You Don't Need More Discipline — You Need More Capacity

You don't need more discipline.

You need capacity.

In fact, what I found is that trying to be more disciplined is actually or could be the thing that is triggering your own protective patterns.

And the thing about discipline is it has this punitive tone to it.

Whereas capacity is asking like, what does this organism that is me need in order to thrive? 20 years ago, I developed an eating disorder and the way that I understand it now is that this pattern helped me to manage what was overwhelming for my system.

It was a way of protecting me.

Basically, the food desensitized me and put me into a coma.

And so I would go through this binge purge reset pattern where I would be like, okay, now I'm empty and I'm ready to start again.

You know, you can feel the thread of perfectionism in there.

And that's the trap is that we reach for the thing that is helping to fill us up in some way.

And it puts us into a desensitized state of And then we realize we need to press the reset button because that shame can be so overwhelming.

We need to be able to start again, turn over a new page, clean the slate.

And it becomes almost like this reinforcing pattern that we get stuck in essentially.

But the trouble with the pattern is that over time it erodes our sense of self-trust and We don't feel like we can be trusted and so we need the control and we need the discipline because we can't trust ourselves.