Discipline as a form of self-love
It’s not unusual for me to start the year thinking about my health. I often set health-related goals and use the fresh slate of a new year to rethink the way I’m approaching my self-care.
But this year feels different: I’ve started running again, and I even signed up for a 10K (the last race I did was more than a decade ago!). I’m keeping up with my Lagree classes. After taking a break last year, I’m back to seeing my personal trainer again for a few sessions a month to get some extra strength training in. I’m focusing on eating foods that make me feel good and fuel my body; I’m drinking a lot of water; and I’m getting in bed early enough most nights to have a really good night’s sleep. I’m also limiting alcohol and cooking at home more than dining out. I have to say: I feel really good—the best I have felt physically, emotionally, mentally, and energetically in a long time. It’s exciting to me, and the best part is that what I’m doing actually feels sustainable. I’m committed to keeping it going.
Contrast that with last year: I made commitments to my health, but I was in a very different season of life. I was feeling a need to be extremely gentle with myself. I was traveling a lot more than I am now, and my husband and I were going through a big life change with moving into our new house, so I wanted to do what I could to make other parts of my life as stress-free as possible. 2024 became my year of slow. I stopped working out with my trainer so that I didn’t have to commit to a set schedule, swapped running for long walks, and stopped holding myself to early bedtimes. I wasn’t as mindful about what I ate, and I gave myself permission to eat out or order in if that felt easier than cooking. I started doing Lagree fitness, which is a kind of workout that is all about slow, deliberate movements.
In 2024, my philosophy was, “If it makes me happy, I’ll do it.” If I woke up and didn’t feel like exercising, I didn’t. If I wanted to eat something, I ate it. If I wanted to stay up late and watch a movie, I did. There were so many times last year when I had commitments on my calendar to go to a workout class or when I told myself I’d go for a walk after work, but I didn’t always stick to those commitments because I just didn’t feel like it. At the time, I really thought that what I was giving myself was self-love. But what happened is that I started not to trust myself. I started to realize that putting something on my calendar didn’t mean that it was going to happen, and it became easier to fall back on excuses. I was living for short-term satisfaction: I didn’t think about the consequences of not moving my body or eating something that might not make me feel the best. The consequences showed up anyway: I ended the year feeling fine, but not great. I certainly didn’t feel at my best physically, and I didn’t have the high levels of energy and vibrancy that I wanted to have.
In no way am I saying that last year was a bust or a failure. By sticking to my “whatever I want is what’s going to happen” mentality, I showed myself more love and gentleness than I’d ever shown myself before. It was a lesson I needed and wanted to learn, and I had a really happy and fulfilling year because of it.
But this year? I’m in a totally different place—and maybe it’s because I gave myself that chance to slow down last year.
At the beginning of 2025, I got really honest with myself: I realized that my well-intentioned focus on self-love had also started to become an excuse not to take care of myself in the way that I truly wanted to deep-down. I realized that living only for short-term satisfaction—and not thinking about how something might make me feel long-term—is not really the highest level of self-love. I reflected on the fact that discipline is something I often rebel against, but really, discipline is a form of self-love. It’s about making the decision to do things today that you might not want to do in the moment in order to build the future that you really want. It’s about making decisions that your future self will be happy and grateful that you made.
This year, I’m taking my self-care to a higher level. My vision for myself in 2025 is about lovingly pushing myself to do the things that will lead to me feeling like the best version of myself—even when I might not want to do them in the moment. I want to use discipline as a tool to help me feel my best physically, mentally, and emotionally.
But there’s a catch. Last year taught me that it’s okay to have moments where I decide not to push myself. Before 2024, I spent years pushing myself way too hard, and not only did that make me feel not-so-great, but it also led me straight to burnout. And then, in 2024, I hardly pushed myself at all. Now that I’ve spent time in both extremes, I can see that they each have merit. My challenge now is finding a balance between the two and recognizing when keeping myself at one end of the spectrum is doing more harm than good.
Here’s the way I’m thinking about it so far: When I am physically ill or emotionally or mentally zapped, I will ask myself what will truly make me feel better in that moment. If my answer is missing a workout, then that’s what I’ll do. But if I wake up and just don’t “feel” like moving my body, that’s when I know that the resistance is coming from my mindset, and I need to push through it. I’ll know that I’ve done the most caring thing for myself when I feel really good after I work through that resistance and am grateful that I did the thing—which happens nearly 100% of the time.
I’m also finding that when I notice a pattern of not wanting to do something for myself that I’ve committed to, I need to dig deep and think about why. Maybe I’m feeling bored with my workouts, for example, which could mean that I need to switch them up. Maybe the time of day I’m trying to do something just isn’t working, and shifting my schedule would help. Maybe I need to make some changes so that I can bring back some excitement around a project I’m working on. I want to remain curious about my resistance and what it’s trying to tell me.
Another way I’m thinking about this is in terms of results. For example, last year, when I was making a lot of excuses in the name of self-love, I didn’t get the results that I really wanted: I didn’t feel my best physically, and I didn’t always feel rested, rejuvenated, or vibrant. To me, all of these things are really important, and I value them a lot. When I don’t feel them, I feel out of alignment.
Now that I have discipline around doing what will help me feel my best, I’m getting different results. I have energy that I haven’t had in a long time. I feel stronger every week as I train for my 10K. I feel physically great in my body. I feel vibrant. And that’s how I know that what I’m doing today is true self-love.
And it makes sense, right? On a team or in an organization, if you don’t have accountability around your goals, you’re probably not going to get the results you seek. And if someone on your team was consistently making excuses and finding ways to avoid accountability at every turn, they probably wouldn’t be on the team for very long. Sure, you can give someone grace for a period of time, but you can’t give the same person grace every single day and allow them to keep making excuses—it wouldn’t make sense to keep them on the team.
Even though I dubbed 2024 my year of self-love, I’m actually loving myself even better in 2025. I’m really proud of what I’ve done so far, and I’m really excited to keep it going.
So now, I want to ask you: When do you think it makes sense to push through your resistance and when does it make sense to give yourself a break? What does true self-love look like and mean to you? I don’t have the answers for you; each of us has to find that for ourselves. This is something that I’m thinking about a lot as I go into this year, and I hope it inspires you to think about it, too.
Hit reply and tell me more! I’d love to know.
We’ve got this!
Big hugs,
