Most of us believe that discipline comes first and happiness follows. Stick to your plans, the thinking goes, and you will eventually feel better about your life. So when self-control slips, the usual response is to be harder on yourself.

Let’s say you decide to start exercising in the mornings. The first week goes well. Then work gets stressful, sleep gets shorter and the alarm starts losing. By the third week, you conclude that you just aren’t a disciplined person. In the end, you simply plan to cut back on whatever still feels good and push harder.

A recent study suggests this may get the order wrong. When researchers tracked people over time, feeling good tended to come before better self-control, not after it. That points to a habit most people don’t think of as self-improvement : taking your own well-being seriously as the starting point for discipline.

Where The Old ‘Feel-Bad’ Habit Came From

It’s easy to see why the old belief persists. People who seem to have their lives in order often appear both disciplined and content, and it feels natural to assume the first explains the second. But they might just as easily find discipline easier because they are content. From the outside, those two stories look identical.

A team including psychologist Lile Jia of the National University of Singapore noticed that most earlier research was correlational. It showed that the two go together, but not which one drives the other. They also had reason to suspect the reverse. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory proposes that positive emotions help people build psychological resources over time, and self-control might draw on those resources.

The team published their work in Social Psychological and Personality Science . Their first study followed 377 working adults in Asia for a year, checking in every six months. Each time, participants described how well they followed through on their intentions and how good they felt about their lives.

The key was comparing each person to themselves rather than to others. Comparing people is like comparing runners’ race times. The fastest runner may simply be more gifted, which says nothing about what helps anyone improve. The better question is whether a runner does better after a good night’s sleep than on their own usual days. In the same way, the researchers asked whether someone feeling better than their own normal would later show better self-control than their own normal.

That is what they found. When well-being rose above a person’s usual level, self-control tended to be higher six months later. A rise in self-control , by contrast, did not reliably lead to greater well-being.

A second study of 1,299 working adults in the United States, surveyed monthly for three months, found the same pattern over a much shorter window. Across two countries and two time frames, the influence seemed to run mainly from feeling well to functioning well.

Why A ‘Feel Good’ Habit Might Help

The researchers suggest that positive emotions may restore the mental energy self-control requires. It helps to think about what a bad stretch feels like from the inside. When someone is worn down and unhappy, much of their energy is already spoken for. The late-night snack or the extra hour of scrolling is often doing a job, offering small and reliable relief. Asking that person to give it up through willpower alone means asking them to surrender one of the few things holding them together.

Someone who feels reasonably good may not need that relief as badly, so temptation may have less pull. The researchers also suggest that feeling good may make people more open to challenges and better at juggling competing goals. Habits that fall apart during joyless periods may be a sign of a drained reserve rather than a flaw in character.

Putting The Habit Into Practice

The habit is to deliberately make time for what genuinely lifts your mood, especially while working toward something hard. For the struggling morning exerciser, that means protecting the weekend coffee with a friend precisely because the week has been difficult.

Be thoughtful about what counts. The study measured well-being as things like optimism, energy and appreciation for life, not momentary pleasure. Since some activities feel good at the time but leave people drained, a useful test is to notice how you feel an hour later.

Speaking to PsyPost, Jia put it plainly: looking after your well-being may be a more direct route to self-control than relying on willpower alone.

Many people respond to lapses with self-criticism, taking away what they enjoy as a kind of penalty. If well-being does support self-control, that approach may drain the very resource they need to change. Effort still matters, but it likely works better with something powering it. After a setback, the more useful question may be what would help you feel a little better first.

Wondering whether your self-control habits are running on empty? Find out how well your well-being is fueling you with this science-inspired test: Well-Being Index