Punishing Yourself Doesn't Work

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

The next time you procrastinate, fall off the wagon, “forget”, or willfully rebel against doing your habits or goals, don’t be tempted to use punishment to motivate yourself.

When you punish and threaten yourself by criticizing yourself, creating restrictions or depriving yourself, making yourself pay contrived fines, threatening to make yourself start all over if you mess up, piling on more work and higher expectations, etc., you create false stakes that undermine your ability to motivate yourself intrinsically.

If you treat yourself like a disobedient child, you remain a child forever.

To reach your life’s greatest goals, you need to treat yourself like the adult you really are. You don’t need made-up consequences when you know the real life consequences of your actions.

When you take action on your goals, you’re more likely to achieve them. When you don’t take action, you don’t achieve them.

Obvious, right?

So if your goals are things you really want to create in your life, not achieving them is punishment enough.

Not achieving your goals means you don’t get to enjoy fulfillment, meaning or personal accomplishment. Instead you get to feel stuck, helpless and empty.

By far the worst punishment of all is being powerless over your life.

Piling on contrived punishments on top of that is unwise, unkind and frankly, ineffective.

Punishment is used to make people do things they don’t want to do for themselves.

Children get punished because they don’t fully grasp the real life consequences of their actions yet.

Your caregivers slapped you on the wrist back then to spare you from getting punched in the face later.

When you were young, others set your goals for you. It didn’t matter if you wanted to achieve them or not. So punishment was used to motivate you.

And it was incredibly effective.

Being punished for bad grades and poor performance got you to the top of your class. It got you to pull all-nighters, do amazing academic feats, become a star athlete, ace the SATs, APs, ACTs, GREs.

And now as a professional, the fear of low performance reviews, getting laid off, being written up, etc. keeps you busy, gets you to overdeliver, makes you compare yourself to others and compete to win. You think, The better I get, the farther I will be from punishment.

So it makes sense that when it comes to achieving your life goals, you’d lean on those tried and true strategies for self-motivation and become your own authority figure ready to dole out pain whenever you screw up.

But that is a mistake. And it points to something even more important:

If punishment is the only way you can motivate yourself to take action on your goals, it’s a sign that you don’t really want to do them.

Instead, you need to get back in touch with what really motivates you.

If you’re not sure yet, start with confronting reality.

Acting on health goals gets you vitality and longevity. Inaction gets you lethargy and illness.

Acting on relationship goals gets you intimacy and love. Inaction gets you loneliness and alienation.

Acting on personal growth goals gets you authenticity and purpose. Inaction gets you emptiness and stuckness.

With every action or inaction, you are either creating a life you want or creating one you don’t.

And those are the highest stakes of all.

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Do you struggle with staying motivated? I can help you access your intrinsic motivation engine, so you can take sustainable action toward your life’s greatest goals. Let’s talk.