you can’t build a life on motivation alone
how to use routines to set yourself up for success
The first time I heard about the importance of discipline, I was probably around 15. I was frantically googling ‘How to stop procrastinating’ while procrastinating on an assignment that was due the next morning.
The irony wasn’t lost on me.
I was someone who relied on sheer motivation. Who would let my mood dictate everything - how productive I was, whether I would even get anything done at all.
Consistency? I didn’t know her. I was lucky if I could focus on a task for even 30 minutes.
But when that wave of inspiration hit me, I was unstoppable. I could sit for hours, completely locked in, getting everything done in one go if I was in the right mood.
It might not have been perfect, but it worked. I got through school by cramming for tests last minute, through sporadic study bursts and counting on motivation to save me when I really needed it.
I thought this was something I could carry with me through to my adult life, but I got a rude awakening real quick.
The problem with motivation was that it never arrived on schedule. Not when deadlines were looming, not when life got busy, and certainly not when you actually needed it.
I remember one time interviewing for a job and being given one week to work on a case study and present back my findings. This wasn’t something I could whip up the night before, and I waited impatiently, hoping motivation would get the hint and strike so I could get started early.
She didn’t.
She danced in on her own time, and that time happened to be 11pm the night before the interview.
Anxiety kicked in when I realised the enormity of the task, and it was a late night, with spiralling thoughts at 3am.
I should’ve started this earlier. Why do I always leave things to the last minute?
It was the same story every time, but this time the consequences felt more real.
Safe to say I didn’t get the job. And I realised that I couldn’t keep living like this.
It wasn’t sustainable nor healthy. It wasn’t something that would keep me afloat in the real world, where there are pressing deadlines everyday and responsibilities keep piling up.
Life doesn’t wait for when you’re in the right mood. And you can’t build a life around waiting to feel inspired.
Something needed to change.
The journey of going from someone who relied on motivation to someone who relied on discipline wasn’t easy.
Motivation is exciting. It lets you fantasise about a better future, one where
everything makes sense, and it becomes so easy to leave things for ‘future you’ to figure out.
Discipline isn’t as fun. It means showing up when you don’t feel like it, even when you’re tired and your mind is fighting to convince you to do anything else.
And I guess it’s all a part of growing up, of becoming an adult and facing increasing deadlines and watching all the responsibilities pile up.
Work
Chores
Hobbies
Errands
Relationships
But what discipline does, which motivation has failed countless times in doing, is that it removes friction.
The funny thing about the brain, is that for all its capability and complexity, it’s actually wired to conserve energy. When given a choice between a hard or an easy option, it will always choose the easier route.
That’s where routines come in.
Routines take the decision-making out of doing hard things by removing decision fatigue. When something becomes a routine, you stop negotiating with yourself. You don’t sit there debating whether or not you should do it. You don’t waste energy going back and forth.
You just do it.
It wasn’t until I had some time off that I really noticed the absence of routines in my life. How I was existing as a ghost- sleeping and waking up at ridiculous hours, feeling disconnected, like a lesser version of myself. It was my first break since moving out of home, and I had no one to hold me accountable, no one to question why I was still in bed at 1pm.
My routines were out of whack and without structure, without anything keeping them in place, they crumbled.
Don’t get me wrong, having a rest was much needed, and I think it’s important to have times where you can just exist. But equally as important is having solid structures and foundations which you can rely on.
Where I saw this most clearly were in my morning and night routines. Mornings were difficult. I was someone who would snooze their alarm countlessly, again and again, until I’d finally had enough of the blaring noise and would roll over, grab my phone, and start scrolling to wake myself up.
I had the occasional mornings where I managed to resist. But those days were rare and never lasted.
Nights weren’t much better.
After a long day, I’d end up doomscrolling in bed, mindlessly consuming content until I was too tired to keep my eyes open.
And somehow, I still wondered why I never had enough time.
Enough time to read more, to meditate or to journal, to start a proper skincare routine.
In the times I thought I was allowing myself moments of rest, letting myself do whatever I wanted, whatever felt easiest, I was actually making my life harder.
Because sometimes, real self-care isn’t always what feels good in the moment.
Sometimes it looks like structure.
The quiet repetition of small things done consistently.
Motivation might kick things off, but routines are where the hard work exists. They’re where you start to build the life you want.
Where most people fail is that they walk in without a plan. The most important thing I realised is that you can’t simply take away something without replacing it.
If you want to stop scrolling on your phone before bed, you can’t just tell yourself to stop. Instead, you need to give yourself something else to reach for.
More importantly: it has to be something you’ll enjoy doing.
Going into your night routine with the expectation that you’ll read 20 pages of a non-fiction book when you hate reading isn’t going to become a lasting habit. Because discipline isn’t about forcing yourself into a life you’ll hate.
But, if you start small - with 5 pages of something you actually enjoy, something that you’re interested in, which you then slowly build to 10, then 20 - over time, you can shape this into something more intentional. And before you realise it, you’ve built yourself a routine.
Another one of my favourite hacks is habit stacking. Deceptively simple and incredibly impactful, James Clear goes into more detail in his book Atomic Habits. It involves taking one of your current habits and anchoring a new habit to it, which reduces friction and the mental effort it takes to build a habit.
For example, if you want to start meditating, you may anchor this to the existing habit of brushing your teeth.
Instead of trying to find time in the day for yet another thing to do, you’re utilising established patterns and routines to make these new behaviours stick.
And while these changes may feel small, they compound over time and become impactful.
That’s the thing about habits. They feel hard at first, unnatural, like you’re constantly fighting against yourself between what feels right and what you’re supposed to do.
But if you stick with it, give it time, something starts to shift. Slowly, it becomes effortless, like muscle memory. Like brushing your teeth or washing your face. Remember the time when something that comes so effortlessly now felt hard to do?
Our brain loves patterns, it’s wired to crave structure.
The same goes for bad patterns - doom scrolling, negative thoughts, self criticism.
Discipline isn’t about forcing yourself to do things you hate. It’s about cultivating habits and routines and systems in order to get what needs to be done, done. To help you build yourself into the person you want to become.
It is, in its authentic form, the purest form of self love you can give yourself.
When you wake up and choose to give your mind a moment of rest by not immediately picking up your phone. When you prioritise your health by sticking to a workout, even though you’re tired from work. When you come home to a healthy home cooked meal because you trudged through the slump on Sunday and stuck to your meal prep schedule.
These are the quiet examples of how discipline trumps motivation, how doing hard things in the moment leads to better outcomes in the future. It’s not about punishing yourself in the moment, it’s about instilling behaviours that align with your desired self.
A way of showing up for yourself, again and again, until the life you want is no longer something you just think about.
It’s just something that is.