This post is about habits – the good ones, the bad ones, and the indifferent ones. All are important and require intentional examination. That is, if you want to work on building a life of more peace, focus, and discipline. If you want to limit bad habits, promote good ones, and start resisting impulse decisions, it helps to be aware of the choices you regularly make.
I’ll dive into why I believe this self-examination is beneficial, the specifics of the three categories of habits, examples of each, and how to drop the bad, build the good, and understand the indifferent so you can build a solid foundation of discipline and make intentional choices.
As always, I don’t have all the answers, but I hope my expedition to try finding them in my life inspires you to start the search in your own.
Peace and a Disciplined Mind
I’ve come to define peace as a lack of emotional flux and impressions.
With a lot of observation, I’ve noticed how many emotions, thoughts, and impulses I have daily. Up until I started healing, most days were dictated by these emotions and impulses. My mood was always fluctuating, my actions were based on my mood, and my thoughts ran rampant.
Peace has started showing itself more regularly. Since reading about the Stoic acts of passion, I’ve been able to notice and understand my emotions and impulses. Each emotion brings a desire to act, but in most cases, an act of emotion is irrational and should be filtered through rational thought. As I observe these thoughts, these emotions, these impulses, and label them for what they are, I’m able to resist action.
When someone is considered disciplined, they show their ability to eat well, exercise, and take care of their health. Forming discipline by going to the gym, meal prepping, and resisting sweets are all examples of ignoring impulses of pleasure and instead acting rationally. Your brain tells you to skip the gym, you go. You crave sugar, you don’t eat it. Short term pleasure is abandoned to promote long-term growth.
A disciplined mind is control over pleasure as well as every other emotional impulse and impression of externals. When anger arises, you stay calm and steady. Fear tries to stop you, but you proceed cautiously and confidently. Desire wants you to obtain something, you accept whatever happens. Every time an emotion arises, it wants you to act, you take control, see it’s irrational nature, then act rationally. When your mind places false impressions on an event, you hear it, but don’t accept it as fact.
As you build more discipline over your impulses, they slowly disappear. Just like a habit becomes second nature with time, so too does rational thinking. When anger arises but you recognize it and stay grounded enough times, the anger realizes it no longer has power over you. If you release desire for something each time it comes up, eventually desire fades completely. You release impressions, grievances, and fears over and over until one day, you don’t have any.
That is peace.
There’s no more anxiety, no more fear, no more cravings. You just are who you are. You let Nature guide your path and make rational decisions in every moment. Always at attention in case a passion arises, but knowing you can manage it if it does.
Bad Habits
Bad habits are ones that lead to negative results (or less healthy results) and make peace harder to grasp.
To discover bad habits and remove them, it helps to work backwards. When you perform a habit, how do you feel after? If the habit leaves you feeling drained, anxious, angry, lethargic, etc. it’s probably within this category. Once you discover the habit, ask yourself what you get out of performing it. This could be a lot of things – a “cure” for boredom, quick dopamine, distraction, rest, to name a few. This takes a deep level of self-awareness and compassion. You’re not doing this to find fault or berate yourself, you’re doing it to improve your life.
After you discover the habit and the feeling or experience it’s trying to fix or prevent, you look to the moment right before you commit the habit. That moment you go to reach for your phone, when you go to lie on the couch, order DoorDash, or crack open a beer. Right before you do it, you catch yourself, feel this impulse in your body, the thoughts surrounding it, and what emotion is leading to it. Each bad habit stems from pleasure, desire, distress, and fear and it’s your job to determine which it is.
Removing the bad habits from your life is difficult. The process takes patience, awareness, self-compassion, and effort. I’ve found it helps me to start small with a simpler bad habit such as checking my phone for notifications. Every time I checked I’d feel a rush of dopamine when there was one or slightly bummed when there wasn’t one (not peace). From there I asked why I did it – I was bored or I was hoping for a response. I then made the intention to change, so each time I felt the urge to check, I stopped, felt the feelings in my body, heard the thoughts, and understood the reason for the action. Finally, I made the choice to not act.
Good Habits
Your good habits, your healthy ones, are the opposite of the above. Good habits make peace easier, they come from a place of control and discipline, and they improve your health and well-being. These are the habits we want to discover and expand.
These habits are like a natural source of dopamine in my life. When I do them, everything feels good, my mind is clear, and I have thoughts like “Hell yeah, I’m glad I did that.” Working out, stable diet, reflecting on philosophy, writing, reading, and walking are a few of mine.
I believe there are groups of good habits we should all pursue, but the specific habit within each group can be unique to you. We all need exercise, but the type of exercise that brings you peace can be anything. We all need to eat, but the diet that fuels you best can be many things – for me, it’s paleo (for now). We should all continue expanding our knowledge and strengthening our brain. How you choose to do that is up to you.
Make discovering these habits a priority. Start small and do what you can manage. That may mean going for a 10 minute walk. Maybe you read a couple pages instead of checking your phone. You can try journaling about your day tonight. Try anything that calls out to you, try it for a week or two, see how you feel after doing the habit, then adjust.
Indifferent Habits
The habits I classify as indifferent are neither inherently good or bad, but the reason for doing them needs to be examined.
Indifferent habits are things like checking the weather forecast, making your bed, taking cold showers, and writing to-do lists. Each of these habits can be performed or not and have no real effect on your rational mind or virtue. Making the bed is not a necessary step of being a good person and neither is any of the other indifferent habits. They can be done or not, but you need to know the reason behind each.
If the indifferent habit is being performed from a state of impulse, out of an irrational flow of emotions, then it needs to be altered. In the case of making your bed, when you’re given the option each morning to make it or not, what is the deciding factor? If you choose to leave it unmade, did you first think “I don’t feel like making that”? In that case, you’re acting from a state of laziness (pleasure) which is, according to Stoics, irrational.
Unconscious decisions need to be made conscious in order to build a solid foundation and constitution. Nothing can be committed out of impulse, nothing “just happened”, every habit and choice were done and made for some reason. It’s your job to determine that reason and decide if it’s rational or not.
Final Thoughts
There are three categories of habits: Good, Bad, and Indifferent. Each habit is responsible for making it easier or harder for you to obtain peace. Bad habits lead to more emotional flux and less peace. Good habits make rational thought easier. They improve your mind and body and bring you more clarity. Indifferent habits are not good or bad until you determine why you perform them and whether that’s aligned with who you’d like to be.
Peace is a byproduct of a disciplined mind. A disciplined mind comes from feeling your emotions, understanding them, knowing their impulses, and disregarding them to act rationally instead. With time, the emotional rollercoasters fade, your impressions disappear, and you’re left perfectly existing in the flow of Nature.
You have the choice to be at the whim of your emotions and impulses or to gain control and work towards peace. The latter choice is significantly more difficult, but significantly more fulfilling. Start looking at every habit to figure out why you do it, how it makes you feel, and if it’s rational.
Start building the good, removing the bad, and staying aware of the indifferent.
March 29, 2026
