A Christian Tradition That Can Teach You Discipline Even If You Aren't Religious
Acts of abstention are the key to a better life.
I’m not a particularly religious man but I did grow up in the church, seeing preachers proselytize ancient stories and the subjective wisdom of the bible. Even if you’re the most cynical person towards religion, you can still learn much from Christian traditions.
For example, lent comes every year for Catholics. It goes from March until mid April and pays tribute to Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness. Per tradition, you give up something important for that stretch of time. We can borrow and modify this exercise to bring great benefits to our lives and relationships.
Adding becomes subtracting
Many of the healthiest decisions we make involve stopping rather than starting. Removing bad food from your diet adds energy and overall health. Removing caffeine late in the day adds better sleep.
Per a 2020 report by Twitter’s Lent Tracker, most four popular things people gave up for Lent were:
Social media
Alcohol
Fast Food
Chocolate (and candy)
These are unsurprising suspects for many of you. But what many also forget is that — even if you only temporarily remove these things from your life — you may end up appreciating them more than ever.
I went on a week long fast in my 20s, when I ate nothing, and only drank water and took vitamin supplements (don’t do this without a doctor’s supervision, as I did). When I finally ate again, even bland vegetables tasted better than you’d ever imagine. A cucumber had an almost candy-like quality to it, and a grape was so sweet it made my face pucker up.
Dr. Jordi Quoidbach, of Harvard University, tested exactly this theory. She and her team had one group eat as much chocolate as they could handle, a second group eat when they felt like it, and a third group abstain completely. The experiment lasted one week. At the end of it, the binge-eating chocolate people lost their affection for chocolate. The status-quo group had no change. And when the abstain group ate chocolate again, they said it tasted better than ever.
In essence, abstaining even for a temporary period undoes the hedonic adaptation that dulls our favorite things.
This is also why traveling can make you appreciate your own bed so much more when you get home. The little creature comforts we take for granted will suddenly reach out to hug us.
Newfound freedom instills bad habits
From college until my late 20s, there was this bizarre 360 that happened. Initially, I stayed up late, partying, eating bad food, indulging all the things I’d been discouraged from while living with my parents. I felt like a caged animal who’d finally been set free.
And, like a dog who gets into your refrigerator and eats two sticks of butter, you quickly learn that this freedom carries a cost if you aren’t careful.
Restraint gives you freedom — in the form of feeling good.
And this restraint does something even more valuable than the immediate benefits they confer: they improve our internal locus of control— which is the overall feeling that we control our life path. People with a high external locus of control believe outside forces control what happens to them: destiny, peers, teachers, and an endless list of things that aren’t their own.
A high internal locus of control means you feel like you’re the captain of the ship. You decide you need to do something, and you follow through and implement that gameplan. Unsurprisingly, a high locus of control is associated with all sorts of positive benefits — better health, higher productivity, better workplace performance, and greater satisfaction.
This is why making a decision to quit something, even something small, and then following through on it — is so effective. Admiral Bill McRaven’s thesis with Make Your Bed, centers around this concept and how small acts initiate a chain of events that are in your favor. Making your bed is the small act of discipline that initiates a virtuous cycle of productivity.
Sacrifice doesn’t have to be about you
A 2005 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who made sacrifices for their romantic partners were more likely to be satisfied with the relationship and their life — in addition to their partner being happier too.
But these sacrifices need to be made with positive intentions — meaning, to surprise or help a partner with something important. If we are sacrificing just so that we avoid getting in trouble with a partner — those same benefits weren’t shown to come through.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t friction involved either way. My mother made enormous sacrifices for my father’s military career, moving every year, and effectively giving up her own career to support his. Today, they are one of the happier married couples I know.
Making sacrifices for a genuine and committed partner, sends a signal that you care for the other person, and the union. Which is why we should think deeply about the power of willingly giving things up, and what it can do for us in the long term.
Start with small things
This could mean skipping the extra handful of chips that you usually have with lunch, or skipping playing on your phone before bed, and instead reading a book.
Small acts of omission lead to larger ones. We move away from behaving like a pleasure-binging goldfish, and more towards a sentient, disciplined person.
I went from being a binge drinker, to being someone who has at most one beer a month, and the change has been fantastic. I feel far more rested (alcohol has a nasty habit of disrupting your REM sleep cycle), and lost a few pounds along the way.
Quitting caffeine had the surprising effect of giving me much more energy overall. Even more surprising was that my wakeups are much easier. My baseline doesn’t leave me in the pits each morning. Quitting video games gave me the free-time to write on the side and be more productive. That allowed me to quit my finance career to write fulltime. Quitting is often the first step to starting.
At this point — I’m running out of things to quit — because I love so many of the things I do. But I do feel more in control of my life, and not just at the mercy of every indulgent whim.
Parting tips
Even if you aren’t catholic, consider the prospects of taking a month off from something you regularly indulge in. Consider this question now, “What would I benefit from removing from my life?”
What’s the first thing that comes to mind? Give it a shot for 30 days. Maybe you’ll get to the end of those 30 days and realize you don’t need to go back. The other side of quitting might be much better. And even if you don’t, I suspect that brownie or slice of cake will taste that much better after you’ve abstained from sweets.
Remember that subtraction can be a form of addition. Quitting the bad pre-sleep routine, the snacking, the fast-food, the excessive caffeine and alcohol, will allow your body to do its job that much easier.
And know that sacrificing something for someone you love can pay dividends in the long run, in the form of happiness for you both. Acts of abstention are the key to a better life.
I'm a former financial analyst turned writer out of Tampa, Florida. I write story-driven content to help us live better and maximize our potential.