Motivation is Overrated: Why You Should Cultivate Discipline First
Transform Your Life By Embracing These 5 Simple “Discipline Habits”
WRITTEN BY THE NEUROHACKER TEAM, APRIL, 2024
Everywhere you look, someone’s trying to get you motivated.
Influencers are constantly posting their “foolproof methods” and workout routines. Your entrepreneurial friends are bragging about their side hustles. Podcasters are pushing you to just “grind harder.”
We want motivation, and we want it now, apparently. It’s seen as the key to a better life: one where you’ve achieved your most ambitious goals and can kick back and enjoy the fruits of all that hard work.
The popular way to view motivation is actually completely backwards. Most people think of it like this:
There’s just one problem.
According to published research, motivation doesn’t make you happy. In fact, the opposite is true1:
The takeaway: if you want a happy life, you don’t need motivation… You need self-discipline.
We never talk about discipline, because motivation is easy and discipline is hard…
Merriam-Webster defines discipline as “correction or regulation of oneself for the sake of improvement.”
Did you notice what’s “baked into” that definition? The understanding that you will fail. You’re going to fall short, or succumb to temptation, and need to correct your approach — again and again.
That’s why discipline is hard — nobody likes the feeling of failure.
But the science is clear: discipline can build a deep, long-term sense of satisfaction in your life. Motivation helps you achieve some short-term goals, but it’s impossible to maintain that jacked-up “hustle” feeling for weeks or months on end.
You should think of motivation as the result of a process that starts with discipline.
To find out why, believe it or not, we need to turn to Scotland.
This 66-year Scottish study may hold the secret to a lifetime of discipline
In 1947, 70,805 Scottish children — all of them born in the year 1936 — took a general intelligence test.2
The Scottish Mental Survey of 1947, as it was called, aimed to test a familiar hypothesis — one we’d be pretty familiar with today: researchers believed that the general population of the UK was becoming less intelligent.
They compared their test results with a similar one that had been conducted in 1943. And it turned out that the hypothesis was false… that Scottish children were actually getting smarter.
But the original study’s conclusion isn’t the interesting part. What’s really fascinating is that these researchers unintentionally created an incredible data set for learning about how our brains age.
The data was actually lost for decades, buried in a library archive… but researchers rediscovered it in the 1990s. They followed up with surviving participants and conducted a battery of cognitive tests on them.3
One of the things that researches measured was resilience — and resilience appears to have an extraordinary effect on your mental health, physical health, and overall well-being.4
As the authors of this study defined it, resilience is “the ability to manage and quickly recover from stress and trauma.”
And that’s exactly what you need resilience — because “becoming disciplined” is a stressful process. Discipline requires setbacks and temptation. The better you’re able to handle them, the more disciplined you can be.
Even more importantly, the researchers found no correlation between intelligence and resilience. It appears that anyone can become resilient.
The number one predictor of resilience in this study? Exposure to childhood stress — at least, a manageable amount of stress. The researchers in a follow-up study referred to it as “healthy stress.”
5 science-backed habits to build unwavering discipline
To an extent, the “hustle culture” influencers have a point: to succeed in life, you’re just going to have to do some hard things.
But you shouldn’t feel like you’re working yourself within an inch of your life. It shouldn’t feel terrible. You need to be in that “flow zone” where the work is challenging, but manageable.
Here’s the kicker: there are a few “discipline habits,” according to scientific research, that can make you more resilient within a matter of weeks.
Want the easiest path to self-discipline? Start with nutrition.
The first 4 “discipline habits” on this list require a lot of work on your part. But nutrition doesn’t have to.
That’s because there are supplements you can take right now that, according to mountains of scientific research, can help your brain be more resilient…
…so you’re able to implement the other 4 habits with a “healthy” amount of stress.
Here are a few standout supplements that have hundreds of studies behind them:
These are some of the most well-studied cognitive enhancers available today. And there are many more that work with them (as you’ll see in just a moment) to promote many more benefits to your cognition.
The bottom line: if you just read that list of “resilience-building habits” and dreaded doing them, you can start by taking things that help you handle the stress better. Then you can build self-discipline and resilience by engaging in healthy stress.
And we’ve got just the thing in mind — something that’s meticulously crafted to help you build bulletproof resilience.
Qualia Mind was designed to help your brain do hard things… with focus, energy, and resilience.
We looked around and saw a world that, while it was getting more connected and vibrant, was also getting more stressful and cognitively demanding.
So we set out to create an all-in-one cognitive supplement that supports the mental conditions for
discipline and productivity: mental focus, clarity, drive, and resilience.
Our team of expert neuroscientists and doctors spent thousands of hours researching, testing, and tinkering the best formula for supporting brain function long-term.
The end result is a supplement called Qualia Mind.
Qualia Mind provides 27 high-purity, biologically available ingredients that help enhance the four areas of focus we mentioned earlier:*
And it provides them in a way that takes the complex workings of the brain into account.
Don't just take our word for it though.
They were blown away by the way it made them feel — after only 30-40 minutes for some people. They reported that their focus and clarity was so fine-tuned that they completed work tasks that usually took all day in one morning.*†
Pretty soon Forbes featured our work on their website. They wrote that they’d seen the best results in boosting focus by using our product.
Since then, word has been spreading about Qualia Mind. It’s already helped thousands of people build a life that’s disciplined, focused… and above all, happy.
And it’s little wonder so many people give it a chance when you realize you can…
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We recommend 5 capsules a day, 5 days a week.
Giving yourself 2 days off is important for preventing habituation — so every time you take Qualia Mind, you’ll feel an effect that lasts throughout the workday.*
If you don’t love it for any reason, just let us know and we’ll refund every penny of your purchase. And you have up to 100 days to do so.
What would it be worth to you to set ambitious goals for yourself… and to know that you had the self-discipline to see them through?
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We must warn you… if you navigate away from this page, you may not find this offer again.
You won’t find it on our regular website — this is a special offer for readers of this article, for people who have proven that they want to be more disciplined.
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While you’re waiting for your Qualia Mind to arrive, you can start planning for a more disciplined life.
Sit down for half an hour and chart out your morning and night routines. Get your gratitude journal ready. Decide how you’re going to fit exercise into your week. Start simple, then build it out as you get better at it.
Remember: healthy stress is good for you. And with Qualia Mind in your toolkit, it’ll be easier to cultivate it than ever before.
Just click below to unlock your discipline.
2 https://lothian-birth-cohorts.ed.ac.uk/history/the-scottish-mental-survey-1947
3 Deary, I. J. (2012). An Intelligent Scotland: Professor Sir Godfrey Thomson and the Scottish Mental Surveys [Lecture recording]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVGICGmdLiY
4 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4846692/
5 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18281642/
6 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7874196/
7 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9281297/
8 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466337/
9 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9441951/
* These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, cure, or prevent any disease.
† Disclaimer: This testimonial represents the actual experience and honest opinions of the author, and is not a guarantee, promise, or reflection of other users’ results.