How To Stay Disciplined And Consistent

For most of his writing life, Anthony Trollope had a full-time job. He worked for Britain's General Post Office for more than thirty years, traveling around Ireland and England inspecting mail routes and helping set up the country's first roadside mailboxes. He also became one of the most successful novelists of the 1800s, writing 47 novels along with dozens of other books, stories, and articles.

He managed both by doing the same thing every morning. He paid an old servant to wake him before dawn and bring him coffee, and by 5:30 he was at his desk. He wrote for three hours, finishing before he dressed for breakfast and went to his day job. And he wrote with a watch sitting in front of him. In his autobiography, he explained the rule he held himself to:

He kept a diary where he wrote down how many pages he'd finished each week, and if he fell behind for a day or two, the record was there in front of him until he caught up. He kept writing when he traveled. On a rough voyage across the Mediterranean, he wrote his pages every day, and more than once he left them on the cabin table and ran to his room to be seasick before coming back to finish.

Trollope wasn't known as a genius. When his autobiography was published after his death and readers learned how he worked, some critics thought less of him, because writing by the clock seemed too ordinary for a real artist. But his books have stayed in print for more than 150 years, and he explained why his method worked in a line that fits almost anything:

Most of us know the spasmodic Hercules. It's the person who works out six days in a row in January and then not again until March. It's the person who writes 5,000 words one weekend and nothing for the next two months, or who reads the Bible every day for three weeks and then doesn't open it until the next New Year's resolution. It may be you.

You go hard, burn out, feel guilty, and wait until you feel motivated enough to start again. And the usual advice doesn't help much: be more disciplined, push through, want it more. You've tried that. It works for a while, and then it stops working.

The idea behind this article is that most people have been told only part of the story about discipline and consistency. They've heard it's about willpower and toughness.

The research, and a lot of old wisdom, says it's mostly about something else: a reason you actually care about, habits that run without much thought, surroundings that make the right thing easy, a pace you can keep, a sense of who you are, what you do on the days you miss, and how you protect all of it when your life changes.

Put those pieces together and you get what Trollope had, a small daily task that really is daily.

The two words get used together, but they mean different things, and it helps to separate them.

Discipline is doing what you decided to do, even when you don't feel like doing it in the moment. It's the gap between your plan and your mood. When you get up to write at 5:30 because you said you would, even though you'd rather sleep, that's discipline.

Consistency is doing it again and again over a long stretch of time. Discipline is about a single moment. Consistency is about the pattern those moments add up to. You can be disciplined for a week and not be consistent. Trollope was consistent for decades.

Here's why the difference matters. Most people think that if they can be disciplined enough in each moment, consistency will take care of itself.

But if every single day depends on winning a fight with your mood, you're going to lose some of those fights, and eventually you'll lose enough of them in a row to quit.

The people who stay consistent for years have found ways to make most days not require a fight at all.

You've probably seen this line on posters and social media: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." It's almost always credited to Aristotle. Aristotle didn't write it. The historian Will Durant wrote it in his 1926 book The Story of Philosophy, as his own summary of Aristotle's ideas.

Durant did summarize Aristotle well, though. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argued that we become good at things, and become good people, by doing the same good actions over and over until they're part of us. And he said this about the habits we build:

That's the heart of it. Consistency comes mostly from what you've made into a habit, much more than from how hard you can push on any given day.

If you picture a disciplined person, you probably picture someone fighting their urges all day and winning. The research paints a different picture.

In 2012, Denise de Ridder and her colleagues combined the results of 102 studies, covering more than 32,000 people, to see how self-control relates to the way people actually behave.

They found that people with more self-control did behave better across many areas of life. But when they looked at what kind of behavior self-control was linked to, the connection was significantly stronger for automatic behaviors, the things people do out of habit without much thought, than for controlled, deliberate ones. Self-control showed up most in what people did on autopilot.

Brian Galla and Angela Duckworth wanted to know how that works. In 2015, across six studies with more than 2,200 people, they looked at eating, exercise, sleep, studying, and school performance.

They found that people with high self-control tended to have stronger good habits, and that those habits explained much of why self-control led to good outcomes, all the way to college grades and whether students stayed in school. People with strong good habits also reported needing less effort to resist temptation.

In other words, the people who look the most disciplined are often the ones relying on willpower the least. They've built habits that do the work for them.

That's the first missing piece most discipline advice leaves out. If you're trying to be consistent by forcing yourself every day, you're using the method that works least well, and the one that wears out first.

There's one more thing that affects how long you keep something up, and it comes before any habit: why you're doing it in the first place.

In 1999, the psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot followed college students over a semester as they worked toward goals they had set for themselves. They measured how much each goal fit the student's own interests and values, which they called self-concordance, as opposed to goals pursued out of pressure, guilt, or to please someone else.

Students whose goals fit who they were put more sustained effort into those goals and were more likely to reach them. Trollope loved writing, and Daniel's prayers came from his faith. Neither was forcing himself through something he didn't care about. Before you try to be consistent at something, make sure it's something you want for your own reasons.

Daniel was taken from Jerusalem to Babylon as a young man, and he spent the rest of his long life serving foreign kings. By the time of the story in Daniel 6, he was one of the three top officials over the entire kingdom of Darius, and the king was planning to put him over everyone.

The other officials were jealous and looked for something to accuse him of. They couldn't find anything. The Bible says "they could find none occasion nor fault; forasmuch as he was faithful."

So they decided their only chance was his faith. "We shall not find any occasion against this Daniel," they said, "except we find it against him concerning the law of his God."

They convinced the king to sign a law that for thirty days, anyone who prayed to any god or man other than the king would be thrown into a den of lions. Then they waited to see what Daniel would do.

"As he did aforetime." Daniel didn't make a dramatic new decision that day. He didn't have to work himself up to it. He did exactly what he had done every day for years: the same room, the same open window, the same three times a day. The habit was so much a part of him that even a death sentence didn't change it. He was thrown to the lions, and the Bible says God shut the lions' mouths.

The story shows two things the research confirms. First, Daniel's consistency came from a habit tied to a set time and a set place, not from a burst of courage in the moment.

Second, it was built long before he needed it. When the pressure came, the habit was already strong enough to hold. That's what consistency looks like. It gets built on ordinary days, so it's already there when the hard days come.

A habit is something you do automatically when you're in a certain situation, without having to decide to do it. It forms when you repeat the same action in the same situation over and over, until the situation itself triggers the action. Daniel's window and his time of day were the situation. Trollope's desk at 5:30 was his.

Habits run a large share of daily life. When the psychologist Wendy Wood and her colleagues asked people to record what they were doing throughout the day, about 43 percent of their actions were things they did almost every day in the same setting, often while thinking about something else. That's the part of your day that doesn't require willpower, and it's where consistency lives.

If you've read other articles here, you'll recognize the Wood study above and the Lally study below. They keep coming up because they're the foundation of what researchers know about habits.

How long does it take for something to become automatic? In 2010, Phillippa Lally and her colleagues at University College London followed 96 people who each picked one new daily behavior, like drinking a glass of water with lunch or going for a run before dinner.

On average it took about 66 days for the behavior to become automatic, but the range was huge, from 18 days to 254. More complicated behaviors, like exercise, took longer to become automatic than simple ones, like drinking water.

The more consistent the situation, the faster the habit forms, because the situation is what eventually triggers it. "I'll work out sometime every day" never becomes automatic. "I'll put on my running shoes as soon as I get home from work" can.

The second missing piece is how much your surroundings decide what you do. Wendy Wood calls this friction: anything that makes a behavior take more time, effort, or distance. A little friction can stop a behavior. A little less can make it easy.

Some of the evidence is almost funny. In one classic study, researchers slowed down how quickly an elevator's doors closed, by 16 seconds, and more people took the stairs instead. Nobody was trying to get people to exercise. The stairs just became easier than waiting.

In another example Wood cites, people whose gym was about 3.6 miles from home went about five times a month, while people who had to travel about 5.1 miles went only about once a month. An extra mile and a half made the difference between a habit and an occasional trip.

That means the fastest way to be more consistent is often to change the setting instead of trying harder. Trollope made his morning writing easy by paying someone to wake him and bring coffee, so the first step was already done. You can do the same thing. Put your running clothes next to your bed.

Leave your Bible or your book on the chair you sit in every morning. Keep the laptop open to the document you're working on. And add friction to what pulls you away: leave your phone charging in another room, log out of the apps that eat your evenings, and don't keep the snacks in the house.

Every bit of friction you remove from the good habit, and every bit you add to the bad one, is a fight you won't have to win with willpower.

A lot of popular advice says that if you just start calling yourself a runner or a writer, you'll act like one. It's worth being careful here, because the most famous study behind that idea didn't hold up.

In 2011, researchers reported that asking people how important it was to "be a voter," instead of how important it was to "vote," raised turnout by more than ten percentage points.

But when other researchers repeated the experiment with thousands of people, in three separate large studies, they found no difference at all. Changing a label by itself doesn't do much.

What does hold up is the other direction: what you do shapes who you think you are. In 1967, the psychologist Daryl Bem proposed what became known as self-perception theory. His idea was that we often figure out what kind of person we are the same way other people do, by watching what we actually do.

If you run four mornings a week for three months, you start to see yourself as someone who runs. That's close to what Aristotle said more than two thousand years earlier: we become what we repeatedly do.

This matters for consistency because it builds on itself. Each time you show up, you add a little more evidence that you're the kind of person who shows up.

After enough of those days, not doing it starts to feel out of character, the way skipping his prayers would have felt to Daniel. So don't start by trying to convince yourself you're disciplined.

Start by giving yourself proof, one small day at a time, and let the way you see yourself catch up.

One of the most common ways people lose consistency is by starting too big. The spasmodic Hercules goes from nothing to an hour at the gym every day, or from never writing to 3,000 words a night. It's exciting for a week. Then a busy day comes, the huge task doesn't fit, and one missed day turns into ten.

Look at what Trollope actually did. He wrote for three hours a day, and he didn't try to write for twelve. He had a set amount, 250 words every fifteen minutes, that he could meet on a normal day and even on a seasick day.

Lally's research points the same way: more complicated and demanding behaviors take longer to become automatic. The bigger the task, the longer it depends on willpower before it runs on its own, and the more chances you have to quit before it gets there.

So start with an amount so small that you can do it on your worst day. Ten minutes of reading. One page of writing. A 15-minute walk. Once that's automatic, add more.

Consistency with a small task builds the habit, and the habit is what lets you do more later. A small task you do every day will carry you further than a big one you do in bursts.

You will miss days. Everyone does. Even Trollope admitted that later in life he had become "a little lenient" with himself. What happens after a missed day decides whether you stay consistent.

Here's the good news from Lally's study: missing a single day didn't meaningfully affect whether a habit formed. One bad day doesn't erase the progress you've made.

What does the damage is the story people tell themselves afterward: "I broke my streak, so I've failed, so I might as well stop." That turns one missed day into a month off.

So decide ahead of time what you'll do after a miss. The simplest rule is to start again at the very next chance, not next Monday or next month. Many people use a plain version of this: never miss twice in a row.

If you missed today, tomorrow's session matters more than any other, because it's the one that keeps a missed day from becoming a new pattern. And when you come back, go back to your smallest version of the task, so there's nothing standing in the way of starting.

Many people who were consistent for months lose it all at once, and it's usually not because they stopped caring. Their life changed. They started a new job, moved, had a baby, went on a long trip, or their schedule shifted. Suddenly the habit that ran on its own is gone, and they can't figure out why.

The reason goes back to how habits work. A habit is triggered by the situation around it: the time, the place, the people, what you did right before. Change the situation and the trigger disappears.

In a 2005 study, Wendy Wood, Leona Tam, and Melissa Guerrero Witt followed college students who were transferring to a new university. They tracked the students' habits for exercising, reading the newspaper, and watching TV before and after the move.

The habits only survived the move when parts of the situation stayed the same, like reading the paper with other people as they had before. When the setting changed, the habit fell apart.

There's another side to this that researchers call habit discontinuity. When your routine is disrupted, your old habits lose their grip, and for a while your choices are more deliberate.

That makes big life changes, like moving, starting a job, or becoming a parent, one of the best times to build new habits, because the old ones aren't in the way.

So when you know a change is coming, plan for it. Decide ahead of time where and when your habit will happen in the new setting, and tie it to something that comes with you, like your morning coffee or the moment you wake up, instead of a place you won't be anymore. Drop to your smallest version for the first few weeks while the new situation settles.

That's what Trollope did. He built himself a small writing tablet so he could write in railway carriages, and he kept writing on ships and while traveling for work, because his habit was tied to the morning and to a set number of pages, and those came with him wherever he went.

Here's what all of this can look like in one person's life.

Picture a woman named Alicia. She's 31, works in an office, and has tried to get in shape more times than she can count. Every January she signs up for a gym, goes hard for two or three weeks, and then stops. Each time, she tells herself she just needs more discipline.

She starts with why. This time, before she does anything, she asks why she wants it. Looking good for other people isn't enough to keep her going, and she knows it because it's never worked before. What she really wants is energy for her kids after work and to stop getting winded on the stairs. That's something she cares about for her own reasons.

She picks a time and a place, and starts small. Instead of the gym five days a week, she decides on a 15-minute walk around her neighborhood right after she gets home from work, before she sits down. It's small enough to do on her worst day.

She removes the friction. The old plan had a 20-minute drive to the gym. The new one starts at her front door. She leaves her walking shoes by the door and keeps a jacket on the hook next to them, so the only thing she has to do when she walks in is turn around and walk back out.

She keeps a record. She puts a paper calendar on the fridge and marks an X for every walk. After three weeks, she has a row of X's she doesn't want to break.

She lets her actions tell her who she is. Around the two-month mark, she notices something. She doesn't have to talk herself into it anymore. She walks in, changes her shoes, and goes out without thinking about it. When a coworker asks how she stays so consistent, she realizes she's started thinking of herself as someone who walks every day.

She misses, and comes back. In the third month, she gets sick and misses four days. The old Alicia would have taken that as the end. This time she remembers that one missed stretch doesn't undo the habit. The first evening she feels well enough, she does a short five-minute walk, just to get back out the door. The next day she's back to fifteen.

Her life changes, and she plans for it. In the fifth month, she starts a new job with different hours, and she gets home an hour later. She can feel the habit slipping, because the old cue, walking in the door at 5:30, is gone. So she moves the walk to the morning, right after she drops her kids at school, and ties it to that. For two weeks she keeps it to ten minutes while she adjusts. Then it's back to normal.

A year later, Alicia walks about 30 minutes a day and has added two short strength workouts a week. She never became someone with endless willpower. She built something small, protected it, and kept coming back to it.