WHY DISCIPLINE IS
SELF-LOVE
Officially on a journey of unlearning the dread attached to the word discipline
Oslo, Norway, October 2026
This morning as I sat down at my desk, I decided to create a weekly writing routine. As I am dedicated to getting my Substack up to business, a weekly writing routine is in order. May I put aside a full day where I only write on my Substack? Sunday? Sundays are for my Substack. I shall place myself in cute cafes, and write from there! How cute. Shall we put a time frame on this? Maybe from 12 to 4? Good, that has now been put into my calendar. Maybe also one morning each week? Maybe Wednesday? From 08–12? Also now in my calendar.
While putting these tasks into my calendar, pressing “repeat every week”, I informed my partner about my new writing routine. Telling him about it made me feel proud for being clear about how to get my writing done, yet somewhere inside I felt like I was punishing myself. Writing being a punishment? I couldn’t understand it. How come writing, which fuels my soul each time, all of a sudden felt like a chore that had to be done?
My partner, a brilliant, creative 6-foot-4 man in his prime, put the moving boxes down and listened as I started:
“Why do I feel like it’s an obligation for me to write? All of a sudden this feels like something I have to do, not something I want to do.”
He casually responded that we often meet the concept of discipline only when introduced to things we do not want to do. Because of this, we have attached acts of reluctance to the concept. Now, when we try to be disciplined in our lives with things we in principle find rewarding, we are reminded of these associations of force and resistance, making it feel like it does not serve us.
My mind, which often needs clear reasoning to make sense of things, landed softly on the comfortable cushion lying in my chair. It looked like my unconscious, now conscious programming, had attached all these tedious practices to the word discipline.
My entire life I had seen discipline as something forceful, implemented only when demanding or uninspiring tasks had to be done. Usually encountering the word discipline in contexts like training a pet, raising a child, or enforcing punishment. Not to mention military order, religious practices, and corporate compliance, where fear and control dominate. Naturally, these associations narrowed my perspective.
I had come to see discipline as nothing more than obedience, blind to its true power as a tool for personal empowerment and self-determined growth.
No wonder I fell deep into a thought-stream of how I am now creating a cage for myself. It felt like discipline had four walls, and my writing schedule was sitting in the very middle of it.
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