Not Falling for That Shit Again Meme

When I was in college, there were some people on the internet who claimed that you could train yourself to sleep equally little as two hours per solar day. Go on in heed, this was back in the early 2000s when nosotros all notwithstanding believed random shit we read on the internet.

Here's how the story went: There was a hyper-productive slumber schedule that had been discovered by military scientists. They were testing the limits of sleep deprivation on soldiers and made this startling discovery. Supposedly, bang-up historical figures like Napoleon and Da Vinci and Tesla followed the aforementioned sleep schedule and information technology'due south why they were and so productive and influential in history.¹ Supposedly, everyone (i.e., you and me) could achieve this country of daily hyper-productivity. Supposedly, all we needed was enough willpower to barrel through days of sleep deprivation and "acclimatize" to this new superhuman schedule. Supposedly, this was all true and verified and somehow made sense.

Supposedly.

The scheme was chosen "The Uberman Sleep Schedule," and here's how you did it:

• Sleep follows the lxxx/20 Rule—that is, lxxx% of your recovery comes from 20% of the time you lot're unconscious. Conversely, 80% of the time you're asleep, you lot're a lazy slice of shit.
• This uber-efficient portion of sleep is called REM sleep and only lasts approximately 15-twenty minutes at a time.² That ways for every two hours that your body is asleep, actually simply the last 20 minutes or and so is "useful" sleep. Thus, when you sleep eight hours during the nighttime, only 80-100 of those minutes are actually causing you to experience rested and restored.³ People on the internet decided this was inefficient and needed to be stock-still.
• What the military scientists (supposedly) discovered is that if you're severely sleep-deprived, your body will immediately fall into REM sleep the second y'all pass out. Information technology does this in order to compensate for its lack of rest. People on the internet decided this was incredibly efficient.
• The idea of the Uberman Sleep Schedule was that if yous took 20-minute naps, every four hours, around the clock, for days and weeks on end, y'all would "railroad train" your brain to fall into REM slumber instantly the moment yous lay downwardly. And so, once your REM sleep was over, you would experience rested and restored for the next 3-4 hours.
• As long as you lot continued to accept xx-minute naps every 4 hours, you could effectively stay awake forever. Congratulations, you lot were at present an Uberman. Here, take a aureate star.
• Only there was a catch: supposedly it took 1-2 weeks of intense slumber deprivation to properly "adjust" to the Uberman Sleep Schedule. You had to stay up all dark, every night, forcing yourself to simply sleep for 20 minutes at a time, six different times per day. And if at any point you screwed upward and overslept your nap, all would be undone and you would accept to start over.
• PS: Caffeine is not allowed. And alcohol might as well be suicide.
• Therefore, the Uberman Sleep Schedule became this kind of decathlon of willpower among internet self-help people—an ultimate examination of one's self-subject field with the ultimate pay-off: an actress xx-30% of productive waking hours per solar day, every 24-hour interval for the residue for your life. That'due south similar having an actress 2 days each calendar week, or an extra three and a half months per yr. That's insane! Over the grade of 1'south life, that's over a decade of actress waking hours. Imagine everything you could reach with an extra decade of life, all while anybody else is asleep.

Like an idiot, I tried to do this. Multiple times. For years, I obsessed with achieving the Uberman Sleep Schedule.

And for years, I continually failed at it.^four

You have probably pulled an all-nighter before. Not sleeping for one night is not that difficult. Especially if there are deadlines and/or drugs involved.⁵

What'southward difficult are the second and third and fourth nights. Farthermost sleep impecuniousness is a crash form on how fragile our heed actually is. Past day three, you will showtime falling asleep standing up. You will doze while walking downwards the street in broad daylight. Yous forget basic facts similar your female parent's name or whether you had eaten that solar day, or—fuck, what day is it?

By twenty-four hours iv you lot become delirious, imagining that people are speaking to you when they're not, believing that you're writing an email when you're not, and then discovering that you don't even think who yous were supposed to be emailing. I used to walk in circles around my living room for an hr, but to keep myself awake. When nap time came, I would crash, falling unconscious instantaneously, and go along to have intense, fucked up dreams that seemed similar they lasted for five hours. Then, xx minutes later, my alarm would wake me up, where I would spend the next iii hours and change desperately lying to myself, trying to convince myself that I felt rested and couldn't wait to go back to—await, what was I supposed to be doing again?

In the finish, I could never make information technology through the fourth solar day. Each time I failed, I felt intense disappointment at my own lack of willpower and self-control. I believed this was something I should be able to practice. Information technology pissed me off that some random people on the internet could supposedly do this thing that I couldn't. I felt similar it meant there was something incorrect with me. That if I didn't have the cocky-subject area to sleep deprive myself for weeks on finish, then what the fuck, Mark? Get your shit together!

So I tortured myself. And the more than I tortured myself, the more unrealistic my expectations of myself became.

***

Chances are, at some bespeak in your life, you lot've tried to change your behavior through sheer willpower. And chances are, yous also failed miserably. Don't feel bad! This is what happens most of the fourth dimension.

Most people think of self-subject field in terms of willpower. If we see someone who wakes up at five AM every day, eats an avocado-chia-fennel-apricot-papaya smoothie each meal, snorts brussel sprout flakes, and works out for three hours earlier even wiping their ass in the morning, nosotros assume they're achieving this through straight-up cocky-abuse—that there is some clamorous inner demon driving them like a slave to do everything correct, no matter what.

Merely this isn't true. Because, if you actually know anybody like this, y'all'll notice something actually frightening about them: they actually bask it.⁶

Seeing cocky-discipline in terms of pure willpower fails because beating ourselves up for non trying hard enough doesn't work. In fact, it backfires. And, as anyone who has ever tried to keep a nutrition will tell you, it usually but makes it worse.

The problem is that willpower works like a muscle. If you piece of work it too hard, it becomes fatigued and gives out. The kickoff calendar week committing to a new diet, or a new conditioning regimen, or a new morning routine, things go great. But by the second or third week, you lot're back to your quondam late-night, cheeto-loving means.⁷

The same mode you can't merely walk into a gym for the starting time time and elevator 500 pounds, you tin can't just start waking up at 4 AM on a dime, much less do something ridiculous like an Uberman sleep schedule. To have a take chances at success, your willpower must be trained steadily over a long period of time.⁸

Only this leaves us in a conundrum. If we view self-discipline in terms of willpower, it creates a chicken-or-the-egg situation: To build willpower, we need self-discipline over a long flow of time; only to have self-discipline, we demand massive amounts of willpower.

So, which came first? What should we do? How exercise we outset? Or, more importantly, where the fuck is the Ben and Jerry's?

Viewing cocky-discipline in terms of willpower creates a paradox for the simple reason that information technology's not true. As we'll see, building self-discipline in your own life is a completely dissimilar do.

Our behaviors are not based on logic or ideas. Logic and ideas can influence our decisions, but ultimately, our feelings determine what we exercise. ⁹

Nosotros do what feels skillful and avoid what feels bad. And the only way we tin can ever NOT do what feels good, and practise what feels bad instead, is through a temporary boost of willpower—to deny ourselves our desires and feelings and instead do what was "right."

Throughout history, virtue was seen in terms of this sort of self-denial and cocky-negation.^ten To be a skillful person, you non just had to deny yourself whatsoever pleasance, but you also had to show your willingness to hurt yourself. You had monks hitting themselves and locking themselves in rooms for days and not eating or even speaking for years on end. You had armies of men throwing themselves into battle for picayune or no reason. You had people abnegation from sex until marriage, or even for life. Shit was non fun.

This classical approach is where our supposition that "willpower = self-subject" originally comes from. It operates on the belief that self-discipline is achieved through denying or rejecting one'south emotions. You want that taco? BAD MARK! Y'all DON'T Desire SHIT! You ARE SHIT! You DESERVE TO STARVE YOU INGRATE!

The root of all evil.

The classical approach fused the concept of willpower—i.e., the ability to deny or decline one's desires and emotions—with morality. Someone who can say no to the taco is a good person. The person who can't is a failure of a human being.

The Classical Arroyo to Self-Subject

Self-Subject area = Willpower = Self-Deprival = Good Person

This fusion of willpower and morality had skillful intentions. Information technology recognized (correctly) that, when left to our own instinctive desires, nosotros all become narcissistic assholes. If we could go away with it, we would consume, fuck, or kill pretty much anything or anyone within a ten-meter vicinity. So the great religious leaders and philosophers and kings throughout history preached a concept of virtue that involved suppressing our feelings in favor of rationality and denying our impulses in favor of developing willpower.

And the classic approach works! …kind of. Well, okay, while it makes for a more than stable society, it also totally fucks us up individually.

The classic arroyo has the paradoxical outcome of preparation united states of america to feel bad nigh all the things that make us feel good. It basically seeks to teach united states of america cocky-bailiwick through shaming the states—by making us detest ourselves for but being who we are. And the idea is that once we are saddled with a sufficient amount of shame nigh all the things that give united states pleasance, we'll be so self-loathing and terrified of our own desires that we'll but fall in line and do what we're told.

Disciplining people through shame works for a while, but in the long run, it backfires. As an instance, let'southward employ maybe the near common source of shame on the planet: sex.

The encephalon likes sexual practice. That'southward because a) sex feels awesome, and b) we're biologically evolved to crave it. Pretty self-explanatory.^xi

Now, if yous grew up like nigh people—and especially if you're a woman—in that location'due south a practiced take a chance that yous were taught that sex was this evil, lecherous thing that corrupts you and makes you a horrible, icky person. You were punished for wanting it, and therefore, take a lot of conflicted feelings around sex: information technology sounds amazing but is also scary; it feels right but also somehow then, so wrong. As a result, you still want sex, merely yous also drag around a lot of guilt and anxiety and uncertainty about yourself for wanting it.

This mixture of feelings generates an unpleasant tension within a person. And as time goes on, that tension grows. Because the want for sexual activity never goes away. And equally the desire continues, the shame grows.

Eventually, this tension becomes unbearable and must resolve itself in one of two ways.

The first pick is to overindulge. The tension has become so great that nosotros feel the simply fashion to resolve it is past going all out in a spectacular style. Hooker orgies. Compulsive masturbation for days on stop. Rampant infidelity. And, sadly, often sexual violence.¹²

Simply indulgence doesn't really resolve the tension. It just kicks the can downward the road. Because after you put the cock rings abroad and the hookers have gone abode, the shame and guilt come back. And they come back with a vengeance.

So, if indulgence doesn't work, what about the other pick?

Well, the only other option to escape that internal tension is to numb it. To distract oneself from the tension by finding some larger, more palatable tension. Alcohol is a common one.¹³ Partying and drugs, of course.¹⁴ Watching fourteen hours of television set each mean solar day can be some other option. Or just eating yourself half to death.^fifteen

Sometimes, people practise find productive ways to distract themselves from their shame. They run ultra-marathons or work 100-hr work weeks for years on finish. These are, ironically, many of the people we come to admire for having inhuman willpower. Merely self-denial comes easy when, deep down, you fucking hate yourself.

Because shame can't exist numbed abroad. It just changes form.¹⁶ The person who exercises religiously to escape their self-loathing volition eventually discover ways to loathe themselves for their practice habits. And soon, what started out equally a remarkable work ethic in the gym morphs into some form of trunk dysmorphia, like those guys who inject Synthol into their arms to make themselves wait similar Popeye.

Prototype: Barcroft

Similarly, the man of affairs who transmutes his shame into stellar work at the office eventually develops shame near his productivity to the point where he literally can't get home. He's terrified to do it. Any non-productive minute feels like an untenable failure. And while the rest of his life falls autonomously around him, he'southward only worrying most spreadsheets and quarterly numbers.

This is why the most hardcore, uncompromising people are usually the ones who are most compromised. It's why the most fundamentalist religious leaders who runway against the immorality of the world are always the same leaders who are ordering fuckboys off Craigslist.¹⁷ It's why the virtually "spiritually aware" gurus are also the ones blackmailing and extorting their followers. It's why the politicians most vocal about party loyalty and patriotism are ever the ones shooting up meth in the airdrome bath. They are running away from their demons. And one way to do that is to create shinier, more socially acceptable demons.

Self-discipline based on self-denial cannot be sustained in the long-run. Information technology merely breeds greater dysfunction, and ultimately results in self-destruction.

The Truth About the Classical Approach

Self-Denial = Emotional Dysfunction = Self-Devastation = -(Self-Subject area)

Here's the problem with all this—and it's and so obvious once you hear it, I can't believe we have to say it. Y'all can will yourself to go to the gym if you don't feel like it for a few days. Just unless the gym ends up feeling good in some style, y'all will eventually lose motivation, run out of willpower, and terminate going. You can volition yourself to terminate drinking for a solar day or a week, merely unless you feel the reward of not drinking, then yous will eventually become dorsum to it.

This is why my polyphasic sleeping nightmare consistently ended in disaster. Staying up all night and sleep-depriving myself produced no tangible benefits. It produced no adept feelings. It produced zip but misery and delirium. It was an exercise in self-abuse. Therefore, my willpower eventually ran out and my emotions took over, driving me to pass out for nearly sixteen hours direct.

Whatever emotionally salubrious approach to self-subject field must work with your emotions, rather than confronting them.

Ultimately, self-discipline is not based on willpower or self-denial, but it's actually based on the contrary: self-acceptance.

Permit's say you're trying to lose weight and your big hang-up is that you lot run through nigh three liters of ice cream each calendar week. You're an ice foam fiend. You've tried stopping through willpower. You've tried diets with your friends. You've told your partner to never ever buy ice cream again in a desperate attempt to blame them for your ain shortcomings.

Simply aught's worked. Not a twenty-four hours goes by that you don't downwards about a thousand calories of creamy goodness.

And you detest yourself for it.

And that'southward your first trouble. Footstep one to self-field of study is to de-link your personal failings from moral failings. Yous have to accept that you cave to indulgence and that this doesn't necessarily make you a horrible person. We all cave to indulgence in some shape or form. Nosotros all harbor shame. We all fail to rein in our impulses. And we all like a good fucking basin of ice cream from time to time.

This sort of acceptance is fashion more than complicated than it sounds. We don't even realize all of the ways that we judge ourselves for our perceived failings. Thoughts are constantly streaming through our heads and without fifty-fifty realizing it, we're tacking on "because I'yard a horrible person" to the stop of a lot of them.

• "I fucked up that project at work, because I'm a horrible person…"
• "The whole kitchen is a mess and my parents volition exist here in 20 minutes, considering I'm a horrible person…"
• "Other people are expert at this, but I'grand not, because I'm a horrible person…"
• "Anybody probably thinks I'm an idiot, because I'm a horrible person…"

Hell, you lot might even be tacking on these self-judgments correct now while reading this! Man, I guess myself like this all the fourth dimension… because I'm a horrible person.

Here's the thing: in that location's a sick sort of condolement that comes from these self-judgments. That's because they save us of the responsibility for our ain actions. If I make up one's mind that I can't give up ice cream because I'g a horrible person—that "horrible person-ness" precludes my ability to change or better in the hereafter—therefore, it's technically out of my hands, isn't it? It implies that there'southward nothing I tin practice about my cravings or compulsions, so fuck it, why try?

There'southward a kind of fright and anxiety that comes when we relinquish our conventionalities in our own horribleness. We actually resist accepting ourselves because the responsibility is scary. Because it suggests that not but are we capable of alter in the futurity (and change is always scary) but that we have perhaps wasted much of our past. And that never feels proficient either. In fact, another little trap is when people accept that they're not a horrible person—but then determine that they are a horrible person for not realizing that years agone!

Simply, once we've de-coupled our emotions from our moral judgments—once nosotros've decided that just because something makes united states of america feel bad doesn't mean we are bad—this opens us up to some new perspectives.

For one, it suggests that emotions are merely internal behavioral mechanisms that can be manipulated like anything else.^eighteen Just similar putting your floss next to your toothbrush reminds yous to floss every morning time, in one case the moral judgments are removed, feeling bad considering you relapsed on the cookies and cream tin simply exist a reminder or motivator to address the underlying issue.

Nosotros must address the emotional trouble the compulsion is trying to numb or embrace up. You compulsively eat tubs of water ice cream each calendar week. Why? Well, eating—specially sugary, unhealthy food—is a grade of numbing. It brings the trunk comfort. Information technology'due south sometimes known as "emotional eating" and the same manner an alcoholic drinks to escape her demons, the overeater eats to escape his.^nineteen

So, what are those demons? What is that shame?

Find it. Address it. And well-nigh importantly: accept information technology. Find that deep, nighttime ugly role of yourself. Confront it, caput on, assuasive yourself to feel all the awful, icky emotions that come with it. Then take that this is a part of you and information technology'south never going away. And that'southward fine. You can piece of work with this, rather than against it.

And here's where the magic happens. When you finish feeling awful about yourself, ii things happen:

1. In that location's nothing to numb anymore. Therefore, all of a sudden those tubs of ice cream seem pointless.
2. You see no reason to punish yourself. On the contrary, you similar yourself, so you desire to take care of yourself. More chiefly, it feels expert to take care of yourself.

And, incredibly, that tub of ice foam no longer feels proficient. It's no longer scratching some internal crawling. Instead, it makes you feel sick and bloated and gross.

Similarly, exercising no longer feels like this impossible job that you'll never exist up for. On the contrary, it replenishes and enhances you. And those proficient feelings start showing up that make information technology feel effortless.

***

Merely yous don't necessarily have to do this deep therapeutic work to gain cocky-subject field. Simply agreement and accepting your emotions for what they are can allow you to piece of work with them rather than against them.

Hither's one fashion to do this: telephone call up your all-time friend and tell them to come over. Take out your checkbook. Write a check for $two,000 to them, sign it, and give information technology to them. Then tell them that if you ever consume ice foam again, they can cash it.

Done.

Eating ice cream will now crusade a much greater emotional trouble than the i it solves. And, as if by magic, refraining from eating ice cream will begin to feel actually fucking good.

Social accountability works in the same way. It'southward much easier to meditate for a long time when you're in a room full of people than information technology is to do information technology by yourself. Why? Because when you're in a room total of people, you don't want to be the lone asshole who gets up and walks out after iii minutes, like you practice at domicile! The social pressure makes it so that not meditating causes a bigger emotional problem than meditating for the full amount of time.²⁰

You can also exercise this through positive reinforcement: find ways to reward yourself for doing the correct behavior. Inquiry shows that this is really how new habits are formed: you do the desired behavior and and so advantage yourself for it.²¹

Once you resolve much of your shame, and once y'all've created situations to provide greater emotional benefits from doing the desired behavior than not doing it, what you end up with is the appearance of closed self-discipline, without actually putting forth whatsoever effort. You stop upwards with discipline without willpower.

You wake up early considering it feels skilful to wake up early.

You eat kale instead of smoking crack because it feels good to eat the kale and feels bad to smoke crevice.

You stop lying because it feels worse to lie than to say an of import truth.

You practice because it feels improve to exercise than it does to sit around, covering yourself in a thin layer of Cheeto dust.

It's not that the hurting goes away. No, the hurting is nevertheless in that location. It'southward just that the pain now has pregnant. Information technology has purpose. And that makes all the difference. You piece of work with the pain rather than against it. You pursue it rather than run from it. And with every pursuit, you become stronger and healthier and happier.

And eventually, from the exterior, information technology will wait as though yous're putting along monumental attempt, that you have this endless reservoir of willpower. Yet, to you lot, it will feel similar zilch at all.

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Source: https://markmanson.net/self-discipline