Are we becoming too comfortable? The psychology of discipline | Real Health

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:04]Welcome to Real Health with me, Carl Henry. Folks, before we go any further, I have a very important announcement to make. Real Health is 8 years old this week. We are absolutely blown away by how fast time has gone. We haven't missed a Thursday in 8 years, over 420 episodes. And thank you so much to everyone who's listened in, who's watched over the course of those eight years. We are very proud of that. and we have lots lots lots more podcasting to do in the coming years. So, let's hope we get to eight more. But very proud of ourselves today, I have to say. And with that in mind, we're going to talk about modern life uh this week. It has made everything easier. Food arrives in minutes. Entertainment is endless.

[00:00:43]Shopping is instant. And AI increasingly is removing effort from our daily lives.

[00:00:48]While convenience has clear benefits, are we becoming too comfortable for our own good? Well, today, assistant professor in psychology in Trinity College Dublin, Dr. Dr. Dale Wheelen explores what discipline really means, why humans are wired for short-term pleasure, and how people can build healthier habits without becoming obsessed with productivity or self optimization. Dale, welcome back.

[00:01:08]>> Thank you for having me.

[00:01:09]>> Do you know your app last year was the most downloaded episode we had of all of last year's shows?

[00:01:15]>> Well, that doesn't put any pressure on for >> no pressure for another one. [laughter] >> We're like, who are we going to get in to talk about this? And uh the app was just so popular, we said we have to bring you back in. So, how's life? Life is pretty good. Yeah, >> you're in Trinity now.

[00:01:28]>> Yes, I have uh I'm I'm doing the tour of the universities around the country uh at this point. I feel like I've been job hopping a few different places, but yes, in Trinity now, so only across the across the water from me. [snorts] >> Amazing. And you have a uh you're you have a book on the way. You're telling me before we came in here?

[00:01:42]>> Yeah, just a few weeks ago, I got a I got a book deal with uh with Penguin, and I'm going to be writing a book called It's About Time. And it is about the increasing kind of skewed relationship that we have with our relationship to time. What's driving that and how we might create a more humane relationship with time in the future.

[00:02:02]>> Fascinating because we we did cover that in the last episode. Time is something that we are time poor now.

[00:02:08]>> Yeah. Or and there's two things. You're you're time impoverished and then we also perceive time scarcity. And some of that is very real, but some of it's also driven by the fact that we're constantly overwhelmed. So we perceive ourselves to not have much time. And so I'm trying to disentangle some of this subjective feeling versus objective reality and make a clearer path forward for people.

[00:02:28]And I like to position it as the antithesis to time management because uh I believe time management is simply just reinforcing the sort of structure that we already exist within.

[00:02:39]>> Fascinating. Very cool. Okay, let's get into today's topic then. Uh discipline is something that we hear constantly that people need more of. But from a behavioral science perspective, what is it? Is it a personality trait? Is it a skill? Is it something we can train? Is it something we can improve? Is it a conscious decision to change it or you know what is it? I had to do a little bit of reflection on myself, my own relationship with discipline. And I think I've been quite disciplined as a person uh in many ways and then in other ways not very disciplined. So therefore, I think it's something that's much broader than perhaps what we conceptualize it as. So for example, I'm really good at getting up in the morning and writing my book. And there's a great saying that, you know, a novice writer waits for divine inspiration to write, the rest of us just get on with it. Um, and so I think what my relationship with writing has become disciplined. So I just get up even when I don't feel like doing it. Um, but then I also have a tendonopathy which uh in both my shoulder and uh in my leg and I'm not very disciplined in rehabbing that. I'm a physio by background, but I'm actually very poor at rehabbing my uh tendonopathy because it requires me to actually restrain myself somewhat. So actually discipline is not necessarily always doing more. It can be sometimes going against maybe your your disposition.

[00:03:55]>> And are some people I suppose born disciplined? Is it something that we're born with or is it something that we develop over time? again. So I the kind of origin of the word discipline comes from disciblius which originally meant to teach or to learn something and it's also where the word disciple comes from.

[00:04:13]So you were a disciple of something and for centuries you know different schools of thought t thought about uh what are you becoming disciplined in? So stoics uh which is a school of philosophy said that you become disciplined in your sort of awareness and your sense of judgment what's within your control and what's not in your control. But even like formal religion was making people disciplined. It was trying to teach people certain traits in order to achieve some goal towards the end of their life to heaven or wherever else.

[00:04:42]Um the problem I suppose is that from the 14th century onward the war the word discipline moved itself from kind of creating a person's character towards uh institutionalizing uh rules and regulations. Here's what you must do in order to become a disciplined member of society. And with industrial capitalism then that narrow framing of what discipline um became more prominent and essentially we now perceive discipline to be uh productive and non-discipline to be unproductive when actually it had a much broader rematch in the past. So again I think my example is a good example because um I'm extremely disciplined in the sense I'm extremely productive but that doesn't necessarily always serve me. I' I've underdeveloped some of the disciplinary skills that I need to do to rehab myself, which is actually to restrain myself from being overly productive. Um, and so therefore, I think a better relationship with discipline would be to realize good is not always more.

[00:05:41]>> And is being disciplined good or bad?

[00:05:44]But presumably, it's about balance, I would imagine.

[00:05:46]>> Again, I think it's what's driving your discipline. So if you think about motivation, motivation is kind of that fuel that we use to describe um the kind of beginning of an action. And the research would suggest to us that motivation can be both uh exttrinsic, i.e. being um enforced by some form of external rule or regulation, which is typically how we're conditioned. In school, we do activities to uh receive a grade. In work, we uh engage in tasks in order to get remuneration or to get a promotion. Uh but another form of motivation is what's called intrinsic motivation which is when you do something just for the love of it purely and um people will naturally go through a phase of exttrinsic motivation first and then if they really like something they'll become intrinsically motivated discipline then I think is a part of that shift from exttrinsic to intrinsic motivation where you show up uh without that external enforcement but what is driving that discipline is what discerns whether it's healthy or unhealthy. So do you do it because you love it or do you do it because you feel guilty or ashamed if you don't do it? And I think that is uh what we see a lot within society today. There is a disposition in some people more so than others towards perfectionism towards overachieving towards self-optimization.

[00:07:03]Um and if that's being driven by some form of a negative narrative then it's an unhealthy narrative.

[00:07:08]>> And is discipline a lot of the time future focused? Is it about having getting to the top of the job, you know, the job ladder, getting to the marathon, getting to the weight loss goal?

[00:07:19]Therefore, I'm going to be disciplined and do my training. You >> It's predominantly presumably it is.

[00:07:25]It's predominantly future focused.

[00:07:27]>> Yes. I mean, you could look at perhaps if you're going through some form of a therapeutic process and you're trying to maybe rewrite some of the negative narratives about your past or maybe you're trying to uh you know, relinquish yourself of of the control of your past.

[00:07:40]you could engage in sort of CBT as a way to try and keep yourself um disciplined from your cognitive perspective. But yes, by and large it tends to be more future orientated and it's driven by a principle what we call delayed gratification. So typically when people um engage in some sort of activity that they perceive as awarding, rewarding, they get an anticipatory effect where dopamine is released before they actually engage in the activity. It's not necessarily when they're doing the activity, it's in the anticipation of it. um you're essentially training your mind to not follow that dopamine signal all the time. You're delaying the gratification of it with the promise that you will eventually receive a larger goal in the long term. The the risk is that if you constantly keep on elongating that long-term goal. So actually when the time comes to you know reap what you sew and and you know feast on your your success that you simply haven't got the capability to actually be present and enjoy that success.

[00:08:36]you're already thinking of the next goal. That's the risk I think for people >> and that that's time perspective, isn't it? It's about being able to enjoy the the moment as opposed to just thinking about the next thing and the next thing.

[00:08:48]>> Yeah. Like we're constantly being told that we need to be mindful um and to be present, but actually we are conditioned to perceive success as only being future orientated. So there was an academic his name is Philip Zombardo most infamously known for the Stanford prison experiment back in the in the ' 50s60s but he also came up with this theory called time perspective which he says that by and large people can be categorized into having a past present or future orientation and that ultimately shapes their experience of life. And so people can be uh stuck in the past and they could be stuck in the past positively from a nostalgia point of view, negatively from a sort of trauma point of view. They can be in the present whereby they are fatalistic um about you know their their current lives or they can be hedonistic which is they are kind of um what we call on the hydonic treadmill. So they're constantly just seeking those dopamine hits in the present moment. And then the future orientation tends to be past or or positive or negative as well. So if you have a positive evaluation of what your future looks like h we'd call that positive future. But if you actually feel like your future is quite fatalistic as well, you can also have a negative future. So all of those different perspectives ultimately influence things like your motivation, your relationship with discipline.

[00:10:04]You're much more likely to be disciplined if you feel my future is going to be positive.

[00:10:09]>> The problem is, and there was a really famous um study that was done a long time ago called the marshmallow experiment on young kids. And the promise was is that if we gave we offered a child a marshmallow and we said if you have this marshmallow now um you know you can you can do so but if you wait you'll get double in in a longer period of time. And what the research had suggested was that those who were able to delay their gratification were more successful in life later on.

[00:10:36]What subsequent research has found is that actually people who tend to take the marshmallow there and then um do so because their perception of the future is actually uncertain. And you can think about how that's very fundamentally becomes an issue of of equity and equality as well. So some of us have uh safer um more supported environments to be able to think about the future than others. Um whereas others I suppose don't have the luxury to be able to think about the future. they must take the resource when it's presented to them. Um, and we'll talk about this, I suppose, in a minute, but that feeds into then how we determine whether people are productive or unproductive members of society. We assume it's just because they can delay their gratification, but actually it's much more structural than that. And have we seen an increase or decrease in that sense of not being able to stay and enjoy the in the moment things in the moment the way society has shifted now with being constantly on the time you know the issue of time has the the view on discipline or discipline change with regards to society changing as well.

[00:11:40]>> [snorts] >> Yeah, I mean everything is is being driven towards in in a way there's a sort of um paradox because we are um we have a disposition to do what's called temporal discounting. So we tend to undervaluate future consequences uh and reap short-term rewards and actually a lot of our economic systems um are driven in that sort of way.

[00:12:02]People have to report on profits over three months as opposed to 12 months.

[00:12:05]You know it's a return of investment as soon as possible. We are kind of hardwired to be that way and yet at the same time we are pushed towards thinking about the future all of the time. We you know get mortgages with the promises that we will continue to commit to it over however many years.

[00:12:20]>> 25 years in the corner over here. Yeah.

[00:12:22]>> Exactly. And that's just one example but it's the same with like keep yourself healthy now so that when you're older you future proofing.

[00:12:28]>> Yeah. You're you've more successful aging. Um and so there is this tension between um society driving us towards short short-termism but actually also at the same time requiring us to think long term um and it's not always necessarily working um congruently I suppose with us and in wellness and the wellness space it's something that we see time and time again we see in our Instagram Q&A we see it with clients that idea of discipline of how do I become how do I not fall off the wagon? How do I stick to my goals?

[00:12:57]How do I be slightly more disciplined?

[00:12:59]for people listening in I can guarantee that's what they're thinking as we chat through our conversation already.

[00:13:03]>> Let's go down the route of I suppose tips for people to introduce discipline and if they find that they are impulsive or they fall off the wagon in terms of that behavioral change. What are the simplest ways to improve your [snorts] levels of discipline? Well, the first thing I would uh say to you is that typically there is a disproportionate level of responsibility being put on individuals to operate within increasingly complex uh environments.

[00:13:29]So, it is a lot harder now to uh stay healthy uh to eat well, to keep yourself physically active than it was 40 or 50 years ago.

[00:13:39]>> Oh, without a doubt. And it's it's it's it's getting worse.

[00:13:42]>> Absolutely. you are already working against a tide that is pushing you towards uh more sedentary behavior.

[00:13:49]>> Mhm.

[00:13:50]>> So I think recognize that and perhaps release some of the pressure that you place in yourself as not being good enough you know because if you are going to be driven in your behavior change journey from a place of like I am not good enough um you are going to fall off the wagon. So a much more healthy relationship and I remember learning this it was the first day of secondary school from my principal was and it's a simple analogy and you've heard it a million times but you eat an elephant in small pieces. So you um you know instead of doing the half an hour walk if that's too much for you. It might be what you aspire to do start with five minutes. Do five minutes every day and then if that goes well then build up to 10 minutes every day the next week. It's not that you're not capable of perhaps doing the 10 minutes from week one, but actually you need to build your confidence in the process. You need to build your sense of um I can commit to this. They say habits take on average 66 days to form. Now the variation depending on the complexity of the behavior is anywhere from a few days up to hundreds of days. Um but you've got to realize that changing your behavior is not simply as getting up and doing something. It actually requires three different components. So, in the same way that when a person commits a crime, means, motive, and opportunity, you've got to get really curious around whether those three recipe ingredients align for you to actually do this behavior long term.

[00:15:09]>> Means, motive, and opportunity. Let's dig into that. I like that now. That's good.

[00:15:13]>> So, means presumably is the ability to achieve the goal. That's that.

[00:15:20]>> Yeah. I'm going to reframe it slightly in the way I actually think about it, which is called capability, opportunity, and motivation.

[00:15:25]>> Okay.

[00:15:26]>> Yeah. So capability is whether you have um you know the physical uh or cognitive um skills or or you know capacity to actually engage in whatever it is that you're trying to do.

[00:15:37]>> Time could go into that presume as part of the capability. How about the time >> that's opportunity? Yeah. So capability is is basically learning knowledge and acquiring skill.

[00:15:46]>> Okay.

[00:15:47]>> So for example, you're not going to uh go out and run uh 10k for the first time. you need to learn the skill of how to run um and how to run 100 meters and then 500 meters and then 1k and then you know once you get up to five and 10k the your body starts changing and adapting.

[00:16:02]So you've got to build up that skill set um in in the muscle as such opportunity then is yes how do you actually have the physical and social conditions that actually allow you the permission to even engage in that activity. So if you do find yourself time impoverished and time scarce um is there capacity in your life to create more slack to allow you to try and create the space for this behavior to uh have its time to form and then the last one is motivation which again is first of all you will be extrinsically motivated. So what we find is people will use an app like Strava or you know a running app and they get great sense of satisfaction from the achievement of activity and perhaps the the digital visualization of it.

[00:16:46][snorts] Um that becomes really important in initial phases of behavior change. Successful motivation though again we want to bring people to be intrinsically motivated. So they're not doing it because they want their friends to see they run a 5k straa. They are doing it because they want to live a healthier life. today and people go through three phases of motivational change that exttrinsic the second one's called process change so they'll actually get curious around how do I get a little bit better um and so become more motivated by the process and the last one is an identity so the motivation has actually become a core part of the person's identity so they eat well because it's a part of their value system they connect with their friends because it's part of their value system and that takes a long time to get there um so they're kind of the three pieces of recipe and they take time to uh come together and make something that's sustainable for people.

[00:17:34]>> And that's often the hard bit, isn't it?

[00:17:36]The time component >> regardless whether we had this chat 20 years ago, 40 years ago, it's all the same. People want it instantly. They want it tomorrow or they want it, you know, they want it straight away.

[00:17:47]>> That idea of this takes time, wellness takes time, change, discipline, they all take time.

[00:17:52]>> People don't want to hear that necessarily.

[00:17:54]>> And we are being promised instant, you know. I mean I I have a lot of uh strong opinions on the wellness indust illness industry generally in what I perceive to be a lot of window shopping wellness whereby people can simply pick up individualized sort of things that promises them salvation from their suffering. [snorts] Um [laughter] humans have never thrived from comfort.

[00:18:18]>> Yeah. We need to be uncomfortable in order to grow. And humans typically feel that sense of what we call udemonic well-being, which is a more stronger sense of purpose and life satisfaction when they are engaging in some sort of productive discomfort.

[00:18:36]>> And discipline can be toxic, can't it?

[00:18:39]balance as part of the next part of our chat is important to have a balanced approach to discipline because you know that idea of the Mark Wahlberg the 5 a.m. club or obsessive anything obsessive it's very easy to become obsessed when you're trying to be disciplined. Yeah.

[00:18:53]>> And you have to it is important to balance it out.

[00:18:55]>> Yes. And I am a living case study of it because um I do have I have quite bad perfectionism. So I have this constant little nagging voice in my head saying of unrelenting standards. So there is more that one can do. So when you get what it is that you've achieved, you know, what's the next thing? So you don't sit down, you actually figure out what is, you know, what you've achieved and sit sit in that and enjoy it. Um, and again, the toxic forms of discipline come from what are the narratives that are driving your sense of discipline?

[00:19:26]Are you doing it because you feel like you are not good enough? Where is that narrative come from for you? Is it mainly coming from society telling you you're not good enough? Has it come from your childhood? Is there something from your childhood that has said to you um you know some massive moment perhaps for me with running in madly enough um I finished last in a race a cross country race in second class >> okay >> and within two years I'd finished in the top three of it and you might say god what great uh resilience what great adaptability but actually what it did was it reinforced this sort of negative mindset I wasn't being driven from a place of healthiness. I was being driven from I need to prove myself. Um and so I think when it comes to discipline, what's driving it? What's the being curious about the narrative behind it? I was the last person on doing the laps of the perimeter of the school in rugby and been I remember being pushed around in the back by the coach and that was to this day actually is probably my trigger.

[00:20:28]>> Yeah. to do all the other all the stuff that I do and and when I went to college I started doing all anyway that's very deep but that it stems from a lot of it stems from that of being not the fittest not one of the fitter people there and really struggling to run.

[00:20:41]>> Yeah.

[00:20:41]>> And then as I went through my 20ies I began to run and get into marathons and ultras and whatever. Uh but it stems very much I can remember to this day.

[00:20:48]It's just one of those things that sticks in your head. I was probably 10 or 12 or whatever it was. The coach was starting to be really kind of helpful but >> and men were like shocking at it. Like I love that saying that runners are always running towards something or running away from something.

[00:21:00]>> Um but actually you can change like if you really want to change behavior, you need to be curious about where some of these stories have started for you and inevitably those stories have been imprinted somewhere along your childhood.

[00:21:13]>> We do as over the last 1015 years with the explosion in ultra stuff Iron Man's whatever.

[00:21:21]>> Yeah. Can is it fair to say that I've always said it, but you're far more educated than I am with regards to this this idea that there we're increasingly running from stuff. Yeah.

[00:21:31]>> That pushes us into the extremes of these events and become all-encompassing and all obsessive because we're technically running from stress or work or whatever it is. We yeah we love to distract ourselves like we're doing hard things but the harder thing would actually be to sit and confront the reality of what's driving our our sense of unhappiness in the first place. And you know we there was very little uh signals in the environment suggesting that we should do that. The signals push us towards the self-optimization as much as possible.

[00:22:03]But we should be really curious as to why I think I I read something briefly yesterday that male athletes in the US um have skyrocketed when it comes to suicide rates. We think of these people as the most disciplined, most healthy, psychologically resilient people. We should be curious as to why that those statistics should be running up. Um, and it's a problem that's getting worse, particularly for men, um, who are now being fed kind of content from the manosphere to tell them completely neglect and ignore the emotional realities of your life. Suppress that as much as possible. Success for you is ultimately going to be how disciplined you are in your physical activity, your physical health, and your career.

[00:22:44]>> So, what we're saying is do the iron mans and the ultramarathons or the marathons and whatever, but do the therapy in conjunction with Well, if you can't cry, you should be curious as to why you can't cry. And I take that as myself from someone who went six, seven years not crying, doing the marathons and wondering why am I not happy? I said I was finished this marathon and you know I'd feel the reward and you just don't. So there is there is an unconscious part of us whether we like it or not and the the tough thing to do but the most constructive and sustainable thing that will bring us happiness is actually confronting that unconscious.

[00:23:20]>> Love it. Comfort economy. Let's let's pull away from our our own individual whatever issues. Uh talk to me about the comfort economy.

[00:23:28]>> Well, it kind of feeds into that same idea. It's this idea of um society and increasingly a lot of economic activity is driven towards keeping people engaged in a frictionless world. So you can now order your food, you don't have to cook it. You can um you know um stay at home perhaps not commuting to the office although um there's I think there's broader structural issues around commuting time. Um you can have a relationship online and not have to ever meet someone. So there's lots of these things that have removed the frictionless around ultimately what allowed humanity to survive up to this point. And while it might feel nice, it also feels quite hollow for people.

[00:24:10]There's a I suppose the most common example would be hours spent scrolling on on you know Tik Tok or whatever. Uh that's an very easy thing to do, but it doesn't necessarily make you feel good.

[00:24:20]And we are being pushed towards this frictionless economy against our own uh health and well-being. And we should be curious about how do we yeah build the ability to resist some of that. And do you think that's reducing our ability or the younger generations? I sound like an old person when I say that. But the the the younger generation's resilience that they're very much seen as being quite a a poorly resilient se uh generation.

[00:24:47]>> Yeah. And it's interesting that word resilience like as a psychologist I I take for it what it is which is one's ability to bounce back um from a >> bounce back ability.

[00:24:56]>> Yeah, it's a great great word.

[00:24:58]>> Yeah. From an an adverse event.

[00:25:00]>> Uh but it has been weaponized I think over uh the last few years whereby it's a sense of well there's very real structural uh issues and things are a lot harder. Uh the American dream is gone for those generations and for many years they have been gas lit and told to simply be more resilient. Um and I think therefore the word perhaps has lost some of its potential initial um you know meaning. saying that there is an opportunity um you know it is increasingly easy to simply exist in a digital world and that world is frictionless and it is not healthy for our children not to be uh outside socializing um you know meeting uncomfortable situations quite early on in life because if they aren't engaging that friction then they're also not growing. They're not growing in the in the physical ways, the mental ways, social ways, emotional ways, whatever way it might be. And if we don't have those foundational skills from um you know childhood, you can't have a seven-year-old without having a one-year-old. Um or the other saying the pig uh won't be fat come market day, you know. Um so if we aren't being conscious about delivering these skill sets, disciplining kids to have this broader character set earlier on when they inevitably will face adversity, when society will become uh more difficult, when they will go out of controlled environment of education into the world of work or wherever it may be, they won't be equipped with the skills to know how to deal with those moments. And that is a I think a a failure of this the culture that we're now creating. um for for younger generations.

[00:26:36]>> We've covered a lot of ground. Uh deep and meaningful as as always. Uh what would you like people to get from the episode so from the chat that we've had.

[00:26:44]So in terms of takeaways, what would you like them to take away from it?

[00:26:47]>> I mean I am like a behavioral science ultimate ultimately that's my background. So um you people want to engage in you know good behavior change.

[00:26:56]I want people to realize that it's not simply um it's not as simple perhaps as the narrative might make it out to be.

[00:27:03]Um my suggestion would be first of all be curious around why you want to engage in that behavior change first. Is it for a good reason or an unhealthy reason?

[00:27:11]Because when you're further down the track that unhealthy reason is going to come back and and bite you in the ass.

[00:27:15]Um so be curious from the outset. Why are you doing this? Um then be kind to yourself. So you are not going to run the marathon um having never ran before.

[00:27:26]Um manage your expectations but give yourself a pat on the back when you actually do achieve those little goals along the way because you're doing something that society is increasingly pushing you away from which is doing hard things. Um also though realize there are very structural issues in society that have made it harder for people to be healthy. And so always think about in behavior change what is happening in my psychology and what's happening in my physiology. If I'm operating from any point of behavior change in a place where I'm stressed out, I'm time poor, um I'm overwhelmed or that's going to lead to a high level of what we call cortisol within the body. The whole body is going to feel tired, exhausted, in pain. You need to address those fundamentals as much as possible first. if you have any sort of desire to make this behavior change long term. We're not independent um from these very fundamental realities uh as much as self-optimization um lingo might tell us that we are good luck in Glengar hiding yourself away finishing the book off. Uh good luck with the book. When you release it, come and chat to us.

[00:28:37]>> I will.

[00:28:37]>> We'll uh we'll give you every bit of a push that we can.

[00:28:40]>> Appreciate it.

[00:28:40]>> We've covered lots of ground and we really appreciate you coming in. Thank you very much, folks. I really hope you enjoyed today's episode of Real Health with me, Carl Henry. A fascinating episode, lots of tips and tools. We covered a lot of ground and a lot of food for thought there as well. If you liked what you heard, don't forget to rate and review. You know where we are as well for contacting us at Henry PT on Instagram, [email protected], and on the Irish independent website. And we'll see you next week for more real health.