Chapters 1-7 are designed to make your fire of motivation gradually stronger and stronger. It’s only question of time before you start feeling motivation to start removing all the remaining factors that have potential to derail you from ever more productive line.
These factors are your vices and addictions. It doesn’t matter whether these are smoking, sugar, porn, social media, games youtube or anything else, these vices are the only remaining thing that can destroy your willpower and put you back into procrastination cycle.
DO NOT WORRY, you don’t have to sacrifice anything right now! I can assure you that after gradually doing things from chapters 1-7, you will eventually feel like you want to start addressing behaviour patterns that you know are not good for you. If you don’t feel like quitting smoking for example, this just means your fire of motivation is not big enough yet.
Removing vices and addictions will stabilize your level of motivation and willpower because every vice works in the same way. Firstly they increase your feeling of motivation for a short amount of time, but then they crash your motivation below level you started with.
The problem is, that the every crash lands you lower in terms of willpower. It gets especially bad, when you begin combining vices, like weed, junk food, porn, games also called a dopamine binge. Your levels of dopamine will stabilize after a few hours or days after binge, but will meanwhile disrupt your productivity and well being.
The solution is simple: start gradually decreasing amount of vices and observe how you feel. Allow yourself to feel discomfort of not having a cigarette. You can still have it but only after you observed the feeling for a few seconds or minutes.
There are 2 strong forces that will help you overcome vices and addictions:
- When you allow yourself to feel discomfort of not having a cigarette (or any other vice), you will overcome the fear of discomfort. And the fear is usually the biggest component of every addiction.
- Your feeling of well being you built from stages 1-7 will make you less miserable when you decide to deny yourself a vice. If I offered you 1 million dollars to not indulge in any vice for the next 5 days, you would feel ecstatic about not smoking for example. That would be external motivation, but by following steps 1-7 your will build a internal motivation which has the same effect!
Don’t say to your self: “from tomorrow I will not smoke weed/eat sugar/watch porn ever again”. Approach it with mindset: “Before I indulge in any vice, I will first observe my feelings and thoughts that emerge if I don’t do it straight away, and when it gets too bad, I am free to do it.” Accept that you are addicted and be happy that you work on it. Every moment is a progress towards the point where eventually feeling of not having becomes stronger than feeling like having it.
If you do it gradually like that, there will be no shock or misery, just like there is no shock or misery if you slowly but surely dip your body into the swimming pool.
