New Age Life - Your Guide to a Better Lifestyle

• Set your subconscious mind to respond to your alarm the right way. You can do this by practicing. Go to your bedroom, darken the room and set up conditions like how you go to bed. Set your alarm a few minutes ahead, and go to your favorite sleeping position, but don’t sleep - pretend that you’re sleeping. When the alarm goes off, stretch your limbs, inflate your lungs fully with air. Sit, and get off your feet with a big smile on your face. Repeat this whole process until your inner voice tells you that you’re ready for it. If necessary, do this the next day too, until you really program your subconscious mind to produce this exact response for this stimulus. A few hours of practicing this can potentially save you hundreds of hours each year.
• The more you practice your wake-up ritual, the deeper you’ll ingrain this habit into your subconscious.  Alarm goes off -> get up immediately.  Alarm goes off -> get up immediately.  Alarm goes off -> get up immediately. Try this, you have nothing to lose.
• Decide to get up early, and commit to yourself to get up half an hour earlier than the previous day. Repeat until you form a habit. Remember? 21 days of repeated action forms a habit.
• How would your life be, if you had no TV, Computer, Music systems or other things that keeps you awake at late night.. Make a choice to keep them away when you need to sleep.
• Don’t go to sleep if you’re not feeling sleepy. Sleep when you feel like, but get up when you want to, just once. So, once you get up early, you will feel sleepy soon at that night. Do this for once.
• Keep your alarm at a distance, so you can reach for it after physically extending yourself
• Breathe in deeply as soon as you get up, and stretch your body - don’t wait, get up!
• Take a cold water shower as soon as you get up, it helps your nervous system to buzz with life. Watch Ishaan therapy by Guruka Singh

Resources:

How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off

Discipline

In my Goals for 2009, disciplining myself is listed as my #1 priority. While researching ways of getting disciplined, i came across some pretty interesting stuff… Let me share them with you:

#1. Guilt Vs. Self-Discipline:

This was the first time that i ever watched a ’spiritual’ video on YouTube!! I found it really enlightening.

Take-aways from this video (by Guruka Singh):

1. Make discipline your best friend.

2. Make discipline a habit, and enjoy doing it. Make it become your lifestyle. and never look back!

3. Develop habit as a routine, and make it an essential part of your life. Make it your ritual.

4. In any case if you were not able to keep up your disciplined routine, move on.. Don’t feel guilty. Guilt is self-torture. It will take you away from discipline.

5. You screw up sometimes.. So what? Make sure that you learn from it, and move on with your new disciplined habit.

#2. Steve Pavlina says:

“The five pillars of self-discipline are: Acceptance, Willpower, Hard Work, Industry, and Persistence. If you take the first letter of each word, you get the acronym “A WHIP” — a convenient way to remember them, since many people associate self-discipline with whipping themselves into shape.”

Did you notice how people associate the word ‘discipline’ to? No wonder why i find it so hard to get myself disciplined! Guilt, as Guruka Singh says, is nothing but self-torture (whipping themselves into shape)!!

When you signal your brain that you are going to undergo a painful process (here, getting disciplined), it will do it’s best to stop that activity, since the primary objective of our nervous system is to protect our body. This is due to what Tony Robbins calls “The power of associations“. Our neuro-muscular system has been designed in such a way as to avoid pain and obtain pleasure. So it largely depends on what we associate our feelings to. This is the basics of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).

Getting back to the topic - We need to associate pleasure to the things that we want to achieve (like getting up early in the morning, doing exercises and meditate) and associating pain with pleasurable sins (like getting up late, unhealthy eating, etc).

So, How to develop self discipline?

• Take small steps, keep it consistent and enjoy the process.
• Reward yourself every week for the commitment you’ve shown.
• Make discipline a habit.
• Associate pleasure to following your disciplined routine.

Conclusion:

Persistence is the key. Not only for this, but for achieving anything.

It Takes 26 Days to Create a Habit, or to Break it.

Cheers!

Radhakrishnan KG

Discipline Discipline, Empowerment, Personal Growth