It has taken me years to hone discipline with my gym and fitness routine but is now a baked in habit aka ‘lifestyle’. This means a 5am something start no matter what or how I’m feeling and a habitual accountability check on nutrition, sleep, hydration and supplementation.
I’ve learnt the stop / start failure of ‘motivation’ surges that soon regress into inferior life habits.
Motivation gets far too much credit. We spend millions on seasonal ‘initiatives’ or short term inspiration pieces. Motivation is volatile, emotional, and short-lived. Anyone who’s worked in product, health tech, or behaviour design knows: people are motivated all the time right up until the moment they aren’t. Motivation might get your users a few weeks’ engagement for a ‘dry January’ app that attempts to reduce alcohol consumption. Apps like Fabulous excite users by the self-improvement narrative but churn as the habit-forming tasks become repetitive. Same for Headspace – wonderful onboarding but many don’t complete the 10-day meditation course.
The real challenge is adherence. Not the first run, the first login, or the first use. But the second, third, tenth, and fiftieth. And for those of us building digital products, especially ones that promise behavioural change, that’s where the work really begins.
The Psychology of Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do
Adherence is the ability to stick to a behaviour regardless of mood, motivation, or momentary distractions. In psychological terms, it’s closely tied to self-regulation and executive function prefrontal cortex stuff. This is the same part of the brain involved in planning, impulse control, and delayed gratification.
And it turns out: humans are generally quite bad at it – no surprises there!
Psychologists have long observed that willpower is finite, subject to depletion (Baumeister’s ego depletion theory) and highly influenced by context. This is why someone can smash their workout before work and still eat half a cake at 9pm.
So, if humans are hardwired to choose the path of least resistance, how can we design products that encourage adherence even when motivation is gone? From my own personal experience it takes time, learning by frustration and being accountable to yourself – knowing that MOST of the time you should follow the ‘good path’ – but how to get there? And how to sow that into the minds of those using your products?
From Spark to System: Motivation vs. Discipline
In the behaviour change space, BJ Fogg’s model is often cited: behaviour = motivation × ability × prompt.
It’s a useful framework, but the motivation part is shaky. What Fogg and others have shown is that motivation can trigger action, but sustained behaviour comes from ability and smart prompts. In other words, making it easy to do the right thing.
This is where product design comes in.
Products need to be more than engaging they must become rituals – a lifestyle. This means:
- Reducing friction to make the desired action easier than the alternative
- Creating feedback loops that reward not just results but consistency
- Building in constraint, not choice overload (see: Duolingo’s streaks, Calm’s daily reminder)
- Normalising tiny wins, not giant leaps
When Strava sends you a notification that your friend has just gone for a run, it’s not “motivation” it’s a social nudge that bypasses your rational brain. When Headspace offers you a single tap to resume your session, it’s not deep inspiration it’s simplicity leading to adherence. As digital use has proven our attention spans are reduced, we’re time poor and anything, however small, that blocks progress will lead to churn in the moment and possibly eventual abandoment.
Is It Even Possible to Design for Discipline?
Discipline, in the traditional sense, is internal. But digital products can scaffold it. Not replace it, but support and reinforce it until it becomes habit. I believe that lifestyle should transcend habit. Lifestyle speaks to the real long term, something that is even hard to break than habit.
Psychologist Wendy Wood, in her book Good Habits, Bad Habits, argues that most of our behaviour isn’t governed by decision-making but by context and environment. Change the environment, and you change the behaviour.
In product terms, this means:
- Timing matters. Prompt the action when the user is most likely to do it.
- Identity matters. Make the user feel like someone who does this kind of thing.
- Defaults matter. Most users will do what’s set for them.
This is why the best behaviour-change apps don’t just remind you they create identity loops. You’re not just tracking meals, you’re a “streak holder”, a “progressor”, part of a community. You’re not just meditating, you’re someone who meditates. I notice that Apple’s new workout buddy has made me feel that there’s a community there keeping me going, telling me my baseline. It’s wonderfully simple but also effective.
Adherence Without Autonomy Is Control
Designing for adherence isn’t about coercion. It’s about reducing cognitive overhead and supporting the user’s own goals. The moment a product becomes overbearing – in other words, too many nudges, too much shame it gets deleted.
So we tread a line. The best products design for the version of the user they want to become, not the one they are today. But they do it respectfully. This also means that we should survey users as to the pushes they receive – some are fine with continuous reminders but others might be temporarily busy (e.g. moving house) and might want to pause notifications for a few days but not eternally. Design for individual customisation and preferences and you’ve a better chance of moving from adoption, through to habits that stick and ultimately lifestyle change and a high LTV!
We can’t force people to be disciplined. But we can build products that make discipline easier than indiscipline through structure, simplicity, and subtle design.