Your environment is killing you!
Our environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.
You need to change
How does your room look like?
How do you friends look like?
How does you social media content look like?
If your room is messy, you will become a messy person.
If your friends are poor, smoker, and undisciplined, you will become like your friends.
If your social media content is all about gaming, LGBTQ and Hot Girls/Boys, you will become a mentally masturbater.
Is that what you want to become?
If these things don’t overlap with the vision you have for your future, you need to change them!
If you want to become the person you desire to be you can design your environment to your advantage. Here is how:
Trigger Cue
A chain of good habits is more likely to be sustained if you practice this consistently.
You need a trigger cue.
A trigger cue = something you do automatically without failing during the day → for example: waking up
Motivation is highly overrated. You can better shape your behavior by designing your environment.
“Our environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.”
Creating a habit requires you to redesign the space around you to:
make it easier to see the cues for the desired habits.
avoid bad habits by making cues invisible.
Now redesign your environment the best you can to make cues for good habits you want to implement.
Imagine your dream character and how their environment looks like. Design your environment accordingly.
Context
Now that you organized everything in a productive manner which has cues for good habits and no cues for bad habits, start making relationship with those places.
Context is cue.
Objects in our environment do not determine our behavior, rather, it is our relationship to them that does. Stop seeing your environment as a place simply filled with objects. Imagine it is a place filled with relationships.
The couch in the living room may be a place for one person to read. For another, the couch is where they watch Netflix and eat pizza and relax after work.
If your relationship with the couch is a place to relax, then trying to get a work related task done in that environment may be difficult. Try to make separate zones in your house for different activities.
“One space, one use”
Make It Invisible
I you’re trying to eliminate a bad habit, you can only rely on self-control in the short-term.
Cutting off bad habits at the source is more reliable solution and one of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to make it invisible. Eliminate it from the environment.
For example :
Put your phone in another room for a few hours if you have trouble getting work done.
Put Junk food out of sight or remove it from your house if you’re trying to lose weight.
Remove the triggers cues for your bad habits and you’re not even tempted to start doing the habit.
The best for your progress,
-Bendix Schroeder