You are the sum of your habits. It is my sincerest hope that you have come across this many times. Enough to make you research the idea and what it means. It is what you do consistently, not the sporadic moments of brilliance that make you who you are. Your weekly, daily and even hourly habits make up the sum of your abilities. The struggle, of course, becomes dropping bad habits and taking up good habits. How do we assure we take up good habits and eliminate bad habits? The answer is in your environment.

Habits are an interesting and worthy area of study. There are many books written on habits and I shall in the future give you some great book recommendations on the area of habits. You see habits are in essence repeated behaviours and we tend to build our worlds around these habits. So what you will find if you look around is that your environment supports your habits good and bad. There are more elements involved in changing your habits, environment happens to be the most powerful one.

At one point in time, I felt I was dedicating too much time to watching TV. This is something I’m sure many can relate to. I really wanted to dedicate more time to reading books as I had challenged myself to read 50 books in the year. After months of continually drifting behind schedule yet staying up to date with television programs, I would openly say have nothing to do with me I decided something had to go. So I rid myself of all forms of live TV. I ended up reading 52 books in the year.

Creating good habits

In one of the best books I’ve read on the subject, James Clears Atomic Habits the author simply puts forward that we do what is easy to do. Environment is a matter of design. If we want to drink more water it helps to keep water near us or available. If you want to do more of something create an enabling environment for it. One of the top tips in the book is that if something takes longer two minutes to get started you are less likely to do it. We’ve all had that moment where we wanted to do something but a few minutes into preparing to do it we found ourself pulling out.

Eliminating bad habits

Well, it’s fairly obvious how the environment works here. If you want to eliminate a bad habit make it difficult to get the task involved started. I obviously have great difficulty tuning into live TV.  Other bad habits we are familiar with could be time spent on social media. Disabling notifications is one measure that can help. I went as far as removing certain apps from certain devices altogether.

Dopamine

With bad habits, we need to be aware of the dopamine cycle. I’m not qualified to speak extensively on the science behind it but dopamine is a chemical related to excitement and reward that the brain lets off in anticipation of excitement and rewards. It is the chemical linked to addiction. Remember that when you want to eliminate a habit that has provided you with much excitement.

My favourite Steve Jobs quote is “design is not what something looks like but what it does” and I feel it ties perfectly into the idea of managing your environment. The environment is not always physical. I still have a television and watch sport via streaming. When thinking of environmental design think of all the things around you. I keep my devices ready for writing when I go to bed. When I get up it doesn’t take me long to get into writing. Think of your daily influences, do they support the habits you want to keep or the ones that weigh you down. Environmental design is a holistic approach. You must look at the sum total of your environment and that goes all the way down to the conversations you have. Of course, there’s a time to catch up on your favourite celebrities latest live video (if that’s important to you) but I strongly doubt it is during your most energetic hours.

Finally, it’s your environment. You ultimately decide whether you are a prisoner of it or creator.