[If you find yourself looking for a TL;DR, you are exactly the target audience of this post.]

Darren Hardy, the author of "The Compound Effect", asserts that small, smart, choices made consistently over time makes for a radical difference. In his book, he goes in to depth explaining the massive results that could originate from seemingly imperceptible changes in our life. The compund effect integrates naturally in many, if not all, of TRP's topics. Small and smart choices on a daily basis let us create habits and a lifestyle that accommodates real and massive change. We all know instinctively about these choices; someone makes the decision to drag their sorry ass to the gym on a bad day. Someone chooses to skip the donut in favour of eating... nothing else. Before we know it we've dropped 35bls, or we bench 225lb for reps, maybe we talk with every person in sight effortlessly - all thanks to the small choices made every day. The power of this praxeology spells consistency.

To reap the massive benefits from the compund effect, we must first master the art of consistency. Consistency, if you don't know by now, is one of the most important concepts in TRP. The intelligent ones reading this post have already deduced this, but for the spergs out there I'll make it painstakingly clear with the help of the Cambridge dictionary: "[consistency is] the quality of always behaving or performing in a similar way". Read that again. Not only is this crucial in shaping our habits and in the long run - our life, but at it's core, it's an integral part of frame.

Now, you might think to yourself; "Where's my bullet point list about discipline to masturbate to? Did I fetch my lube for nothing?". If this is you, you can go ahead and fuck right off now because you're not in a state to ingest the contents of this post. For the ones still here, I'll describe what practical steps you have to take in order to build a rock solid foundation of consistency with the help of discipline. Consistency is the quality we build, and discipline is the tool we use.

In ranger school the first thing you'll learn is how to stand correctly, how to say yes correctly and how to make your bed the right way. Some men find this practice completely meaningless but there's a much, much higher purpose behind this routine than the crayon eaters understand (they always end up carrying the machine gun). The purpose of executing these seemingly small acts the proper way is to practice your discipline. If you can't convince your peers that you could make your bed when you're dry, fed and after a nights sleep - how the hell could they trust you to bring the right equipment to an ambush, or remember the right frequency for the radio in the field? The point here being; no one is born with a high amount of self-discipine. It is something we practice and get better at in increments, as with everything else in life.

With that lesson in mind we move on to what practical steps you can take to increase your discipline. First, the prerequisite for bettering your discipline in your civilian life is to acquire a physical notebook or calendar. I don't care if you think there's an app that will do the same job in a more convenient way - get a physical notebook. This notebook or calendar will serve as your accountability partner on your journey. The second thing you will do is to create your list. This list is holy to you. You and your list now live together inside your notebook.

The list should contain a number of actions you would like to take every day in order to become the man you want to be. If you want to be big and fit, the list should contain "Go to the gym" as an item. If you want to be a man that reads, you put "Read" on the list. If you want to lose weight the list item reads "make a healthy dinner". You get the point. Now - and this is important - the list should contain a number of small, elementary items. Items such as "Brushing my teeth", "Cleaning the kithen before bed" or, why not, "Shine my shoes". These small tasks will act as our gateway drug to discipline. With your list of items - no more than 10 - we move on to the next step. You now choose one (1) of the simple, gateway items from your list and write that task down on every weekday the coming week in your calendar or notebook. This means;

...and so on.

Now. What ever happens in the world, in your country, in your life, you will shine those fucking shoes. If you get fired from your job - doesn't matter - you shine your shoes. If your friend dies in an accident - doesn't matter - you shine your shoes. If your oneitis begs you to come over and put a baby in her - It. Does. Not. Fucking. Matter. You shine your shoes first. It's just one measly task. This is the mentality you will have over the coming weeks. If something is on your list, you bet your life that you will execute that task and put a checkmark next to it. After you've done that - you're free to do whatever you want. As an anecdote, this is what Jocko means with discipline equals freedom.

Here's the important part for all you computer touchers¹ ; the shoe shining doesn't have to be perfect. It is imperative that you understand this. Some days even the small task of shining your shoes will seem insurmountable, the important part is that you execute the task anyway. In practice this means that you pick up the shoe, brush it once, and then put it back. There. You can put a checkmark in your notebook for today. Allowing yourself to execute this task without it being perfect alleviates the pressure of doing it in the first place and you should, with a clean conscience, say that you are done with the task for today. But you will do it. With time you will notice that shining your shoes becomes much easier, and you will start to do it with a higher degree of precision. This is your mind telling you that the task has become a habit - it is no longer something that is hard to do.

The second week, you add another simple item to your notebook from your list of tasks. You will have to trust me here, because you will have an urge to add multiple or more complex items to your list. Nothing stops you from doing these things anyway but you are not putting them on your holy list. Yet. Your list now contains "Shine shoes" and "Brush teeth". Guess what. These are two things that are now part of your life and something you do not, under any circumstance, skip. I can not stress the importance of not overloading your list with items the first month(s). Anyone who started 5x5 starting strength with ego weights knows exactly what I'm talking about. The load goes from easy to impossible real quick. It's the same with discipline. You will crash and burn if you increase the holy items too quick. To be clear; you start to add the simple items (the light weights) to your notebook and build on those easy tasks with more challenging items like "Go to the gym" or "Make small talk to a stranger". Only you know the inherent hierarchy of your items regarding difficulty. You now see where this is going. For every week that goes by, you add another task to your daily list of things that you will do no matter what. For example, a day in week five could read:

This means that you gradually increase your discipline while also building a life that you want, and a life that you don't compromise with either. This method helps you to not just build a frame of consistency, but it will also assist you in holding that frame when your friends asks you to join them on a three day bender, or when that oneitis wants some attention and thinks she can squeeze some out of you. By the time you add the last task to your list, you will be executing the first items by habit.

Yes - it will take time for you to put all your items on your list - but that's the point. During this time you are effectively practicing your self discipline either way, and for the ones of you that have none at all, this is exactly what you need. Small, progressive, overload. Not advice on how to get lean in 30 days or a youtube video explaining the concept of discipline for you. No. With this method you are taking action. Real, measurable action. And that's the only way to build discipline.

Disclaimer: I have used this method for a long time and it have helped me to great extent. However, the method falls in line with many authors and their work which I agree with, such as James Clear, Charles Duhigg, Jocko Willink, Angela Duckworth

1: The perfectionist archetype, Computer Toucher Disease by Itiswr1tten: (Reddit wont let me link directly)

Disclaimer: this article is both a presentation of what dopamine really is, and a field report from my experience regarding increasing my own well being. The article draws from multiple sources but I highly recommend you check out Dr Andrew Huberman and his podcast as he explains the science behind dopamine in more depth while being very entertaining as well as clear and concise.

Tired of being tired?

“I’ll check the the Red Pill sub. Maybe there’s a new post a I can bashturbate to. Nah. Nothing there.

[New Chrome-tab]: Fa… Nah. Already checked Facebook today. [Close Chrome-tab]

[New Chrome-tab]: Redd… fuck sake, I just closed reddit. [Close Chrome-tab]

[New Chrome-tab]: Pornhub.com [ENTER] Nah, not her – ugly. Lemme check next page…

Ringing any bells? Are you currently feeling lethargic, unmotivated or perhaps even depressed?

I’ve been where you are. I’ve experienced the brain fog and the feeling of utter apathy. Granted, it was a some time ago now, but I wish I discovered then what I know now. There’s a remarkably high chance that your lack of motivation is caused by fucked up dopamine.

I’m here to tell you how to take back your motivation.

Dopamine

Dopamine. You’ve all heard about it in some way or another. The popular understanding of dopamine sounds something like this; “Big Tech develop their apps to serve a user experience that produces a dopamine hit to get you hooked”, “Dopamine hits from porn makes you addicted” or why not “Dopamine is the pleasure hormone”. The common popular opinion is that dopamine is responsible for the experience of pleasure and reward in our body.

I’m here to tell you that’s wrong. Wrong in the sense that dopamine plays a much, much more important role than that of a pleasure dispenser.

To start off, we need to understand that dopamine is a neuromodulator. This means that it’s different from the more commonly known neurotransmitter. Neurotransmitters are responsible for the task of forwarding messages from one neuron to another, meaning they operate on a very local scale. Neuromodulators on the other hand influences bigger parts of your brain, so called neural circuits.

When dopamine molecules are released in your brain, it activates some of these neural circuits and deactivates others. Dopamine is powerful precisely because of this substantial geographical influence.

So what does dopamine influence then? Dopamine is primarily responsible for our motivation and drive.Our urge to pursue things in life outside of ourselves – both short term, like food and water, and long term, like our goals or women. This have been one of the biggest discoveries in neuroscience in our time, but the perception that the main function of dopamine is to make us feel good is apparently hard to kill.

Dopamine is also critical for our ability to move. People with Parkinson's disease have a critical dopamine deficiency.

So, dopamine is responsible for our motivation and drive, and supplemental for movement. However, the motivation part and the movement part are divided into separate neural pathways. In this article we will only discuss the motivational part.

In the case of dopamine our brains have a constant release of dopamine, a baseline, going on at any point. This baseline is called the tonic release of dopamine. Your brain has another way of releasing dopamine called the phasic release which describes, in relation to the baseline, an added amount – a a peak that occurs when we achieve or acquire something we really desire. The phasic release, the peak, is what people mean when they talk about dopamine hits.

I’ll now introduce you to two facts you’ve probably never heard of when it comes to dopamine.

The first being that the reward you feel from dopamine peaks depends on your previous dopamine levels. This means that something rewarding, like a piece of chocolate, might feel incredible if you eat it while your dopamine is at baseline-levels. If you eat that piece of chocolate just after having a cigarette (cigarettes are also known to increase dopamine-levels) that piece will not feel as good as the one you had from baseline.

This means that the threshold for enjoying something you like increases all the time. This is very closely related to addiction.

The second fact that is vital to understand is that;

Every time you experience a peak of dopamine, a drop down below the baseline bigger than the peak itself will occur shortly after, before the dopamine slowly works its way back to baseline.

Read that part a second time. This means that every time you experience a peak in dopamine, you will suffer a blow to your motivation and drive, shortly after. Ever wondered why you get stuck on Youtube, Netflix or fucking God forbid TikTok for hours and can’t seem to get a hold of yourself and go do something else? Well, you are actively, but not knowingly, raping your own ambition.

It’s not that the videos are so interesting you can’t leave, it’s because they (and you) consistently create a small peak in your system and then an even bigger drop. For every peak, there’s a deeper valley waiting. This realization was the foundation of my curiosity about learning to control this mechanism.

Furthermore; all of us have different dopamine baselines. Just as with testosterone, you can have a higher or lower dopamine baseline. And guess what? This actually results in you having a higher or lower drive (or: ambition) than the next person.

If this doesn’t blow your mind, as it did with mine, you should probably stop wasting your time reading this article. It blew my mind mind because it clearly tells us that if we can manipulate the baseline of dopamine, we can basically increase our ambition and drive in life.

Good news is; we can.

Increasing the baseline

So as you can guess there are a billion events that can increase your dopamine momentarily. But what about increasing the baseline? Are there things we can, realistically, do to increase it?

Turns out there are, one of which you are familiar with.

Cold showers.

Coffee.

Cold showers (or baths) are proven to actually increase the baseline levels of dopamine for a long time without the subsequent crash. In a study, cold water submersion proved to increase the dopamine level by an insane 250%. To offer you some jaw-dropping perspective, this increase is equal to the increase you get by taking cocaine (250%), and offers a bigger increase than having sex (200%).

Chances are since you are reading this on TRP you know about cold water submersion already, and might be skeptical to these numbers. That’s fair. What we need to understand when it comes to cold showers is that to reap these benefits we actually have to endure a lower temperature for a longer period of time contrary to what we might think.

The study that produced the aforementioned results had the participants submerged in water at a temperature of about 15 degrees Celsius/59 degrees Fahrenheit for about 10 minutes before they recorded these results.

With that said, you don’t have to work with these extremes, I certainly didn’t and I in no way recommend it as a starting point, but it should give you a clue as to why you might haven’t felt the boost if you tried cold showers before – your cold shower was simply too hot.

Coffee might seem like a strange addition but there’s a good reason. Coffee itself doesn’t raise dopamine-levels extensively, but what it does is that it increases the amount of dopamine-receptors. This means that coffee essentially acts like a lubricant for your dopamine, and enhances the effect of the dopamine released. I should clarify that it’s the caffeine in coffee that does this, so it will work with other caffeine sources as well.

Field report

So, you now understand that we all have different baselines of dopamine circulating in our brain. This baseline determines how ambitious you feel, and the peaks we experience are closely followed by a drop in motivation.

When presented with this information I decided to test it out for myself. I made the key assumption that any stimulant such as screen-time, exercising or listening to music will trigger a phasic release of dopamine. In fact, I assumed that any time I did anything that stimulated by brain in some way, an increase in dopamine would occur. This is probably not the case, nevertheless I used this assumption because I wanted to avoid the inevitable drop in dopamine that comes after the peaks so I could ‘get to know’ my baseline better.

I started out on a Saturday morning by taking two full days off any external stimuli, except for exercise. I removed all social media from my phone and put away my laptop. I did this because I wanted to allow my dopamine to level out. This basically meant that when I wasn’t cooking dinner or working out I spent my time sitting down somewhere, thinking and reflecting.

I then proceeded by adding cold showers every morning to my daily routine, except for Sundays. I wanted one day without the showers. Part because they’re painful but also to see if I experienced a drop of motivation that day. Immediately after the morning shower I had a cup of coffee, the reasoning behind this being that I would use the two tools discussed above in conjunction with one another.

I also tried to schedule events that would increase my dopamine momentarily so the following drop in motivation wouldn’t affect my day. For instance; later on when I used my social media, I did so in the afternoon when I’d accomplished all I wanted to do that day, so the inevitable drop in motivation couldn’t affect the outcome of that day. This conscious mapping of peaks-and-drops throughout the day is referred to asdopamine surfing.

I’ve now completed my seventh week with minimal digital stimulation and cold water submersion and I can honestly say that my feelings of motivation and drive have skyrocketed. The main difference I notice is that everything I do, I now do deliberately and with more purpose. Eating well and exercising is completely effortless. I use my laptop and social media but I use them for very specific reasons and on dedicated times during the day. Starting out the cold showers were a pain but I now do them every day because I truly feel more calm, focused and motivated. As for the temperature I’m now down to about 18-19c/64-66F for about 3-4 minutes.

New guys on on this sub can easily get caught up in the notion that you have to maximize your productivity and be as efficient as you can during every waking hour of every day. I’m here to tell you that I have clearly experienced the benefits of added motivation and clarity due to turning down the constant stream of stimulation offered to us by modern society.