipline without trendy hacks include:
- Start small and build momentum
- Stack habits for success
- Create challenges for yourself
- Embrace consistency over perfection
- Embrace the 2-minute rule
- Learn to say no
- Seek accountability
By consistently facing and overcoming challenges, whether physical feats or daily habits, you create neural pathways that strengthen your ability to handle stress and maintain focus under pressure.
Discipline isn’t built on willpower alone. You create it through intentional, sustained efforts over time. While trendy methods like ice baths and dopamine detoxes promise quick fixes, true discipline involves embracing gradual, sustainable changes that integrate seamlessly into daily life.
The Science of Discomfort & Building Discipline
The goal of building discipline is ultimately to increase mental resilience, and this is much more than simply having disciplined habits like going to the gym three days a week and eating mostly nutritious food.
Building mental resilience has positive effects on our mental health. An increased resilience changes the brain on a structural and neural level. These changes often lead to better mental health and general well-being outcomes.
Resilience affects change in three main parts of the brain: the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus, and the amygdala. These areas of your brain involve emotion-making, memory, emotional regulation, and decision-making.
When you set out to build new disciplines into your daily life, expect things to suck at times or assume you’ll want to quit. That’s part of the journey, part of building mental resilience.
Trendy Discipline-Building Practices
No one denies the research on the mental health benefits of ice baths, including helping build mental resilience by lowering cortisol levels.
You should remember one thing about “trendy” or “trending” anything—trends come and go. Sure, cold water immersion is cool, and your 24-hour dopamine detoxes probably offer some temporary and potentially long-lasting results.
Why Are Extreme Approaches Popular?
Extreme is what sells.
Extreme measures. Extreme results.
In reality, these extreme **insert thing** approaches often provide results—sometimes incredible—very quickly. But something is only as good as how long you can keep doing it. Making something a sustainable part of your life is usually the best path forward.
Because what happens when the next “best” way to build and maintain a disciplined life hits your feed?
Want to build discipline in your life? Start with one practice, master it, and make it a part of who you are.
7 Ways to Build Discipline & Get Sustainable Results
Building discipline isn’t a one-time thing. It’s a series of changed habits and behaviors over time. Each time you stretch your discipline muscle, you strengthen it.
Start Small & Build Momentum
Everyone loves the big wins and the splashy results. But starting small is where it’s at when it comes to building discipline. Pick small—or easily achievable—habits to build. Making these small sustainable changes does a couple of things for you:
- Gives you a foundation of success to build on
- Builds your self-confidence in reaching your discipline goals
As you strengthen your will and achieve greater levels of discipline, you can aim to make larger changes in your life.
Stack Habits for Success
A significant byproduct of building discipline is the habits you build along the way as a means to a more disciplined life. But you have habits whether you consider yourself disciplined or not—intention is the difference between bad and good habits.
Habit stacking is an effective way to integrate new habits into your life. You’ll be amazed at how seamless new habits become when you “stack” them onto existing habits.
A scenario where you might use habit stacking would be:
You want to make a 5-minute stretching routine part of your morning. If the initial moments of your morning include standing in front of your coffee pot, scrolling Instagram while it brews, then you have an opportunity.
Habit stacking means getting up and stretching while your coffee brews. Making your coffee every morning is already second nature; use that to your advantage to build a new habit into your morning routine.
Create Challenges
Exposure therapy is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). This form of therapy is typically discussed within the context of overcoming fears or anxiety. But you can apply the same principles to building discipline in your life.
Creating challenges or difficult situations for yourself and successfully navigating them proves to your mind that you can do it. Even when it sucks, you have the power to push through and be who you want to be.
Cold water immersion is a great example of creating a challenge in your day to get through. But so is getting up at a certain time or saying no to certain types of food sometimes.
You don’t need to create life-altering challenges, you just need to embrace uncomfortable things.
Consistency Over Perfection
You won’t achieve perfection despite your motivation and inspiration to change.
You’ll skip a morning of stretches.
You’ll overeat on occasion.
You’ll stay up way later than you should.
Life happens.
But consistently showing up for yourself provides long-term success in your habits and discipline. Temporary but perfect adherence will only provide amazing results until the novelty wears off and your discipline runs out.
Embrace the “2-Minute Rule”
Let’s be honest for a second.
How often do you want to build a new habit or discipline in a certain area, but when it comes time to perform the desired task, there’s always something else to do; you’ll get to it later, right?
The 2-minute rule is a great tool in your kit to stay on top of small achievable tasks.
If the task will take 2 minutes or less, do it when you think of it; don’t put it off until later.
Learn to Say No
Life has taught many of you to be “yes people.” Friends, family, or a second serving of a desert; you don’t say no to these things.
One of the most potent self-development skills you can learn is learning to say no. When you understand that it’s okay (and often ideal) to say no to certain things, you gain the power to take control of your life.
Seek Accountability
Sure, you can make progress in life on your own as the lone wolf type. But this isn’t an ideal way to live. We are social creatures by nature.
Surround yourself with people who want you to win.
Accountability isn’t about having someone looking over your shoulder and checking up on you. Being accountable to someone means telling yourself (and another human) that you’re committed to change.
No, it won’t be perfect, but there will be progress.
Hiring a life coach is a terrific way to gain professional accountability on your journey. You could also start by sharing your goals and plan to reach them with a close friend. Ask them to connect with you and keep you accountable.
Celebrate Your Success & Go Kick Ass
Building discipline and good habits is a part of becoming the best version of yourself. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to doing this. Find the strategies that work for you and celebrate your successes (big and small) along the way.
Book a 15-minute call today to discover how 15 minutes a day is all you need to change your life.