Habits and Environment

This month, we’re continuing with the review and thoughts around the concepts in “Atomic Habits,” by James Clear. Last month, we explored the dynamic of connecting your habits with your identity. This month, we look at your environment. As Mr. Clear points out, your environment literally shapes your behavior. He shares output from a couple of studies showing that people who successfully maintain healthy habits aren’t mentally stronger than the rest of us. It shows that they have learned to manipulate and manage their environment to support healthy habits and make those habits easy.

Simply changing what you see can significantly change what you do. This concept involves taking an active role in your environment, instead of just living in a world created for you. The truth is, we rarely do this. An obvious example of changing the environment would be taking alcohol out of the house if you’re trying to stop drinking.  Another example would be to change the “happy hour” meeting place from the bar to a coffeeshop.

You don’t create a lasting habit by just completing the desired task.  You create a lasting habit by making the desired task easy to do and you do this by altering your environment. For example, let’s say you want to stop eating out for lunch.  You may think this habit has to do with your inability to overcome the temptation of eating unhealthy restaurant food for lunch. Put another way, your environment at lunchtime is such that your tempted to go out for lunch.  To change this, the habit you’re trying to create isn’t at lunchtime at all. You need to change your choices at the grocery store. You’re creating a habit (routine) of buying food that you can eat for lunch. Now you have food in the kitchen that is easily accessed. You can begin a secondary habit of be preparing lunches the night before, so that they are ready to go.

By developing these habits, you’re changing the environment to make the choice to avoid going out much easier from the night before, to the moment of temptation.

Other examples of changing/controlling your environment to change your behavior include removing social media apps from your phone, having an organized space for studying, setting exercise clothes out the night before, or spending time with different friends. These are all examples of changing your environment so that it’s easier to avoid temptation or choose a behavior that aligns with the identity you are trying to be.

Do you control your environment, or do you just live in it?

Next month, we’ll explore the four stages of habits.