Welcome to Day 3 of the Club 12 Habit-Building Challenge!
By now, you should have:
One major habit you want to build,
A tiny version of that habit to help you get started,
And a habit stack in place to make your new routine take hold.
Now that you’ve identified the habit you want, and created a tiny version of it to stack on top of one of your existing habits – let’s dive into Day 3…
In today’s habit challenge, we’re covering an often overlooked technique that can quickly help you turn almost any behavior into an automatic habit:
Designing a frictionless environment.
If your environment is fighting you, your environment is going to win.
As human beings, we’re wired to take the path of least resistance…
If you want to build a daily guitar-playing habit, but your guitar is zipped up in a case in the back of your closet, you’re not going to play.
If you want to develop healthy eating habits, but your fruits and vegetables are out of view – while the chocolate chip cookies are sitting right on the counter, you’re going to eat the cookies.
To make it easier to do the habits you want, design an environment that makes it easier to start the habits you want.
You want to make it as frictionless as possible to reach for the apple instead of the cookie—by making the cookies harder to reach, and the apples easy to reach.
If you want to practice playing your guitar everyday, designate a dedicated place to practice, place your guitar in view - and ideally, practice playing at the same time each day.
Dr. Wendy Wood, a leading researcher on habits at the University of Southern California, discovered that the friction in our environment dictates our actions much more than our actual desires…
In one study, the simple act of moving a bowl of popcorn a little but further away from the participants’ hands dramatically reduced how much they ate, regardless of how much they liked popcorn.1
Make the good things frictionless, and the bad things hard.
Actionable insights
Step 1: Think about the habit you want to build.
Step 2: Now, ask yourself the following question:
“What’s one thing I can do to make it easier to start this habit?”
If the habit you want is to read one page of a book after you brush your teeth, but you keep forgetting to do it - put the book on your bathroom counter to make it easier to start.
If the habit you want is to do some stretching each morning, leave your yoga mat unrolled right next to your bed to make it easier to start.
If your habit is to hit the gym every day after work, but going home to get ready for the gym is a friction-point that keeps you from working out - put your gym gear in a duffle bag the night before, and take it with you to work, so you can hit the gym immediately after you get out of the office.
If your habit is to drink a full glass of water every morning, but you keep avoiding it, then fill up a water bottle and place it on your nightstand before you go to bed each night.
These are minor tweaks with major impact. So don’t dismiss them as inconsequential… Try them.
Step 3: Use the question above to pin down at least one friction-point that prevents you from engaging in the behavior you want to develop into a habit—and adjust your environment accordingly.
See you in Day 4,
—Dean
Master every area of your life.
Up next…
Catch up on previous installments of the Habit Building Challenge…
Footnotes
Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2016). Healthy through habit: Interventions for initiating & maintaining health behavior change. Behavioral Science & Policy, 2(1), 71–83.
