A Soft Glove Holding a Big Stick

Watch on YouTube

I've been trying to become more disciplined over the past month or so in small ways and big. It bothers me that I'm such an unreliable person, and looking inward it feels like becoming more consistent is one of the most productive ways I can improve myself. For most of my life I've thought of discipline in the exact way Heidi Priebe mentions in the video above -- that I must find a way to force myself to do the things I don't want to do, especially when I don't want to do them. 

I've recognized before that authoritarian self-talk isn't great for my self-esteem, but I couldn't figure out another way to motivate myself. Negative reinforcement activates anxiety, which works like nothing else. But positive reinforcement is...different. It's hard to be firm with myself AND kind, especially when I just can't motivate myself to do the thing I know I should. So I end up missing the deadline, or breaking the contract I've made with myself, and the only thing I can do about it is be silently disappointed. 

Heidi Priebe is a trauma YouTuber who talks a lot about using the "attachment theory" framework to resolve childhood traumas, and she's been a great resource for CPTSD lessons. It's through her I've learned about toxic (or malignant) shame, how this useful emotion can curdle into something terrible if you've never really had a way to develop self-confidence. It feels like the way I've been thinking about discipline is another expression of this, where the only way I can think of to relate to myself is through "conditional" praise. If I manage to actually fulfill a contract I've made with myself earlier, I don't feel accomplished -- just relief that I didn't fuck up *again*, and the anxiety that comes with knowing I have to pass this test tomorrow too. 

That kind of pressure, where there's this inner disciplinarian I'm constantly trying to appease, is what leads to burnout. But again, if this is all you know, how does anything get done without burning out?

What Heidi recommends is a shift in perspective. The way she lays it out, there are four quadrants where we can be with discipline. There's of course the high/low discipline scale, but there's also a high/low empathy scale we neglect. For those of us dealing with toxic shame, we exist on the low-empathy side of the quadrant without really understanding there's a high-empathy side too. For us, there's only low-discipline/low-empathy and high-discipline/low-empathy. We don't check in with ourselves to learn what our emotions are telling us, because we've told ourselves they don't matter. It just matter that the work gets done. Most of us want to increase our discipline without empathy, which means suppressing emotions about what we're doing until they're "invisible".

The trouble is those emotions are never really gone, so the work we have to do to suppress them is still eating away at our reserves but we can't acknowledge that. Acknowledging the work would mean acknowledging the emotions, which are supposed to be gone because we're so disciplined now. So instead, we burn out without really getting why.

What she suggests instead is increasing our empathy first. That means actually stopping to listen to what our emotions are telling us and reckoning with that. If we're avoiding something we really *feel* like we want to do, we have to sit with the discomfort and figure out where the procrastination is being fed. Are we worried we're not good enough? Are we not sure how what we're doing aligns with our sense of purpose? Do we really want to be doing this in the first place?

According to her, the more we attune to ourselves and our values, the more motivated we become to do the things that express those values in our daily lives. The more empathy we have for our needs, the more space we'll have for the discipline it takes to get things done. 

One thing I'm noticing is that I need some uninterrupted personal time to feel creative. If my day is packed to the gills with tasks and there's no real idle time, it's hard for me to find the energy to engage in a creative process. On days where I meditate instead of scroll BlueSky, or listen to a focus-music playlist instead of finding YouTube videos to watch, my brain feels calmer and more organized. It's easier to pivot from one task to the next, and a lot easier to put my focus on what I'm doing. It's even easier to imagine doing it AS the person I'd like to be, you know?

But I also find I like to jump from meditation app to meditation app. Today it's PLAYNE, but next month I might really miss sitting on the seiza bench so I'll go back to the Insight Timer. It means streaks won't be applied on either app, but I have my Bullet Journal for that.

Also, there's an element of self-sabotage I have to acknowledge here. I don't have to spend so much time hunting for YouTube videos to pass the time at work. I could engage more closely with what I'm doing, or just...let myself be bored at work. Thinking through a story or game problem while checking numbers on a document is a thing, too. I could do a better job of managing the time I have instead of asking for more time to waste. 

That being said, checking in with myself to see what I really want is...not something I've done in a little while. I feel like I need to dig into my trouble with writing and why that's been so hard. I really feel like I want to be writing; even now, with the drought being so long I might as well call myself a lapsed writer, even after so many stops and starts, I don't feel...right...not doing anything, you know?

Where does that feeling come from? Why do I feel the urge to write so much if I've never been able to make it work? And what's blocking me from writing a lot more easily?

Those are questions I'll be chewing on for a little bit.