I Forced Myself to Do Hard Shit for 30 Days

…with crazy results

“You have power over your mind — not outside events. REALISE this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius

This is one of the quotes that got me through my darkest times. Realizing and embodying this belief is incredibly powerful.

But is your willpower strong enough to control your mind?

Are you disciplined enough to do what you need to do to get where you want to get, even if these things suck?

Most people these days are a slave to their desires and to short-term gratification.

I think we are partly doing too well for our willpower. For most of us, the refrigerator is always full, we have a car with which we can comfortably get around. We can even access artificial intimacy on the Internet in the form of porn. Everything is becoming more and more comfortable and we rarely have to leave our comfort zone. This makes us weak.

I have noticed in myself that my willpower has diminished.

I became soft.

I know exactly why. All my life I was quite professional in endurance sports. I trained several times a day. Often the first training session started at 7 o’clock in the morning. The competitions were torture, which I enjoyed in a weird way. An endurance competition is probably one of the biggest mental challenges there is. It is a constant balancing at your pain threshold.

Anyone who has ever had to run a mile as fast as they can in school knows that it’s fucking painful. So I was used to leaving my comfort zone.

I was comfortable being uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, a severe back injury forced me to end my sports career. After a few months, I noticed how I was getting soft. I found it harder to do things I had to do even though I didn’t feel like it.

In the gym, I started to shorten sets and I pressed snooze more and more often when the alarm rang.

I became a pussy.

I think the saying is probably true. I can confirm it.

Comfort kills.

Do hard shit.

I knew I had to change something so I challenged myself. I was aware of the fact that I had to train my willpower. Therefore, I forced myself to do 3 things a day that absolutely sucked and pushed me out of my comfort zone for a whole month.

These things were e.g. challenges in the gym: Do as many push-ups as possible in one minute. 2 hours of spinning. Without music. Because it’s harder. These things absolutely suck.

I also took ice-cold showers every morning. I even put in a 3-day phase without eating. Simply because it is uncomfortable. Sometimes I would set an alarm in the middle of the night and do 100 pushups before lying down again.

All these things I absolutely did not want to do. But doing them definitely made me mentally stronger.

The results

My self-experiment worked. I can only advise everyone to leave their comfort zone more often. Just for the sake of it.

I noticed that after a few days it was already much easier for me to get things done.No matter if it was at the university, at home, or at the gym. The same applies to willpower as to any muscle: use it or lose it.

Thank you for reading my article! Maybe you are interested in some of my other ones:

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