Following on from yesterday’s post on the key ingredient of self-love, discipline, today I’m sharing with you an interesting trick that has been my go-to hack recently.

One disclaimer though, it requires self-awareness. What is self-awareness? It is being able to observe your mind chatter, your emotions, feelings, physical state and understand what they might be signalling. Simple example: “Lucy, it seems you are more annoyed with people today than usual. I haven’t eaten properly all day and didn’t sleep well last night – could I get something healthy to eat and take a nap?”.

If you can track your thoughts and feelings throughout your day, you know when you’re getting distracted by something unimportant: social media, TV, chats with friends and family, games, apps, cleaning etc. You can catch yourself wasting your time, stealing your own precious time, filling it with zero added value activities.

You can feel this discomfort of avoiding the activities that you had planned for the day, the ones that are contributing to your long-term goals. And, once you find yourself on YouTube watching a compilation of comedy skits, or replying to a friend who’s sent you a dozen of memes, or mindlessly scrolling through your Insta feed, you stop. Stop, just for a moment.

Instead of doing the things that you feel like doing, that entertain you, you need to do the opposite. You need to do the things that you DON’T. FEEL. LIKE. DOING. The ones you got planned for the day, the ones that move you closer towards your goal. Do them in the same way: mindlessly. Don’t overthink it. You don’t need to know how you’ll do it, why you’ll be doing it, whether you’re doing it right or wrong. All you have to do is shift your energy from dopamine-boosting BS to value-adding quests.

Self-love requires commitment, like any other serious relationship.

Self-Love Academy

You can start slowly, incorporating one important task into your day. Soon enough you will find yourself feeling weird masochistic pleasure from depriving yourself of cute cat vids, Instagram stories and dating TV shows during the day in favour of working hard on creating the life of your dreams. One small task after another, you’ll get addicted to disciplining yourself. You will feel unproductive and disappointed if you haven’t done at least one value-added task.

It is essential to slowly realise that dopamine-releasing entertainment is bad for your mental, emotional and physical health. Just like sweets, it’s awesome when you can savour it, enjoy it every once in a while but not feed on it. It’s going to become clear to you that this isn’t what life is all about. Too much of anything leads to imbalance and eventually results in chaos.

I’m not telling you off or lecturing you, trust me on this one. I spend so much time on Instagram, YouTube and messenger apps that I genuinely feel bad for myself. I have recently started looking at my life with a more sober critical eye and seeing hours and hours of wasteful binging. Ok, I have looked at all of the celebrity accounts and found out their dates of birth and whatnot – how has it benefitted me? What have I accomplished? How have I shown love and dedication towards myself? The answer was a bit brutal: no, Lucy, you just spent time consuming information you will forget and never really need.

Be honest with yourself. Love, including self-love, is not just a fancy word. It requires commitment, like any other serious relationship.

Show commitment towards yourself. Catch yourself wasting your time on people you don’t know, on cats you’ll never adopt, on TV shows that will most likely teach you nothing. There is time and place for this but your time is for you and your goals, dreams, desires. Respect your time and spend it on yourself.

Hope this helps you, dear reader – do share your thoughts / ask questions, I’m always happy to learn from you and help you learn, too.

Yours sincerly,

Self-Love Academy

For coaching on self-love and discipline, please email lucy@selfloveacademy.co.uk