Self-Discipline vs. Self-Care: What’s the Right Approach to Reach Your Dreams?

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At the start of a new year or season, there’s a lot of excitement around motivational slogans and challenges. Whether you get inspired by David Goggins’ “Can’t Hurt Me”, doing 75 Hard or taking cold showers every day, all these ideas are centered around self-discipline and pushing yourself hard to reach your full potential.

But at the same time, we hear – or experience ourselves – how hustle culture burns people out, mental health problems are skyrocketing and too many of us feel tired and overwhelmed. That’s why some people are longing for more self-care, more softness, more time for relaxation and letting go of the idea that you have to be productive all the time to be ‘successful’.

It made me wonder: If you want to reach your goals this year, what exactly is the right approach?

Should you be disciplined, put your head down and get to work consistently, no matter how you feel that day? Or do you choose gentler strategies to get to where you want to go, while listening to what your body and mind need in the moment?

Well, that doesn’t just depend on your personality and health, but also on the specific situation you find yourself in. You see, when I was a teenage girl and young adult living with juvenile rheumatism, fibromyalgia and ME/CFS, I found developing a ‘spoonie warrior mindset’ very helpful. Without that drive, I don’t know if I would have found the inner strength I needed to push through the pain to self-study my way to my degrees, to work on my recovery and create a meaningful life for myself.

But now that I’ve done plenty of hard things in my life and have a family to look after, I don’t always have the physical energy nor the desire to get into that state of mind again. My daily life already contains enough moments when I’m stretching my physical, mental and emotional limits. So if, on top of that, I want to do the long-term work to achieve important goals, I also need enough restoration and gentleness towards myself.

When it comes to self-discipline versus self-care, there’s no wrong or right way, they’re just different strategies for different wants, needs and stages of life.

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each approach, so you can decide for yourself what’s best for you right now.

When to Use Self-Discipline to Reach Your Goals

What is self-discipline?

We all know what we should be doing to get healthier, boost our happiness and go after our ambitions. But actually doing those things, that’s a lot harder when you’re tired and overwhelmed, when don’t feel like moving your body and making a salad, when it’s chilly and rainy outside and you’d rather curl up on the couch with a good book.

For self-discipline, consistency is key. You show up to do the work, even if you don’t feel like it. You make a  step-by-step plan to reach your goals and you follow through, regardless of the specific situation you find yourself in that day. In fact, ideally you prepare for the obstacles that could stop you from sticking to your desired behaviors, with if-then planning (“If this happens, then I’ll do….“) and practical solutions, like having healthy meals in the freezer on days when you’re too busy or exhausted to cook.

‘Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments.’ – Jim Rohn

Self-discipline is closely tied to self-improvement, the desire to make yourself better in one or more areas of life. You often need some form of discipline to accomplish measurable, time-bound goals like losing 10 kg, reading one book a month or saving €500 for a weekend away.

Having discipline won’t just help you accomplish things, but it can also shift your mindset. Being able to stick to your routines, no matter what, will change the way you think about yourself: not as a victim of circumstances, but as someone who can do hard things and has some control over the direction of their life. That inner belief forms a solid foundation to tackle more big, bold goals.

Who could benefit from self-discipline?

• You currently have little structure in your life and building positive habits could form a solid foundation to improve your health, feel happier and achieve goals that are meaningful to you.

• If you find yourself stuck inside your comfort zone and you haven’t tried anything new in a while, pushing your physical and psychological limits can help you grow or bring back some excitement into your life. You may also want to expand your repertoire of experiences if you’re still young and relatively healthy.

• You find tough-to-reach goals inspiring and motivating! If you get fired up thinking about crossing items off your bucket list, a disciplined step-by-step plan may be just what you need to make those dreams happen.

• A disciplined approach may be more helpful for measurable goals like ‘running a 5K race’ than for less tangible goals like ‘I want to have more energy’. You do also needed some form of discipline and willpower to reach a ‘negative’ goal, which is any habit you want to quit doing, like reducing your screen time or alcohol intake.

• Sometimes you need a big stick to change, and discipline can help you to stick to a daily routine. Your desire to ‘not break the chain’ could help avoid procrastination, distractions, self doubt and other limiting beliefs.

• For some people, having accountability and ‘positive time pressure’ motivates them to fight off inertia and finish meaningful projects and challenges.

• Your health is stable and strong enough to follow adaptable daily or weekly routines, even on days when (mild!) symptoms play up. ‘Normal’ fluctuations like hormonal changes throughout the month do not affect you much.

Tips for Practicing Self-Discipline

When you’re going after your goals in a disciplined way, it’s helpful to fuel your motivation regularly. Watch the training scenes in Hustle or Rocky, listen to songs that get you fired up, read biographies of people who’ve survived or thrived against all odds.

But be aware that you can’t rely on motivation and willpower alone. As most of us have experienced, you can run out of willpower after a stressful day, so you may still struggle to resist those potato chips late at night. Discipline also means that you change your environment to make it easier to perform the behavior you want to do, like placing healthy snacks where you see and grab them, and make it harder to give in to temptations (so hide those cookies!).

Also, don’t overlook the inner work you may need to do to make changes stick over time. No matter how well you follow your planned schedule, you are not a machine. What’s more, the behaviour you want to improve through discipline may be the result of hidden trauma, inner beliefs about your self-worth or stubborn patterns from your past. Those underlying ‘obstacles’ may not show up right away, but they are often strong and persistent enough to pop up again during times of stress and hardship. That’s why it can be helpful to also understand why you’re overeating, procrastinating or spend hours a day on social media, instead of only changing our habits.

And remember: you don’t have to go all-in all the time! Yes, the winter arc challenge, online business gurus and fitness experts may all tell you that you need to be 100% dedicated to reach your dreams, but that still includes making time to relax your body and quiet your mind. It’s great if you want to join the 5am club and start your day with movement, meditation or ice baths – but only after you’ve gotten enough sleep. You can’t pour from an empty cup, so make sure you don’t end up burning yourself out in the quest for self-improvement.

With that in mind, consider working in sprints. Meaning, you do short, more intense projects or challenges within a set time frame, followed by a few weeks ‘off’ to relax and recharge before taking on a new project/challenge. Think of writing 1,667 words a day for National Novel Writing Month each November or tackling a monthly challenge like Dry January. Working in sprints can be a great way to keep your motivation and energy high, while getting meaningful things done.

Finally, celebrate the victories along the way. Use simple tools like a calendar or bullet journal to track daily habits, and reward yourself for sticking to your plans or reaching certain milestones. You could also take on fun virtual challenges like ‘walking the Inca trail’ or ‘hiking Mount Kilimanjaro’ to stay motivated with your fitness goals and win a beautiful medal upon completion.

Resources on discipline:

• Learn more on discipline in Ryan Holiday’s book ‘Discipline is Destiny’ or listen to Cal Newport’s podcast episode ‘Start with Discipline’. See how you can build better habits with ‘Atomic Habits’ from James Clear or strive for a great, disciplined start of each day with  ‘The 5am Club’ from Robin Sharma or ‘The Miracle Morning’ from Hal Elrod.
• For complete protocols to improve your health, check out Andrew Huberman’s upcoming book ‘Protocols’. A FitBit or Oura ring can also be helpful to track your progress and stay accountable.
• Get inspired by David Goggins’ ‘Never Finished’, or learn more ways to fuel your motivation and how to do hard things in life.

‘Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.’ – Abraham Lincoln

When to Focus on Self-Care to Go After Your Dreams

What does self-care look like?

Self-care can be the goal, as well as a gentle tool to achieve your goals. Maybe you’re striving for less stress in your life, more time for self-reflection, mindfulness and meaningful hobbies. Perhaps you want to spend more time in nature, learn how to cook new healthy recipes or up your wellness game. You can also still have more ‘traditional’ ambitions like getting a promotion or running a race, but you do also care about having an enjoyable or meaningful experience too, not just if you end up where you wanted to go.

‘Self-care is not self-indulgence, it’s self-preservation.’ – Audre Lorde

The self-care approach to reach your dreams is based on the assumption that you’re enough as you are right now, even if life isn’t ideal. Sure, you may want to feel healthier and happier and do things that are important to you, but there is some level of acceptance of your current situation.

And instead of relying on strict plans or external measurements  like the number of steps taken, calories eaten or pages read, you let your inner voice and body’s wisdom guide you. Not in a woo-woo way, but by taking into account how you’re feeling physically and emotionally when you make plans for the day. You try to fit your goals into your existing lifestyle, instead of revolving your life around achieving your goals.

Who could benefit from self-care?

• Your living conditions already force you to push yourself outside of your comfort zone often. Maybe you have a chronic illness or you’re juggling work and caretaking tasks (young kids, sick family members, elderly parents) with little time for yourself. And you deserve some TLC too!

• You’re pretty in tune with your body and intuition. You know how to listen to your body and decide when it’s the right moment to gently push yourself and when you really need to stop and rest. You don’t have any big traumas or limiting beliefs that make you avoid tackling hard things.

• You see your goals as a journey, not just an end result. You want to enjoy the process of getting there too. Maybe you can even take the time to enjoy some surprising side-effects of the new habits you’re building, like how your daily walk connects you more to nature and the people in your neighborhood.

• You tend to be perfectionistic and thinking in terms of “all-or-nothing”. In your mind, you have to do something perfectly every day or it’s a failure. When going after goals, you give it your all for a few days or weeks, before a hiccup happens and you quit, sometimes feeling worse than before your attempt. So don’t set yourself up for that negative cycle and choose a self-care focused approach instead.

• You are dealing wit chronic fatigue, burnout, sensory overload, severe flareups or post-exertional malaise, and the last thing you want is to add more stress on top of an already taxed out body or dysregulated nervous system.

• The dreams you have are somewhat flexible, not necessarily SMART-goals. You’d be happy with any step in the right direction – more energy, better sleep, improved mood, stronger social connections – without getting too wrapped up in how the end result should look like, to avoid possible disappointment when life gets in the way of your plans.

• Taking small steps just suits you better. You enjoy slowly but steadily building on small successes and celebrating tiny victories along the way.

Tips for Practicing Self-Care

Are you in your soft self-care era? You can set some gentle goals for yourself that support your overall wellbeing, like creating relaxing evening routines to wind down before bedtime to improve your sleep. You could take up gratitude journaling to change your thinking patterns and brighten your mood, spend some time in the woods each month to boost your immunity, or try new herbal tea recipes.

If you’re in need of relaxation, make sure you’re getting real rest – and not just the ‘laying on the couch flipping the channels’ kind. You need activities that release tension from your muscles, slow down your breathing and heart rate, and quiet your racing mind. Think of a warm bath, restorative yoga, mindfulness exercises, even singing – whatever triggers your natural relaxation response. Soothing your nervous system and calming your mind are two self-care strategies that form the foundation for feeling healthier and happier.

‘Almost anything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.’  – Anne Lamott

When you want to accomplish goals that are meaningful to you, do keep moving forward, even if you’re moving at a slow pace. Don’t get discouraged by your moderate progress. Like Earl Nightingale said, ‘Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.’ So take as much breaks as you need, but don’t stagnate completely. Keep taking tiny steps towards your goals.

This is especially important for health-related goals with chronic illness, because you don’t want to end up in a vicious cycle of deconditioning, when you lose muscle mass or certain physical abilities due to inactivity, which in turn makes it even harder to move your body well enough to regain your fitness. From a self-care approach, you do make yourself move your body regularly, but you decide in the moment if you want to do serious strength training, some cozy cardio of that gentle stretching in bed is all you can muster today.

And lastly, make your journey as enjoyable as possible. To me, self-care is the opposite of the ‘no pain, no gain’ mentality. Instead, listen to audiobooks while cooking new nutrient-rich recipes. Treat yourself to a healthy hot chocolate after going for your daily walk despite being tired and have a relaxing Epsom salt bath after a stressful day. It can also be helpful to get a journal for self-reflection, exploration and accountability.

Resources to Support Your Self-Care:

• The first step of using self-care to go after your dreams is learning how to listen to the signals your body’s sending you and how to trust your inner voice what’s right for you.
• Feeling worn out and overwhelmed? Learn more about different types of tiredness, the 7 kinds of rest we all need, and how you can make the most of your rest days with chronic illness. Depending on the season, you can also take inspiration from Katherine May’s ‘Wintering’ on the power of rest or try these 10 summer rituals for rejuvenation.
• Get meaningful things done without burning yourself out with help from Kendra Adachi’s ‘The Plan’ and ‘Slow Productivity’ from Cal Newport.
• To improve your physical and mental wellbeing at your own pace, take a look at the powerful principle of ‘Kaizen‘ and 101 small healthy habits you could try. You could also create your own unique action plan for recovery, as well as explore the healing power of nature, art therapy and laughter!

Is there some middle ground between self-discipline and self-care?

Thankfully, real life isn’t as black and white as (social) media picture it to be. You don’t have to choose between being a tough gym bro following strict health protocols, taking ice baths and doing extreme challenges on one hand, or being a soft, nature-loving yogi who enjoys journaling and candlelit bubble baths. You can have a little bit of both self-discipline and self-care.

You can start small, building one daily habit at a time at your own pace and creating a routine that doesn’t feel forced or restrictive, but actually frees up energy. You could be disciplined in some areas of your life, and practice self-care in others. You can take a disciplined approach throughout the (work) day, while focusing on recovery, relaxation and slow living in the evening and weekends. Whatever works best for you.

Conclusion

There is no wrong or right approach to going after your goals, it simply depends on what suits your personality, specific situation and timing best.

And don’t forget: you can mix and match! You can practice self-discipline in your work life or with your finances, but be gentle with yourself when it comes to your downtime, your health or rebuilding your fitness to prevent injury or PEM.

Do you have a preference for self-discipline or self-care when it comes to reaching your dreams?

You can learn more about pursuing your dreams and setting realistic goals when you’re chronically ill by clicking the links.

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