For two years, it looked like discipline. But underneath the routines, reps, and early mornings was a deeper fear: stillness. Sometimes the hardest thing to face isn’t laziness or lack of drive - it’s the silence that arrives when there’s nothing left to distract you.
For two years, I was the most disciplined person I knew.
I woke up at 5am every morning. I was at the gym six days a week. I tracked my macros. I meditated for exactly 20 minutes (timed, of course). I had a morning routine, an evening routine, and a productivity system that would have made a Silicon Valley CEO weep with joy.
From the outside, I looked like someone who had it all figured out. And honestly, from the inside, I felt that way too. For a while.
Then one morning in Saigon, I woke up before my alarm as usual, and instead of getting up, I just lay there. My wife and daughter were still asleep. The apartment was quiet. The city hadn't started buzzing yet. And in that silence, a thought arrived that I hadn't invited: What are you running from?
I didn't have an answer. Which was the answer.
Discipline as armor
Here's what I've come to understand about my two years of perfect discipline: all of it, every single routine, was a sophisticated way of avoiding myself.
Not the productive version of myself. Not the dad-who-exercises version of myself. The version of myself that shows up when there's nothing to do, nowhere to be, and no task to complete. The version that exists in the gap between activities. That version terrified me, and I didn't even know it.
Psychologists have a term for this. It's called experiential avoidance, and it was first defined by psychologist Steven C. Hayes, the creator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. As Hayes and his colleagues describe it, experiential avoidance is the attempt to escape or control uncomfortable internal experiences like thoughts, feelings, and memories, even when doing so causes harm. It's not just about avoiding difficult tasks. It's about avoiding what's happening inside your own head.
And the tricky part? Experiential avoidance doesn't always look like avoidance. Sometimes it looks like incredible discipline. Sometimes it looks like a packed schedule, a clean diet, and a 5am alarm clock.
We literally prefer pain over stillness
If you think I'm exaggerating how uncomfortable it is for people to sit alone with their thoughts, consider this.
A 2014 study published in Science by psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues at the University of Virginia asked participants to sit alone in a room for 6 to 15 minutes with nothing to do but think. No phone. No book. No tasks. Just their own minds for company.
Most people didn't enjoy it. But here's the part that made headlines: when given the option to press a button and receive a mild electric shock, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to shock themselves rather than continue sitting quietly. These were people who had previously said they would pay money to avoid being shocked.
Think about that. People preferred physical pain over the experience of being alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes.
When I read that study, I recognized myself immediately. I hadn't been shocking myself with electricity. I'd been shocking myself with 5am alarms and high-intensity training and 14-hour work days. Different voltage, same impulse.
The productive version of running away
The thing about using discipline as avoidance is that it's almost impossible to spot, because everything you're doing is, on its own, genuinely good for you.
Exercise is healthy. Eating well is smart. Waking up early is, for a lot of people, a game-changer. I'm not saying these things are bad. I still do most of them. But I was doing them in a specific way, for a specific reason, and that reason had nothing to do with health or productivity.
I was filling every available minute so there would be no empty space left. Because empty space is where the uncomfortable stuff lives. The questions you haven't answered. The feelings you haven't processed. The parts of your life you haven't examined because examining them might mean changing them.
The Cognitive Behavior Therapy Center of Southern California describes this pattern clearly: keeping busy can become a form of emotional avoidance. Instead of sitting with uncomfortable feelings like fear, worry, or sadness, people throw themselves into work, routines, or even hobbies as a distraction. They call it experiential avoidance, and note that it creates a cycle where the underlying anxiety keeps growing in the gaps.
That was exactly my cycle. The more disciplined I became, the less time I had to feel anything I didn't want to feel. And the less I felt, the more I needed the discipline to keep the silence at bay.
What meditation actually taught me
The irony is that meditation was on my daily schedule the entire time. Twenty minutes, every morning, right after the alarm. But I'd turned even that into a task to be completed, another box to tick. I was meditating at my thoughts rather than sitting with them.
The shift happened when I stopped treating meditation as a productivity hack and started treating it as what it actually is in the Buddhist tradition: a practice of being present with whatever arises, including the stuff you'd rather not look at.
And what arose, when I finally let it, wasn't dramatic. It wasn't some buried trauma or dark secret. It was more like a low hum of loneliness I hadn't acknowledged. Some unresolved tension about the kind of father I wanted to be versus the kind of father I was actually being. A quiet grief about friendships that had faded since I'd moved to Vietnam. Normal human stuff. The kind of stuff that isn't urgent but matters deeply, and that you can spend years outrunning if you fill your schedule carefully enough.
In Buddhism, there's a concept called dukkha, which is often translated as "suffering" but is closer to "unsatisfactoriness." It's the idea that a certain amount of discomfort is baked into being alive, and that running from it only creates more of it. My two years of perfect discipline were basically a masterclass in creating more dukkha while looking like I had it all together.
What actually changed
I still go to the gym. I still run along the Saigon River most mornings. I still eat reasonably well and I still meditate. But the relationship I have with all of it is different now.
The biggest change is the simplest one: I've started leaving gaps in my day on purpose. Not productive gaps. Not "creative thinking time" or "journaling sessions." Just actual empty space where I don't do anything and don't have to.
Sometimes I sit on my balcony and watch the motorbikes go past. Sometimes I lie on the floor while my daughter plays next to me and I think about nothing. Sometimes I go for a walk wit
