Habits and the environment

Published at 2024-10-18T22:10:14-06:00

What am I even talking about?

I recently started to read the book "Atomic Habits" by James Clear. I have really been enjoying it so far. I am currently about half way through. The issue that I have been having is, even though I am enjoying what I am reading, and all the advice is really solid, I have no idea what habits I would like to set. I have become fairly complacent with where I am at in life so seeking out things to improve has been difficult. Not to mention having ADHD makes it hard to be motivated to do anything. This largely changed after I read through the section on your environment

Your environment

The author starts off by saying too often we associate habit building with sheer willpower and motivation, when in reality, the much larger factor is our environment. He goes on to say, most of the time, our habits are tied to our environment. For example, if each time I get home from work I sit on the couch and pull out my phone, I then start associating sitting on the couch with being on my phone. This will then create a habit of everytime I sit on the couch I will pull out my phone.

Setting goals

We can use this to our advantage though by rearranging our environment to better suit the goals we are trying to accomplish. If we are trying to learn the guitar, we can put the guitar in the middle of the room. If we want to eat healthier, we can put the healthy food at the front of the fridge at eye level, or even move stuff onto the counter where it is easily accessible

Breaking habits

Just like we can use the environment to set habits, we can use it to break them. If I want to play video games less, I can unplug the console and move it into the closet after each time playing it. This means, whenever I want to play it, I have to think of it without seeing it, and then having the motivation to go get it from the closet and set it up. This would be extremely discouraging for me and I would probably play significantly less games... that is, if I wasn't a computer gamer.

What clicked

The thing that really clicked for me, is the act of changing your environment in large ways. Think big. Going back to the couch example. If I wanted to stop using my phone on the couch, I could rearrange the furniture in the front room. This puts me in a foreign environment and prevents me from going into autopilot mode. It makes sitting down and pulling out my phone a much more concious decision. This makes it easier to insert new or different habits, when you don't have the old ones getting in the way. One example that James gave in the book was wanting to buy healther groceries. One easy way to do that is to go to a different grocery store than normal. This prevents you from just going down the same isles and grabbing the same food since you now have to conciously figure out where everything is. All this really hit me hard for some reason.

What am I going to do about it

I learned a lot of cool things, but if you never do anything with it, then it is useless. I want to set a couple of goals myself:

Read more

The whole reason I started reading this book was because I can count on one hand the number of books I have read in the past 5 years. I used to love reading but life always seems to have a way of getting in the way. Even with reading this book, it has been in waves. I'll read 5 chapters in one day, and then not read again for another week. I want to read a little bit every day. I am going to do this by:

• Every morning, when I get out of bed, I am going to make my bed
• After I make my bed, I am going to place my book, and the bed inclining remote on my pillow (inclining beds are so nice to read in)
• When I get in bed, I will incline the bed, and then read 1 chapter, or 20 min, whichever comes first

Post more on this site

I have always been a lurker. As I have been browsing the Gemini space, I have really wanted to start engaging with the community here more. I am going to start off by trying to post at least once a week. I have some ideas for some more tech related posts that I want to do. To accomplish this goal, starting next week, I am going to:

• Whenever I get an idea for a new post, I will make a note in my phone
• At 8 PM on Sunday, I will look through my notes and decide on a topic
• After I decide on a topic, I will pull out my laptop and write a post
• After posting, I can watch the show of my choice

Conclusion

I have really been enjoying this book so far and encourage other people to read it. I am very interested to see how these new strategies work and if they help me with new habits, and more importantly, if those habits last longer than a couple weeks. I will probably make more posts about this book in the future and look forward to finishing another book this year!