Skip to content

Breaking Bad Habits: The Power of Environmental Cues

Picture of Josh
Self-control and willpower are essential for success, but creating a disciplined environment can make practicing these qualities much easier. By understanding how habits are formed in the brain and the power of environmental cues, we can take proactive steps to eliminate bad habits and cultivate positive ones. Instead of relying on sheer willpower to resist temptation, focus on optimising your surroundings to make good habits obvious and bad habits invisible. Remember, self-control is a short-term strategy, while environmental optimisation is a long-term solution for lasting change. Dive deeper into the subject of habit formation and behaviour change to unlock your full potential and lead a more fulfilling life. Explore the insightful book "Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results" by James Clear to learn more about creating positive habits that stick. 
 
 
Recent research, however, shows something different. When scientists analyse 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 internalised; 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 behaviour 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 favourite 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 behaviour 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 drug 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 Behaviour 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 optimising 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.
 
 
Excerpt From
Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results
James Clear
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.