The foundation that expands everything you care about.
Much of life’s excitement is the product of discovering things we like and then finding novel ways of expanding our understanding of them.
Playing an instrument usually becomes fun after we become skillful enough to play music. A relationship becomes more rewarding when we understand its function in our lives. Painting comes naturally when we intuit how our strokes will come together to create something more substantial than themselves.
Momentum is the child of consistency. Daily commitments are containers for long-term relationships with people, objects, and skill sets. When you commit to returning to something day after day no matter how you feel, it becomes self-sustaining.
Consistency can impact your psychological atmosphere in a way that extends beyond the scope of any project, though it likely increases the amount of art you’ll create.
Below are the psychological benefits of consistency.
It is the foundation for self-trust. If we constantly say we want to change our lives but end up repeating the same maladaptive habits, solitude can become grimmer. As has been said, loneliness is solitude with a problem. In an atmosphere of self-doubt and contempt, there’s a sense of un-redeemability. The feeling that nothing changes no matter what you do. You might recognize this as futility.
Such an atmosphere often becomes the breeding ground for a constant need of company. But the need to be around anyone just to get away from your inner life will make you much less choosy about who populates your life.
Having clearly articulated standards about how you want to feel when around friends is an excellent gatekeeper. It can keep you from becoming bitter or hollowed out by a series of repetitive and pointless experiences. For example, without clearly defined standards for friendship, we might end up standing in line at museums we don’t want to visit for hours. Or we might spend our Monday night in the corner of a bowling alley drinking flat diet soda while our friend texts beside us.
If the people in your life consistently contribute to your being in situations that don’t satisfy, intentioned solitude will likely be a better choice for you.
The question of whether life has meaning becomes irrelevant. A commitment to consistency will make it easier to start the kinds of projects that reward creativity. It’s easier to make traction with writing, for instance, if every writing session is part of building a larger system (a book, a poem, a website, etc.). Such an arrangement will make it much easier to experience flow states. These remind us that attention is itself intrinsically pleasurable — if only because you realize that true concentration lets you leave behind the evaluating voice forever chattering in the background of your mind. Instead you merge with something beyond yourself.
You can rebuild yourself with tools of your own choosing. Our inner lives are the products of exposure. However, in the first half of life, we have much less say over the kinds of messages that make it into our minds. But adulthood is an invitation to do our own programming.
If you choose to be consistent in consuming content from a particular author or genre, for instance, you can reprogram your mind with what you find. Of course, there’s an element of uncertainty here too — you can’t choose what registers with you, and you can’t always know if you’ll agree with or appreciate all the ideas in your content of choice. But as opposed to childhood, when information from culture, parents, or peers often felt like a decree, now there is always an opportunity for dialogue.
Daily exercise is another reset tool. A strenuous workout has been shown to increase BDNF in the brain, vital to the growth of new neurons. This is associated with improved cognition and feelings of well-being. Such a change can be a way of overturning decades of painful memories or thought schemas. It reminds us that our circumstances are not the inevitable determinants of our experience. Every day we have the ability to calibrate the way we feel.
Consistency is a method of reprogramming your life. This framing can make the pursuit of goals feel like it’s missing the mark — what is the point of having a goal if it doesn’t improve your daily experience?
Emphasizing consistency is also a way of recognizing that the path is the goal. We wouldn’t form particular intentions and start projects if we didn’t think there was something about the process that was itself part of our vision of the good life.
