What Is Self-Control?

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Self-discipline is a trainable capacity built in repeated moments of conflict between impulse and intention.

What you can measure, you can improve—even for qualities as abstract as self-discipline.

A behavioural log of temptations resisted vs given in to can turn acts of self-control into behavioural data.

We all know that self-discipline pushes you toward actions that breed success. It drags us out of bed when we'd rather stay there, gets us to exercise when we’d rather not, and stops us from doing things that feel good now but make our lives worse later.

But how disciplined are you? And what if we could measure that?

The idea of measuring your self-discipline almost sounds unnatural—How can you quantify a quality?

But what if measuring it could help you build it?

First, what is self-discipline?

In The Power of Discipline, Daniel Walter describes self-discipline as the ability to fight........

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