Discipline

 I don't know what I could tell anyone about discipline that they wouldn't find out from an influencer or some inspirational quote. Or maybe I do? Maybe.

I don't believe in discipline.

I don't believe in self-control.

We aren't "in control" of things at least 80% of the time. Discipline might get you out of bed for a week, but to actually do it long enough to form a habit (in theory, 21 days) or an entire lifestyle (apparently 90 days), you won't be able to rely on it. Discipline lasts you a day, maximum, but in my experience, about an hour. I don't think we're able to "suck it up" for days, but maybe it is my brain being different from everyone else's.

So, how do I wake up at 5 am and train? People do tell me that I sound so disciplined, that it's almost as if I were in the military. And what gets me to wake up? Is it David Goggins? No shade, but no. No amount of inspirational speech can get between me and my love for sleep. No, to be able to do that, I simply go to bed at 8 pm. Or, more specifically, since I want to sleep by 8, I go to bed by seven.

But why do I wake up at 5? Why did I move all my after-work activities into the early morning? You see, I work from 10 to 7, but it's not my first rodeo on this schedule. I was allowed a bit of flexibility before, to work 9 hours between 7 am and 7 pm. Whenever I needed time in the morning and ended up staying until 7, I felt like my day was wasted. My entire day gone, just with work. Obviously, I would stay at home after, watch Netflix or something, but it felt like I was already getting ready to sleep. So when I got this new job with an absolutely inflexible schedule, I really did not want to feel my life wasting away. Spoiler alert, I still do, but a lot less, only in the weekends. I would still very much appreciate having three days of rest after each five days worked, but so far that is not an option.

This all means that instead of discipline, I go by self-care. It also means that if I had found this habit to be worse for me, I would definitely have stopped, not just because of self-care, but because I'd have been incapable of sustaining it.

For example, I used to go to bed at 10 pm and wake up to work out at 5. This meant 6 hours of sleep a day, almost the recommended amount. Yet it resulted in me sleeping through the entire weekend, almost literally: I woke up at 5 on Saturday, I did that day's workout, and then went shopping. Then, after 12 pm I slept until 7, woke up for 2-3 hours and slept again, until 5. This was unsustainable. So I started going to bed earlier, and lo and behold, my skin is glowing.

Well, no, it's not. But I did figure out my sleep schedule. I recall sometime last year my man told me how "he wanted to be one of those people who wakes up early in the morning and immediately starts to work out". I did, too. And now, I am. I wish I could say this is a lifehack, or it makes your days so easy, or rewarding, or whatever you might want to hear. It's not. It was literally a workaround for me to be able to work out. So, beyond self care: you need something that will make you want to get up for it, even if it's early.

I'm not gonna say that Insanity workouts are gonna save you. Whatever makes you happy will. Which sucks, as advice to a depressed person. And I genuinely cannot tell what knocked me out of limbo and gave me the strength to actually start do do what I want to.

I also didn't follow the workout schedule the most precisely. I took a few days off. I went light on a few workouts. All in all, it wasn't discipline that got me to stick to this habit, but rather, it was flexibility.

I'm so glad I didn't post this when I first wrote it. I'm not gonna read through it all now, but I definitely have things to add and others that I should emphasize differently. I'm now three days after having completed Insanity (for the first time) and oh, no, my depression is back. My brain literally wants me to just curl up in some corner and forget about the entire world. I should be doing some laundry, I should take some trash out, and there's a lot of dishes that need to be done. And yet, I don't do any of this. I don't even want to work today. I just want to curl up and cry, as I said. I wanna be miserable in peace.

To be perfectly frank, I didn't know it would be back so soon. My knees hurt from the first part that I did. My body needs a bit of rest right now - but my brain sure doesn't, that fucker wants its endorphins again. So, with this in mind, I can most definitely say it was not discipline that kept me training even in rain, in cold, in the early mornings: it was knowing how bad it can get, and it was my desperate clinging on to life. I haven't been formally diagnosed, as we all know, but that empty feeling in me surely is not a normal thing. It can't be part of one's everyday life to just want to disappear into dust.

It wasn't discipline that put me through the 60 day training. It was depression.