Why can't I count on myself?
Updated: 2 days ago
I’m writing this for you. To be exact, I’m writing it for seven people, so if you are one of them, hello, and sorry in advance for how long it is. If you’re the eighth, welcome. You’re early, and there is no queue.
In this post, I have put two journal entries that I wrote three and a half years apart. Through them I try to answer why willpower was never the problem. I then bring in what the Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, two of the Hindu scriptures, say about the same trouble, and that leads to a simpler question to carry through the day: which part of my life am I leaving on its own today? |
I wrote the same page twice, three and a half years apart.
1 AUGUST 2019 Another New Start July had been the worst month of a year already full of new starts. I wrote that I had broken and sealed myself tens of times, promising to keep away from the poisons, only to go back on it the very next day. I wrote that I had stacked one problem over another and waited for them to go away, and all the stacked piles had rotted, and I could not live in the same room anymore. “From today, I Deepak Singh Parihar promise to be the writer I always wanted to be. And I am going to have a streak until the end of this year.” I wrote that I knew what to do, that all of it was in my power. The last line was: “Let’s live from here.” |
8 JANUARY 2023 Constant Life, Second Term A week into a brand new life, I was still scrolling Netflix for the next series to waste my 29th year. “Nobody gets it on their first attempt. The only problem is that it’s my 100th.” A few paragraphs later, almost as an aside: “I could never follow my system for more than a week, ever, since its conception.” |
Both entries were sincere. Both knew exactly what to do. Neither of them could count on the man writing it.
That is the subject of this post, and it is where this blog is headed over the next month. The question was never whether I knew what to do. I always knew. The question was why I couldn’t count on myself to do it.
More willpower was never the answer.
For years the question I asked was “how do I get more willpower?” I kept asking it in different clothes: which app, which routine, which book, which teacher. Every answer worked for about nine days. Nine days is a very consistent result for something that supposedly wasn’t working.
“I don’t have a discipline problem. I have a trust problem. I don’t trust the person who will wake up tomorrow.” A friend of mine |
Asking it this way has a hidden cost. Each failed attempt teaches you something false: that you are the kind of person who doesn’t follow through. After enough rounds you stop making plans, because making one now feels like volunteering for the next disappointment.
Most of us in this loop can describe our ideal morning in detail. Very few of us can describe the last time we actually had it.
The Gita says you have one self, and it can go either way.
The Hindu scriptures have something blunt to say about this. It is in the Bhagavad Gita, chapter six, verses 5 and 6:
“Let a man lift himself by his own Self alone; let him not lower himself; for this self alone is the friend of oneself, and this self alone is the enemy of oneself. The self is the friend of the self for him who has conquered himself by the self; but to the unconquered self, this self stands in the position of an enemy, like an external foe.” (Bhagavad Gita 6.5 to 6.6, Swami Sivananda’s translation)
Two things in that are easy to miss, and I missed both for years.
First, the Gita does not say you have one self and that it is weak. It says you have a self that can be your friend or your enemy, depending on one thing: whether it has been “conquered”, which Sivananda explains as the lower self being brought under the control of the higher. So the person who won’t wake up tomorrow is not someone else. He is you, unsupervised.
Second, the verb is “lift”. It is a physical word. You lift something by getting under it, taking its weight and standing up. Nobody has ever lifted a heavy box by deciding harder.
Patanjali then adds the mechanics. Yoga Sutra 1.14 says practice becomes firmly grounded when it is “attended to for a long time, without break, and with earnestness” (dirgha-kala nairantarya satkara). That is three conditions: length, continuity and care. Notice which one most of our plans skip. Continuity. We plan the length (“30 days!”), we bring the care on day one, and then we miss a Tuesday and the ground goes soft.
Swami Sivananda, who founded the lineage I live inside at Neyyar Dam, had a practical answer to the continuity problem: a daily spiritual diary, filled in every night, with columns for how long you sat, how many rounds you did, when you slept and when you woke. “A diary is a whip for goading the mind towards righteousness and God,” he wrote, and, more kindly, “there is no other better friend and more faithful teacher than your diary.” It is unglamorous and it works, because it moves the question from “am I disciplined?” to “what did I write in the column last night?”
“The person who won’t wake up tomorrow is not a different person from you. He is you, unsupervised.” |
Which part of my life am I leaving on its own today?
So the question I ask now is different. Instead of “how do I get more willpower?”, it is: which part of my life am I leaving on its own today?
To answer that you need a map, and this is the place to tell you where I’m coming from. I like to think of myself as a yogi. Years ago I also read Ken Wilber, whose Integral work describes three kinds of growth that most traditions keep apart. I adapted that for myself long before I moved into the ashram, and I called it Responsibilism, because the word “responsibility” kept turning up in every tradition I read as the thing that makes the other things work. It is my own arrangement, inspired by Wilber and filled in with yoga. It has three steps:
CLEAN UP The psychological work. Removing what is in the way. | WAKE UP The contemplative work. Seeing what you are. | GROW UP The social work. Taking responsibility, making something useful. |
Clean up. Diet, fasting, cleansing practices, shadow work, writing about your past and your future, cold showers and breathing. Most of the daily posts in October (energy, sleep, food, what drains you) sat here.
Wake up. In yoga this is Patanjali’s eight limbs: yama and niyama (the restraints and observances), asana, pranayama, pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses), dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), samadhi (absorption). Day 13 (“Who is watching my thoughts?”) and Day 17 (“Why doesn’t meditation work for me?”) sat here.
Grow up. Taking responsibility for yourself, then for your surroundings, then for more than that. Earning. Becoming a professional at something. Making something of your life that other people can use. Days 14 and 15 (burning out chasing results, why self-improvement plans don’t stick) sat here.
They are steps, not rungs. You don’t finish one and climb to the next. On any given day one of them is left on its own, unsupervised, and that is the one pulling you the wrong way.
The reason you can’t count on yourself is usually that you are working hard in one step and have left the other two alone. The man who meditates an hour a day and eats like a teenager. The man who runs a tight business and has never once sat with his own mind. Each of them is reliable in one lane and absent in the others, and the absent lanes are where the broken promises come from.
The gap between deciding and doing has been measured.
Here is the first thing I found out. The gap between deciding and doing is a known, measured thing, and it closes with a specific kind of plan. A meta-analysis of 94 studies found that “implementation intentions”, which are plans written as “when X happens, I will do Y”, had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (d = 0.65). A 2024 update across 642 tests put the effect between d = 0.27 and 0.66, larger when the plan has an explicit if-then shape and when it is rehearsed. In one of the original experiments, people who wrote an if-then plan were about three times as likely to finish a task over the Christmas break as people who only had the goal. [1]
That is the Gita’s “lift” with numbers on it. You get under the weight by naming the cue.
d = 0.65 effect of if-then plans, across 94 studies | 66 days median time to form a habit, range 18 to 254 | 8,500+ daily posts by Seth Godin, over 24 years |
The second thing I found out is how long “firmly grounded” takes, and here the popular version is wrong. The 2010 paper everyone quotes for “66 days to form a habit” followed 96 volunteers for 84 days. Only 39 of them produced data that fitted the curve, and for those 39 the median was 66 days, with a range from 18 to 254. One missed day did not materially disrupt the habit. [2] So the fair reading is that it takes somewhere between three weeks and most of a year, it varies enormously by person and by habit, and a single skipped Tuesday is not the catastrophe your inner critic says it is. Patanjali asked for continuity. The data says continuity survives a missed day, and that it does not survive the story you tell yourself about the missed day.
You might say: this is all about small habits, and my problem is bigger than brushing my teeth. Fair. The research is mostly on small, repeated actions. But small, repeated actions are exactly what the three steps are made of. Nobody “does Clean up”. They eat dinner before eight, or they don’t.
For a modern case, I’ll give you Seth Godin, who has published a blog post every day for about 24 years, more than 8,500 posts. Asked how, he said it is not a daily decision: “something gets published by me because I decided that 24 years ago.” He writes the posts in advance and keeps “enough in reserve”, so that “if I get the stomach flu, there’s still going to be a blog post tomorrow.” He learned it from Isaac Asimov. He also said that streaks, the kind an app counts for you, are “usually used against us by software”. [3] The person you can count on is the one who decided once and built a reserve, not the one who wins a fresh battle every morning.
I made the counting literal. Here is how.
This is the way I found to become someone I can count on: make the counting literal. It is the version I run, and it has four small parts. After that I’ll show you a week of it, including the part where it falls over.
1. One line per step, on Sunday night. I take a single page and write three lines: what Clean up is this week, what Wake up is this week, what Grow up is this week. One item each. A typical week for me: Clean up, three rounds of Kapalabhati or Wim Hof breathing before anything else; Wake up, sit after the breathing, even if only for a few minutes; Grow up, write the day’s post before the day job starts. If a line takes more than ten words, it is a project, not a practice, and I cut it down. |
2. Each line gets a cue. This is the if-then from the research. “When I’m up and have washed, the breathing comes before tea.” “When the third round ends, I sit.” “When the laptop opens, the post is the first file.” The cue is external and recurring. “When I have time” has never once fired for me. |
3. A column, not a feeling. Each night I put a tick, a cross or a dash against the three lines. A dash means I didn’t get the chance (travel, illness). A cross means I had the chance and didn’t. This is Sivananda’s diary cut down to the size I will actually fill in. I do not write how I felt about it. The column is the whole review. |
4. The restart rule. A cross is followed by the same line the next day, unchanged. No new plan, no smaller plan, no stern talk. The same line. Lally’s data says a missed day doesn’t break the habit; what breaks it is replanning, because replanning is a way of starting over without admitting you’re starting over. |
The Yoga Sutras say this too, and it is the teaching that has stayed with me longest. Sutra 1.33 says the mind becomes clear when it keeps friendliness towards the happy, compassion towards the suffering, gladness towards the virtuous, and even-mindedness (upeksha) towards the wrongdoer. Read it once more with yourself as the wrongdoer. Even-mindedness towards the version of you that missed the session. The Gita puts the same thing in two words, samatvam yogah: “evenness of mind is called yoga” (2.48). The person who can count on himself is not the one who never misses. He is the one who, having missed, stays even, and does the next thing properly when he’s ready. You are moving towards a personality that treats itself like a friend who sometimes makes mistakes, and is forgiven, and does the right thing next time. That is the “friend” of Gita 6.5 in practice. Punishment is the enemy self, dressed up as discipline.
Here is a week where it falls over.
Same page, same three lines. Here is what a week that goes wrong looks like.
Day | Clean up | Wake up | Grow up |
Monday | tick | tick | tick |
Tuesday | tick | tick | tick |
Wednesday | tick | cross | tick |
Thursday | tick | tick | tick |
Wednesday, a cross. Thursday morning, the same line, unchanged. That is the restart rule at work.
Thursday morning is where the temptation shows up. You want to change the line to “sit for five minutes, any time of day”. Don’t. Same line. Then Thursday gets its tick. The urge to renegotiate on the day after a cross is the exact moment the old pattern tries to come back, and the only move is to refuse the negotiation.
41 DAYS In 2024 I did one thing differently, and it is the only reason I trust this method. I took a 41-day practice, to be done twice a day, and I missed sessions along the way. What changed was the next move. I did not punish myself. I did the next one. Forty-one days later I had finished something I had never finished before. |
Everything else on this blog hangs from this post.
This is the first Sunday post, and it is the one the rest of this blog hangs from. The daily posts so far have been the foundations: where your energy goes, and what the mind does when you’re not watching. From now on, every Sunday takes one question like today’s, goes all the way down into it, and gives you one page to use. The daily posts during the week are cut from the Sunday piece, so a new reader can start on any day. November’s question, across five Sundays, is the one you’ve just read: how to become someone you can count on. The question is older than this blog. I first wrote the word Responsibilism in June 2020, as the planned name of a YouTube channel, and I moved into the ashram in August 2024. The Sunday posts are me going back through those years with what I know now. This is Yogic Productivity, and it is what I write about at Seasonal Friend.
This week’s sheet is called Where am I starting from?
The sheet for this week is called Where am I starting from? (PDF). It is one A4 page. The top has the three steps with one line each for you to fill in. Under that, three if-then lines. Under that, a seven-day grid for the tick, the cross and the dash, and one sentence at the bottom: A cross is followed by the same line tomorrow.
Print it, or draw it on any page; the drawing is the point, not the download. Fill in the three lines tonight. Then do nothing else about it until tomorrow’s cue fires.
Download: Where am I starting from? (PDF)
Which of the three steps have you left alone the longest?
Which of the three steps have you left on its own the longest? I’d like to know. If you get this by email, hit reply. I read all of them and answer most.
Next Sunday: Why do I break promises to myself? The promise that is too big to keep, the promise that is too small to matter, and the size in between.
The whole post in one paragraph.
The reason you can’t count on yourself is rarely a lack of willpower. It is usually that you are supervising one part of your life closely and have left the other two parts alone, and the broken promises come from the parts left on their own. The Gita’s answer is that the same self is friend or enemy depending on whether it is under your care, and the verb it uses is “lift”, which is physical work rather than a decision. Patanjali’s three conditions for practice are length, continuity and care, and continuity is the one most plans skip. The research on if-then plans gives continuity a mechanism: name the external cue, and the gap between deciding and doing shrinks measurably. The research on habit formation says a missed day doesn’t break anything; replanning after the missed day does, and so does punishing yourself, which the Sutras answer with even-mindedness and the Gita calls yoga itself. So the method is small: one line per step, one cue per line, a column each night, and the same line again after a cross. |
Sources
Gollwitzer, P. M. and Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69 to 119. Effect d = 0.65 across 94 studies. Update: Sheeran, Listrom and Gollwitzer (2024), 642 tests, d = 0.27 to 0.66. Summary with references: https://goalsandprogress.com/implementation-intentions-research/
Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W. and Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998 to 1009. Median 66 days for the 39 of 96 participants whose data fitted the model; range 18 to 254; one missed day did not materially affect automaticity. Plain reading: https://www.thebehavioralscientist.com/articles/how-long-to-form-a-habit
Seth Godin on The Tim Ferriss Show, March 2024, transcript: https://tim.blog/2024/03/22/seth-godin-3-transcript/
Bhagavad Gita 6.5 to 6.6, translation and commentary by Swami Sivananda, The Bhagavad Gita, Divine Life Society.
Patanjali, Yoga Sutras 1.14 (dirgha-kala nairantarya satkara asevito dridha-bhumih) and 1.33 (maitri karuna mudita upeksha). Bhagavad Gita 2.48 (samatvam yoga ucyate), Sivananda translation.
Swami Sivananda, “Importance of Spiritual Diary”, Divine Life Society, sivananda.org.in.
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