The processes you create in your life have a huge impact on your behavior, especially when you’re trying to change habits. What I’ve realized is that no amount of motivation can help change a habit if you’re in a bad environment. Creating a positive environment designed to help you change habits comes down to two things: reducing friction and creating triggers.
Just like designers spend time thinking about how to reduce friction in a users’ experience, people need to consider the amount of friction standing between them and the behavior that they want to change. Reducing friction removes excuses.
If the amount of friction between what you’re doing now and what you want to be doing (i.e. working out or not) was 0, then you’d be crazy not to change. Unfortunately, life isn’t that simple, but there are things you can do to lower the amount of friction in your life. First, two examples:
On nights before I work out, I go to bed in my gym clothes. This ensures that I can wake up in the morning dressed and ready to hit the weights. This way, when I’m awake, there’s nothing but a 15 minute run between my gym and me. Before I started doing this, I avoided going to the gym in the morning, citing relatively abstract obstacles like “getting ready,” which seemed pretty daunting. By getting it out of the way the night before, I’m now able to wake up with only one objective: hauling ass to the gym.
I have two good friends, who originally inspired this post. They’re both young health-conscious 20-somethings who live together. Like most twenty-somethings, they enjoy illicit substances on occasion, causing them to crave food, usually of the junk variety. Knowing this, they’ve made a conscious effort to only stock healthy food in their house so that when they’re binging, they’re minimizing damage.
Reducing friction required to change your habits will put you ahead of 90% of people trying to change their habits. However, to go the extra mile and make sure your changes stick, you’ll need to create triggers.
These triggers are best when they execute when you’re about to potentially break your commitment to a behavior change. Personally, one of the biggest habits I’m trying to change is staying off social media when I’m working on deep work. I find that my immediate “Command-T Twitter/email” move happens most often when I’m switching tasks or opening my computer for the first time.
I’ve solved this problem for the most part by implementing a powerful trigger. Whenever I open my computer, I have a message (via my Desktop background) that reminds me to get my shit together. It serves as a reminder for what I’m working for and helps me avoid the usual distractions of Twitter and email and interrupt and plague my work.
By placing triggers to enforce desirable behavior in the moment before you break commitment, you improve your odds of success in a significant way.
How are you implementing these techniques to change behaviors in your life? I’d love to hear about in the comments.
If you’re having trouble changing behaviors, I’m here to help. Fill out the form below or shoot me an email and I’d be happy to jam over how I can help you get on the path to success.