Punish Yourself
Reach Your Goal Using This Scary Method

Punish Yourself

If you feel that rewarding yourself isn't working - then to punish yourself instead might be the way to go...

If you're familiar with my article on how to wake up by rewarding yourself, then just imagine this article to be the complete opposite ;-)

And if you're also familiar with the "carrot and the stick"-metaphor, then this will all make sense to you.

As you know, we often use the carrot to motivate ourselves forward, but sometimes it's a must to also have a stick right behind us in order to make progress. Basically, it's important that you have to face the consequences when you don't accomplish your goals.

The reason I say that this is the opposite of the "rewarding yourself"-article is simple - to find some ideas for how to punish ourselves, we don’t have to look any further. Instead of rewarding yourself when you succeed, we can just see it in another light - by not waking up on time we punish ourselves by not receiving any rewards.

However, that's just two sides of the same coin... So what I rather want do is to expand a bit and provide you with some great (and slightly strange) methods for how to really motivate yourself through potential punishment. Here goes...

12 Ways To Punish Yourself

  • Wear your least favorite clothes to work/school
  • Don't shower
  • Don't get any breakfast
  • Do at least 100 push-ups today
  • Spill something on the floor and then don't clean it up
  • Buy a box of chocolate and then throw it away
  • Buy an gift to someone you actually don't like
  • Force yourself to read at least 10 pages of a really boring book
  • Don't use Facebook/twitter anything today
  • Take the bus instead of driving
  • Wear an old cap from 1995
  • Turn off all data usage on your phone for the entire day

I assume that you get the point by now... ;-) Force yourself to see a consequence as soon as you don't accomplish your goal for the day. I mean, by not being allowed to shower for a day, most of us would really ensure that never happens again! So what do we do?

We achieve our goal!

Any more tips for horrible ways to punish yourself? Please write them below, I think we all would love to hear =) Now good luck, just don't be too hard on yourself...

Early Riser > How To Wake Up > Punish Yourself

Thanks for reading! By Matthew M. McEwan

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