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
