Healthy Habits, Healthy Life
by Marji Keith
The following piece of advice has stuck with me for years:
"If you don't want to eat that candy bar, don't place it at eye level in your kitchen."
Sounds simplistic, doesn't it. It's not very poetic either. But it makes so much sense.
At eye level, willpower is required. Tucked away in a bottom shelf in the corner, far less temptation is triggered.
Bad habits feed on themselves. No pun intended if your bad habit involves eating too much sugar or junk food. Bad habits often bring about the feelings they are trying to block out. An example would be
- you feel bad so you overeat...
- and overeating causes you to feel bad...
It’s a vicious cycle. You can’t tell which came first or even which one of these things is under your control, if any. Can you will away the bad feelings or the overeating? And if none of the above, what can you do?
The good news is that bad habits CAN be broken. And neuroscience tells us that the longer we go without participating in a bad habit, the better and easier this practice become. However habits can be nearly impossible to remove from our neural network altogether, even after the passing time. This means that the act of resisting temptation is not an effective tool.
Research tells us that once you notice something - a cue in the environment, you begin to want it. If a smoker smells cigarette smoke, or is exposed to an advertisement for smoking (even for less than a quarter of a second), they will begin to crave a cigarette. If I see a bag of chocolate chips placed at eye-level when I open my pantry, I admit I am all but helpless against it. This type of sensory cue happens so quickly and so often that we don’t notice that it’s happening. I probably just think I'm craving chocolate and don't relate it to the fact that I SAW the chocolate.
Environmenatal cues like noticing someone smoking, noticing the chocolate immediately visible in your pantry are elements of an environment not conducive to behavior change. Instead, one of the easiest ways to get rid of a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the sensory cues that cause it. This means create a living space that reduces your exposure to seeing, hearing, smelling, touching or tasting temptations.
You may think you have a self-control problem when what you really have is a too-much-exposure-to-temptation-in-your-daily-life problem. Make healthy habits really obvious and make unhealthy habits disappear from your view.
Here are a few ideas to get started:
- Keep unhealthy snack food well above or below eye level in the refrigerator or cupboards - and fill up that space with healthy choices like vegetables, nuts and seeds for snacking.
- Or better yet, do a pantry make-over and get rid of the bad choices altogether so they not only aren’t at eye level, but they aren’t in your new and improved healthy environment.
- The same way your toothbrush is right where it needs to be to brush your teeth each morning, so too could be your running shoes. Have them out, visible and ready to lace up.
- Healthy fruit can be placed on a bowl in the kitchen rather than in a drawer in the refrigerator.
- Too much time on social media making you feel less than? Remove some apps from all but one device so that it’s something you can access all the time.
- Turn off notifications for your phone and other apps or put your phone in airplane mode if you are distracted and can’t get work done.
The bottom line is that it’s not necessarily willpower that will move you toward your goals. It may be as simple as some tweaks in your environment so that sheer willpower isn’t necessary. Making cues for good habits highly visible and cues for bad habits invisible is the secret sauce to self control.
The benefit of good habits is that they convert something that you think requires willpower into something automatic and sustainable over the long run.
Source: James Clear Atomic Habits. (I may receive a small commission from some affiliate links included in this blog.)