Most people are lazy and complacent. They overindulge in pleasure and sacrifice tomorrow for a comfortable life today. Instead of learning to develop patience and self-control, they waste their time on things that, in the grand scheme of things, don’t matter.

There are different reasons for this behavior. Quite often, they have bad mental health, struggle with overthinking, and attempt to escape negative thoughts through destructive behaviors.

In other cases, their peers and environment pressure them into doing bad habits, sabotaging attempts for improvement and growth.

If you find yourself overindulging to dangerous levels, there is hope for you. You can develop patience, self-control and build a better life for yourself.

To help you with this, I’ll tell you the reasons you lack self-control, how these reasons sabotage you, and how you can develop better self-control on a fundamental level. Let’s begin.

Why You Actually Struggle With Self-Control

Self-control is more complex than it seems at a first glance. To control yourself and abstain from bad habits, it isn’t enough to just use willpower and try your best to resist.

In 9 out of 10 times, willpower succumbs to temptations. Furthermore, it doesn’t eliminate the core reasons for your problem. What are these reasons?

The primary reason you lack self-control is limiting beliefs.

1: You Have Limiting Beliefs

We live in a world where mediocrity is predominant and where fears hold the majority back. People give up on their dreams to live mediocre lives, without doing anything valuable or significant.

The environment of mediocrity and past failures creates limiting beliefs – mental mind points which state that one cannot be or do something, no matter how hard they try.

This mindset provokes scarcity, small thinking, and helps people stay in their comfort zones, without having to experience the discomfort of growth.

You believe that you aren’t good enough to pursue your dreams, that you aren’t good enough to be healthy, or to resist bad habits. You see yourself as inferior to others or as a person who has little value.

Your daily actions are the projection of your inner world. Therefore, if you struggle with controlling yourself and quitting bad habits, the main problem isn’t lack of willpower, but an inferior self-image.

2: You Have Unrealistic Expectations

The next reason you lack self-control is unrealistic expectations. Every person has certain goals that they want to achieve, even if they aren’t written down on paper. In such cases, why do only 5% achieve all their goals, leaving the majority in a state of mediocrity?

It’s simple: high achievers understand that goals take time to accomplish, and focus on consistency instead of intensity.

The majority of people always want quick results: weight loss and a jacked physique in 2 weeks, a profitable online business in 1 month, mastering a sport after 10 hours of practice.

Such unrealistic expectations cause disappointment and influence people to retreat back to bad habits and hedonism. They keep eating junk food, watching TV, and wasting their time for nothing.

If you have no goals to pursue, then this is the core issue, as there can’t be positive movement without direction. But, if the situation I described above suits you, then the problem is impulses for instant gratification.

Related article: How to Resist the Urge to Eat Junk Food

3: You Are in an Unsuitable Environment

We are largely influenced by the objects and events in the outside world. if they encourage mediocrity, instant gratification, and wasting one’s time on irrelevant things, a person finds it hard to resist the urge to indulge.

If you are struggling with patience and self-control, it’s likely because your environment holds you back. How can you quit drinking, smoking, and junk food when you live in a bad area near fast food restaurants and have friends who neglect their health?

You can’t, no matter how hard you try. Your environment gives you signals of what behaviors are acceptable and encouraged, pressuring you into conforming to these standards.

This is why you find it hard to be patient, strive towards goals, and quit destructive habits. Things and people in your life influence your perception of what is normal, and force you to accept this normality, so that you don’t become an outcast.

4: You Lack Productive Habits

The last significant reason you struggle with self-control is a lack of good habits. If you’re reading this article, you likely already know how bad cigarettes, porn, and other similar things are to you, yet you keep indulging. Why?

You simply haven’t got anything else to do. You have no healthy ways to deal with stress and make progress, and so you turn to addictions in an attempt to improve your emotional state.

Instant gratification does give you a temporary relief, a sense of reward, but ultimately, it leads your life into the downward spiral of failure and misery.

If you don’t have any good habits to counteract addictions, you will keep indulging. You will keep spending your time on destructive activities until you get better alternatives.

Now that you know the main struggles of people who want to develop patience and self-control, we can move on to learning practical strategies that can help you stop overindulging.

How to Develop Better Self-Control

The 9 strategies I’m about to offer you are simple, practical, and address the 4 core reasons for impulsive behaviors. The better you implement them, the more you’ll develop your patience and self-control.

First and foremost, you need to find a reason to change.

1: Find a Reason to Change to Develop Patience and Self-Control

It’s easy to stay in comfort and mediocrity when you have nothing good to do and nothing to reach towards. You can keep making excuses and delay your goals, while slowly witnessing the decay of your quality of life.

If you don’t find a good reason to change and a goal to pursue, you will keep focusing on pleasure and hedonism. As Viktor Frankl said, “When a man can’t find meaning in his life, he distracts himself with pleasure.”

Figure out what you want to achieve, and what actions you’ll do daily to accomplish it. Your goal shouldn’t be passive and uncertain (“get rich”, “be happier”), but be measurable and specific (“gain 10 pounds of muscle mass in 3 months”, “quit smoking by the end of the year”).

Find out why you want to do it, what your purpose in life is, and how you’ll pursue the goal. Maybe you want to get jacked to be proud of yourself, and earn passive income to obtain freedom from the system.

Whatever your reasons and goals are, just find them and write them down on paper. It will give you a sense of direction and distract you from the evil temptations.

Related article: How to Stop Watching Porn For Good

2: Adjust Your Expectations to Develop Patience and Self-Control

We live in a society of instant gratification. We always want to see results now, or 2 weeks from now, while putting in as little effort as possible.

Why do you think so many people quit fitness and business a month after starting? Yup, it’s because of unrealistic expectations that cause disappointment when they aren’t fulfilled.

To develop patience and self-control, you need to adjust your expectations properly. Realize that the goals you’ve created in the first strategy take time, effort, persistence, and commitment to actualize, and that you’ll have to push through discomfort to achieve them.

Yes, it sucks. Yes, it isn’t pleasurable. But you need to accept this truth, or you’ll remain the same. You will be much less likely to quit self-development, as you’ll have a realistic and reasonable perception of how much work it takes to win.

Once you’ve accepted that goals require sacrifice and hard work, we can move on to things that you can do on a daily basis. One of the best things you can do to develop patience and self-control is to consistently practice mindfulness.

Related article: 9 Reasons Most People Fail (And How to Avoid Them)

3: Practice Mindfulness to Develop Patience and Self-Control

Mindfulness is the skill of being aware of the Present moment, and witnessing the objects and events that exist within it. Simply put, the more mindful you are, the more you focus on the Now, and the less you pay attention to destructive thoughts.

Most people have little control over their minds. They try to fight negative thoughts through logic and reasoning, but inevitably fail because of how strong they are.

The intuitive approach to combating negative thoughts doesn’t work, as it implies focusing on these thoughts, which automatically boosts their strength.

When you, however, cultivate mindfulness, meditate, and learn not to react to certain thoughts, you develop patience, self-control and make better decisions.

Meditate daily for 10-20 minutes, reduce your screen time, go out in nature, and be in the Present moment as often as possible. This is how you train the skill of mindfulness.

On average, it takes 2 weeks of consistent meditation to start seeing improvements in impulse management and mental health. Once you see them, the next step to develop patience and self-control is to stop making excuses.

Recommended article: How to Erase Negative Thoughts For Good

4: Stop Making Excuses to Develop Patience and Self-Control

Excuses hold you back. You and millions of other people create them in an attempt to justify personal inaction and remain in comfort, away from danger.

Yes, excuses make you comfortable and provide a sense of righteousness. But the longer you believe in excuses, the less time you have left on pursuing your dreams, and the more you keep indulging in bad habits you want to quit.

To develop patience and self-control, you need to realize that excuses don’t improve your life in any way and prevent you from living the way you want.

Start eliminating excuses by regularly taking cold showers, doing hard work when you don’t want it, and trying new things, no matter how hard your brain protests it.

Sometimes, your mind is your own worst enemy. The more you beat it in small daily battles, though, the weaker the excuses become, and the more discipline you cultivate.

5: Change The Habit Triggers

We’ve already discussed how being in a bad environment causes you to stay in mediocrity and keep indulging in destructive habits you want to quit.

There is one aspect of habit formation that significantly influences what actions you’ll do on a daily basis: triggers. These are the objects in one’s environment that pressure them into executing an action to get a perceived benefit.

If you have tons of junk food, substances, and video games in your house, you will experience subconscious influence to indulge in these things. If you, however, change your environment and replace bad triggers with good ones, you’ll start making more progress.

Throw out junk food, alcohol, cigarettes, weed, and other substances into the dumpster. Sell your gaming console. Delete TikTok and Instagram. Buy books and place them in your bedroom. Buy a pair of dumbbells to remind yourself of fitness.

Do everything you can to make your environment encourage positive behavior, and remove objects that cause temptations. If you can move to a completely different place, that’s even better: you’ll associate moving with starting a new life, and find it easier to build good habits.

The next important step to develop patience and self-control is to do uncomfortable things regularly.

Recommended article: How to Stop Being a Feminine Man: 8 Steps to Evolve

6: Do Uncomfortable Things Regularly

Self-control, by definition, is the ability to manage your impulses and do what is necessary, even when you least feel like it.

You need discipline to achieve any goal you’ve set, and without it, you won’t last long. You will keep quitting, abandoning your pursuits, and indulging in instant gratification if you don’t develop your discipline.

There is no other way to develop discipline other than doing hard, uncomfortable things. Pick a chore or task that you hate doing, and promise yourself that you’ll complete it every day, no matter the circumstances.

Don’t feel like washing dishes? Wash the dishes. Don’t feel like ironing clothes? Iron your clothes. Don’t feel like working overtime? Work one hour longer than usual.

It’s going to suck. But the more you do these discipline tasks, the more you develop your prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for self-control and making correct decisions.

Do things that you least feel like doing, and slowly, but surely, you’ll find it easier to resist temptations and make more progress.

Recommended article: How to Enjoy Life as an Introvert

7: Exercise Regularly to Develop Better Self-Control

Exercise has tons of benefits for both your physical and mental health. It improves your mood, blood flow, endurance, strength, and helps you grow muscle mass.

However, exercise can also help you develop patience and self-control. It forces you to push through pain and trains your conscious brain’s power. Furthermore, it eliminates unnecessary thoughts, allowing you to make decisions with clarity and precision.

In my guide to quitting TikTok, I wrote about how experiencing temporary pain elevates the dopamine baseline, improving your overall mood, performance, and motivation. It means that the more you train your body, the happier you are, and the less you crave doing bad habits.

Exercise for 30-60 minutes at least 3-4 times a week. You can do any exercise you want, but I highly recommend you start with weightlifting and martial arts. They increase your masculine energy, boost testosterone, and train you to push past fatigue.

It isn’t hard to do, and the longer you do it, the more you crave to exercise your body. Success in fitness will transition into other areas of life: you’ll be more Present during conversations, focus better, and desire to indulge in vices less.

Recommended article: How to Get Outside More (Even When You Don’t Want to)

8: Use the 5 and 10 Minute Rules

We’ve discussed tips and strategies that can help you improve overall self-control. However, it can still be hard to deal with temptations in the moment, as they are often strong and overwhelming.

I cannot guarantee that you’ll always beat temptations. We are humans, and it’s normal to make mistakes. But the 10-minute rule can help you deal with the problem.

Whenever you feel temptations rising up, tell yourself that you’ll do the bad habit after 10 minutes. Immediately after clarifying that, do something productive. You can crush it in the gym or complete an important work task.

When it comes to doing the opposite, which is forcing yourself to do something necessary, you can use the 5-minute rule:

Convince yourself that you’ll only do the thing for 5 minutes. Focus intensely on the task for these 5 minutes, and, if you do everything right, you’ll enter the flow state and complete your work in 1-2 hours.

These rules are simple and easy to use. They have always helped me get shit done and avoid doing things I would regret. I believe that they’ll do the same for you if you put trust and effort into them.

Related article: How to Stop Being Lazy and Kill Procrastination

9: Shift Your Self-Image to Improve Self-Control

Last, but not least, there is still one more thing you can do to boost self-control. I would even say that your success in this task is mostly determined by this one thing: your self-image.

How you see yourself is extremely important, and it largely defines what you spend your time and effort on.

If you see yourself as a weak, feminine man who lacks confidence, you will act like a spineless coward. If you, however, see yourself as a strong, disciplined, courageous man, you will take risks and work hard to achieve goals.

Identify the traits you want to possess, and how you want to spend your average day. During meditation sessions, visualize yourself acting the way you truly want to in harmony with the new self-image.

Learn how to do healthy habits, and put effort into them, no matter how much your brain tries to resist. Train hard, work with maximum focus, purify your mind by meditating, and spend your time on things that matter.

If you want to develop yourself, you shouldn’t think that doing the right things will eventually fix you. Instead, believe that you are already who you want to be, and then imitate his actions. This approach is counterintuitive, but it brings results effectively.

Change how you perceive yourself, and you’ll develop patience and self-control.

Develop Patience and Self-Control

Most people are lazy and complacent. They constantly indulge in instant gratification and distract themselves from necessary work by escaping to the world of pleasure.

They lack self-control, but you can develop yourself by doing the right things. Use these strategies to succeed in this task:

• Find a reason to change;
• Adjust your expectations;
• Cultivate mindfulness;
• Stop making excuses;
• Manage your habit triggers;
• Complete uncomfortable tasks;
• Exercise regularly;
• Use the 5 and 10 minute rules;
• Change your self-image.

The process isn’t quick or easy, but it is entirely worth it. You’ll go through personal transformation and become the man you aspire to be.

Success in any endeavor needs discipline, commitment, and willingness to work. But if you implement the tips, you’ll succeed. So, develop patience, self-control, and keep improving. Good luck on your journey, brother.

If you liked this article and found it useful, make sure to share it on social media and leave a comment below. See you next time.