Today marks day 6 of reading Atomic Habits, in this chapter review, we will learn about redesigning our environment to encourage good habits.
The book itself is very highly rated on amazon https://amzn.to/3x4K7Sa (affiliate link to book), boasting a 4.7 star rating over 157,532 reviews. The book also claims to have sold over 15 million copies as of Oct. 16, 2018 and has sold over 20 million copies as of Mar. 4, 2024.
This chapter follows up Chapter 5, where we learned about things like the Implementation Intention formula, which is a way to increase the odds of you actually building good habits.
Chapter Summary:
- “Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behavior over time.” This is referring to how you can make small changes (perhaps in your environment) that have major results. For example, if I start leaving fruits on my kitchen counter instead of cookies, this will create better eating habits. Something as simple as designating an area to work (like an office) can make you a lot more productive as your brain already knows why and what you are in this area to do (work).
- “Every habit is initiated by a cue. We are more likely to notice cues that stand out.” This builds on the last paragraph. We are creatures of our environment, if your work computer is also your gaming computer, then it creates conflict in your mind. I know this one first hand, as I have this same set-up, and unfortunately I can’t change it, since I don’t own another computer that I could work on, besides a laptop that I could write on (which I occasionally do).
- “Make the cues of good habits obvious in your environment.” Again, if you want to make developing good habits easier, then you need to design your environment to do so. One of the best things you can do, is make your bed a place were you only go to sleep. Many people use their bed as a place of not only sleep, but watching tv, going on social media, etc. This will make it increasingly hard to fall asleep, as your brain no will instantly register you being in bed as meaning it’s time to sleep. You see this problem in a lot of insomniacs, which is why this is one of the first actions taken in improving insomnia.
- “Gradually, your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behavior. The context becomes the cue.” This is exactly what we just talked about in the previous paragraph, make the context of you being in bed the cue for you to go to sleep.
- “It is easier to build new habits in a new environment because you are not fighting against old cues.” If I wanted to start reading, I may find it more challenging to do it in the living room, where I play video-games. It would be much easier for me to develop the habit of reading in a place void of previous cues. It would be much more productive for me to find a place where I haven’t been (perhaps a couch you rarely sit at, or going out somewhere, like to a park) doing this will make it significantly easier for me to focus on the task at hand and nothing else.
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