let's time to build our habits

part 7 untold story which help to build your habits

6

Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often

Matters More

ANNE THORNDIKE, A primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in

Boston, had a crazy idea. She believed she could improve the eating habits of

thousands of hospital staff and visitors without changing their willpower or

motivation in the slightest way. In fact, she didn’t plan on talking to them at all.

Thorndike and her colleagues designed a six-month study to alter the “choice

architecture” of the hospital cafeteria. They started by changing how drinks were

arranged in the room. Originally, the refrigerators located next to the cash

registers in the cafeteria were filled with only soda. The researchers added water

as an option to each one. Additionally, they placed baskets of bottled water next

to the food stations throughout the room. Soda was still in the primary

refrigerators, but water was now available at all drink locations.

Over the next three months, the number of soda sales at the hospital dropped

by 11.4 percent. Meanwhile, sales of bottled water increased by 25.8 percent.

They made similar adjustments—and saw similar results—with the food in the

cafeteria. Nobody had said a word to anyone eating there.

BEFORE AFTER People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of

where they are. If I walk into the kitchen and see a plate of cookies on the

counter, I’ll pick up half a dozen and start eating, even if I hadn’t been thinking

about them beforehand and didn’t necessarily feel hungry. If the communal table

at the office is always filled with doughnuts and bagels, it’s going to be hard not

to grab one every now and then. Your habits change depending on the room you

are in and the cues in front of you.

Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior. Despite our

unique personalities, certain behaviors tend to arise again and again under

certain environmental conditions. In church, people tend to talk in whispers. On

a dark street, people act wary and guarded. In this way, the most common form

of change is not internal, but external: we are changed by the world around us.

Every habit is context dependent.

In 1936, psychologist Kurt Lewin wrote a simple equation that makes a

powerful statement: Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment,

or B = f (P,E).

It didn’t take long for Lewin’s Equation to be tested in business. In 1952, the

economist Hawkins Stern described a phenomenon he called Suggestion Impulse

Buying, which “is triggered when a shopper sees a product for the first time and

visualizes a need for it.” In other words, customers will occasionally buy

products not because they want them but because of how they are presented to them.

For example, items at eye level tend to be purchased more than those down

near the floor. For this reason, you’ll find expensive brand names featured in

easy-to-reach locations on store shelves because they drive the most profit, while

cheaper alternatives are tucked away in harder-to-reach spots. The same goes for

end caps, which are the units at the end of aisles. End caps are moneymaking

machines for retailers because they are obvious locations that encounter a lot of

foot traffic. For example, 45 percent of Coca-Cola sales come specifically from

end-of-the-aisle racks.

The more obviously available a product or service is, the more likely you are

to try it. People drink Bud Light because it is in every bar and visit Starbucks

because it is on every corner. We like to think that we are in control. If we

choose water over soda, we assume it is because we wanted to do so. The truth,

however, is that many of the actions we take each day are shaped not by

purposeful drive and choice but by the most obvious option.

Every living being has its own methods for sensing and understanding the

world. Eagles have remarkable long-distance vision. Snakes can smell by

“tasting the air” with their highly sensitive tongues. Sharks can detect small

amounts of electricity and vibrations in the water caused by nearby fish. Even

bacteria have chemoreceptors—tiny sensory cells that allow them to detect toxic

chemicals in their environment.

In humans, perception is directed by the sensory nervous system. We perceive

the world through sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. But we also have other

ways of sensing stimuli. Some are conscious, but many are nonconscious. For

instance, you can “notice” when the temperature drops before a storm, or when

the pain in your gut rises during a stomachache, or when you fall off balance

while walking on rocky ground. Receptors in your body pick up on a wide range

of internal stimuli, such as the amount of salt in your blood or the need to drink

when thirsty.

The most powerful of all human sensory abilities, however, is vision. The

human body has about eleven million sensory receptors. Approximately ten

million of those are dedicated to sight. Some experts estimate that half of the

brain’s resources are used on vision. Given that we are more dependent on vision

than on any other sense, it should come as no surprise that visual cues are the

greatest catalyst of our behavior. For this reason, a small change in what you see

can lead to a big shift in what you do. As a result, you can imagine how

important it is to live and work in environments that are filled with productive

cues and devoid of unproductive ones.

Thankfully, there is good news in this respect. You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.

HOW TO DESIGN YOUR ENVIRONMENT FOR SUCCESS

During the energy crisis and oil embargo of the 1970s, Dutch researchers began

to pay close attention to the country’s energy usage. In one suburb near

Amsterdam, they found that some homeowners used 30 percent less energy than

their neighbors—despite the homes being of similar size and getting electricity

for the same price.

It turned out the houses in this neighborhood were nearly identical except for

one feature: the location of the electrical meter. Some had one in the basement.

Others had the electrical meter upstairs in the main hallway. As you may guess,

the homes with the meters located in the main hallway used less electricity.

When their energy use was obvious and easy to track, people changed their

behavior.

Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice cues that

stand out. Unfortunately, the environments where we live and work often make

it easy not to do certain actions because there is no obvious cue to trigger the

behavior. It’s easy not to practice the guitar when it’s tucked away in the closet.

It’s easy not to read a book when the bookshelf is in the corner of the guest

room. It’s easy not to take your vitamins when they are out of sight in the pantry.

When the cues that spark a habit are subtle or hidden, they are easy to ignore.

By comparison, creating obvious visual cues can draw your attention toward a

desired habit. In the early 1990s, the cleaning staff at Schiphol Airport in

Amsterdam installed a small sticker that looked like a fly near the center of each

urinal. Apparently, when men stepped up to the urinals, they aimed for what they

thought was a bug. The stickers improved their aim and significantly reduced

“spillage” around the urinals. Further analysis determined that the stickers cut

bathroom cleaning costs by 8 percent per year.

I’ve experienced the power of obvious cues in my own life. I used to buy

apples from the store, put them in the crisper in the bottom of the refrigerator,

and forget all about them. By the time I remembered, the apples would have

gone bad. I never saw them, so I never ate them.

Eventually, I took my own advice and redesigned my environment. I bought a

large display bowl and placed it in the middle of the kitchen counter. The next

time I bought apples, that was where they went—out in the open where I could

see them. Almost like magic, I began eating a few apples each day simply

because they were obvious rather than out of sight.

Here are a few ways you can redesign your environment and make the cues

for your preferred habits more obvious:

If you want to remember to take your medication each night, put your

pill bottle directly next to the faucet on the bathroom counter.

If you want to practice guitar more frequently, place your guitar stand

in the middle of the living room.

If you want to remember to send more thank-you notes, keep a stack of

stationery on your desk.

If you want to drink more water, fill up a few water bottles each

morning and place them in common locations around the house.

If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of

your environment. The most persistent behaviors usually have multiple cues.

Consider how many different ways a smoker could be prompted to pull out a

cigarette: driving in the car, seeing a friend smoke, feeling stressed at work, and

so on.

The same strategy can be employed for good habits. By sprinkling triggers

throughout your surroundings, you increase the odds that you’ll think about your

habit throughout the day. Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one.

Making a better decision is easy and natural when the cues for good habits are

right in front of you.

Environment design is powerful not only because it influences how we engage

with the world but also because we rarely do it. Most people live in a world

others have created for them. But you can alter the spaces where you live and

work to increase your exposure to positive cues and reduce your exposure to

negative ones. Environment design allows you to take back control and become

the architect of your life. Be the designer of your world and not merely the

consumer of it.

THE CONTEXT IS THE CUE

The cues that trigger a habit can start out very specific, but over time your habits

become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context

surrounding the behavior.

For example, many people drink more in social situations than they would

ever drink alone. The trigger is rarely a single cue, but rather the whole situation:watching your friends order drinks, hearing the music at the bar, seeing the beers

on tap.

We mentally assign our habits to the locations in which they occur: the home,

the office, the gym. Each location develops a connection to certain habits and

routines. You establish a particular relationship with the objects on your desk,

the items on your kitchen counter, the things in your bedroom.

Our behavior is not defined by the objects in the environment but by our

relationship to them. In fact, this is a useful way to think about the influence of

the environment on your behavior. Stop thinking about your environment as

filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships. Think in

terms of how you interact with the spaces around you. For one person, her couch

is the place where she reads for an hour each night. For someone else, the couch

is where he watches television and eats a bowl of ice cream after work. Different

people can have different memories—and thus different habits—associated with

the same place.

The good news? You can train yourself to link a particular habit with a

particular context.

In one study, scientists instructed insomniacs to get into bed only when they

were tired. If they couldn’t fall asleep, they were told to sit in a different room

until they became sleepy. Over time, subjects began to associate the context of

their bed with the action of sleeping, and it became easier to quickly fall asleep

when they climbed in bed. Their brains learned that sleeping—not browsing on

their phones, not watching television, not staring at the clock—was the only

action that happened in that room.

The power of context also reveals an important strategy: habits can be easier

to change in a new environment. It helps to escape the subtle triggers and cues

that nudge you toward your current habits. Go to a new place—a different coffee

shop, a bench in the park, a corner of your room you seldom use—and create a

new routine there.

It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new

habit in the face of competing cues. It can be difficult to go to bed early if you

watch television in your bedroom each night. It can be hard to study in the living

room without getting distracted if that’s where you always play video games.

But when you step outside your normal environment, you leave your behavioral

biases behind. You aren’t battling old environmental cues, which allows new

habits to form without interruption.

Want to think more creatively? Move to a bigger room, a rooftop patio, or a

building with expansive architecture. Take a break from the space where you do

your daily work, which is also linked to your current thought patterns.Trying to eat healthier? It is likely that you shop on autopilot at your regular

supermarket. Try a new grocery store. You may find it easier to avoid unhealthy

food when your brain doesn’t automatically know where it is located in the store.

When you can’t manage to get to an entirely new environment, redefine or

rearrange your current one. Create a separate space for work, study, exercise,

entertainment, and cooking. The mantra I find useful is “One space, one use.”

When I started my career as an entrepreneur, I would often work from my

couch or at the kitchen table. In the evenings, I found it very difficult to stop

working. There was no clear division between the end of work time and the

beginning of personal time. Was the kitchen table my office or the space where I

ate meals? Was the couch where I relaxed or where I sent emails? Everything

happened in the same place.

A few years later, I could finally afford to move to a home with a separate

room for my office. Suddenly, work was something that happened “in here” and

personal life was something that happened “out there.” It was easier for me to

turn off the professional side of my brain when there was a clear dividing line

between work life and home life. Each room had one primary use. The kitchen

was for cooking. The office was for working.

Whenever possible, avoid mixing the context of one habit with another. When

you start mixing contexts, you’ll start mixing habits—and the easier ones will

usually win out. This is one reason why the versatility of modern technology is

both a strength and a weakness. You can use your phone for all sorts of tasks,

which makes it a powerful device. But when you can use your phone to do

nearly anything, it becomes hard to associate it with one task. You want to be

productive, but you’re also conditioned to browse social media, check email, and

play video games whenever you open your phone. It’s a mishmash of cues.

You may be thinking, “You don’t understand. I live in New York City. My

apartment is the size of a smartphone. I need each room to play multiple roles.”

Fair enough. If your space is limited, divide your room into activity zones: a

chair for reading, a desk for writing, a table for eating. You can do the same with

your digital spaces. I know a writer who uses his computer only for writing, his

tablet only for reading, and his phone only for social media and texting. Every

habit should have a home.

If you can manage to stick with this strategy, each context will become

associated with a particular habit and mode of thought. Habits thrive under

predictable circumstances like these. Focus comes automatically when you are

sitting at your work desk. Relaxation is easier when you are in a space designed

for that purpose. Sleep comes quickly when it is the only thing that happens in

your bedroom. If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable.

A stable environment where everything has a place and a purpose is an

environment where habits can easily form

Chapter Summary

Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behavior over

time.

Every habit is initiated by a cue. We are more likely to notice cues that

stand out.

Make the cues of good habits obvious in your environment.

Gradually, your habits become associated not with a single trigger but

with the entire context surrounding the behavior. The context becomes

the cue.

It is easier to build new habits in a new environment because you are

not fighting against old cues.

7

The Secret to Self-Control

IN 1971, as the Vietnam War was heading into its sixteenth year, congressmen

Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy from Illinois made a

discovery that stunned the American public. While visiting the troops, they had

learned that over 15 percent of U.S. soldiers stationed there were h****n addicts.

Follow-up research revealed that 35 percent of service members in Vietnam had

tried h****n and as many as 20 percent were addicted—the problem was even

worse than they had initially thought.

The discovery led to a flurry of activity in Washington, including the creation

of the Special Action Office of d**g a***e Prevention under President Nixon to

promote prevention and rehabilitation and to track addicted service members

when they returned home.

Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge. In a finding that completely

upended the accepted beliefs about addiction, Robins found that when soldiers

who had been h****n users returned home, only 5 percent of them became

readdicted within a year, and just 12 percent relapsed within three years. In other

words, approximately nine out of ten soldiers who used h****n in Vietnam

eliminated their addiction nearly overnight.

This finding contradicted the prevailing view at the time, which considered

heroin addiction to be a permanent and irreversible condition. Instead, Robins

revealed that addictions could spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical

change in the environment. In Vietnam, soldiers spent all day surrounded by

cues triggering h****n use: it was easy to access, they were engulfed by the

constant stress of war, they built friendships with fellow soldiers who were also

heroin users, and they were thousands of miles from home. Once a soldier

returned to the United States, though, he found himself in an environment devoid

of those triggers. When the context changed, so did the habit.

Compare this situation to that of a typical d**g user. Someone becomes addicted at home or with friends, goes to a clinic to get clean—which is devoid

of all the environmental stimuli that prompt their habit—then returns to their old

neighborhood with all of their previous cues that caused them to get addicted in

the first place. It’s no wonder that usually you see numbers that are the exact

opposite of those in the Vietnam study. Typically, 90 percent of h****n users

become readdicted once they return home from rehab.

The Vietnam studies ran counter to many of our cultural beliefs about bad

habits because it challenged the conventional association of unhealthy behavior

as a moral weakness. If you’re overweight, a smoker, or an addict, you’ve been

told your entire life that it is because you lack self-control—maybe even that

you’re a bad person. The idea that a little bit of discipline would solve all our

problems is deeply embedded in our culture.

Recent research, however, shows something different. When scientists

analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those

individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead,

“disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not

require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in

tempting situations.

The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it

the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very

often. So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the

way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined

person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

This counterintuitive idea makes even more sense once you understand what

happens when a habit is formed in the brain. A habit that has been encoded in

the mind is ready to be used whenever the relevant situation arises. When Patty

Olwell, a therapist from Austin, Texas, started smoking, she would often light up

while riding horses with a friend. Eventually, she quit smoking and avoided it

for years. She had also stopped riding. Decades later, she hopped on a horse

again and found herself craving a cigarette for the first time in forever. The cues

were still internalized; she just hadn’t been exposed to them in a long time.

Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the

environmental cues reappear. This is one reason behavior change techniques can

backfire. Shaming obese people with weight-loss presentations can make them

feel stressed, and as a result many people return to their favorite coping strategy:

overeating. Showing pictures of blackened lungs to smokers leads to higher

levels of anxiety, which drives many people to reach for a cigarette. If you’re not

careful about cues, you can cause the very behavior you want to stop.

Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food,

you feel bad. Watching television makes you feel sluggish, so you watch more

television because you don’t have the energy to do anything else. Worrying

about your health makes you feel anxious, which causes you to smoke to ease

your anxiety, which makes your health even worse and soon you’re feeling more

anxious. It’s a downward spiral, a runaway train of bad habits.

Researchers refer to this phenomenon as “cue-induced wanting”: an external

trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit. Once you notice

something, you begin to want it. This process is happening all the time—often

without us realizing it. Scientists have found that showing addicts a picture of

cocaine for just thirty-three milliseconds stimulates the reward pathway in the

brain and sparks desire. This speed is too fast for the brain to consciously

register—the addicts couldn’t even tell you what they had seen—but they craved

the d**g all the same.

Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.

Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your brain, they are

nearly impossible to remove entirely—even if they go unused for quite a while.

And that means that simply resisting temptation is an ineffective strategy. It is

hard to maintain a Zen attitude in a life filled with interruptions. It takes too

much energy. In the short-run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the

long-run, we become a product of the environment that we live in. To put it

bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a

negative environment.

A more reliable approach is to cut bad habits off at the source. One of the

most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that

causes it.

If you can’t seem to get any work done, leave your phone in another

room for a few hours.

If you’re continually feeling like you’re not enough, stop following

social media accounts that trigger jealousy and envy.

If you’re wasting too much time watching television, move the TV out

of the bedroom.

If you’re spending too much money on electronics, quit reading

reviews of the latest tech gear.

If you’re playing too many video games, unplug the console and put it

in a closet after each use.This practice is an inversion of the 1st Law of Behavior Change. Rather than

make it obvious, you can make it invisible. I’m often surprised by how effective

simple changes like these can be. Remove a single cue and the entire habit often

fades away.

Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one. You may be able to

resist temptation once or twice, but it’s unlikely you can muster the willpower to

override your desires every time. Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower

whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent

optimizing your environment. This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of

your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.

Chapter Summary

The inversion of the 1st Law of Behavior Change is make it invisible.

Once a habit is formed, it is unlikely to be forgotten.

People with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting

situations. It’s easier to avoid temptation than resist it.

One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce

exposure to the cue that causes it.

Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.

HOW TO CREATE A GOOD HABIT

The 1st Law: Make It Obvious

1.1: Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them.

1.2: Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].”

1.3: Use habit stacking: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”

1.4: Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible.

The 2nd Law: Make It Attractive

The 3rd Law: Make It Easy

The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying

HOW TO BREAK A BAD HABIT

Inversion of the 1st Law: Make It Invisible

1.5: Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.

Inversion of the 2nd Law: Make It Unattractive

Inversion of the 3rd Law: Make It Difficult

Inversion of the 4th Law: Make It Unsatisfying

To be continued in part 8