Mar 29, 2021
Habits and Environment
Atomic Habits by James Clear — has quite a high rank in my readings of self-improvement books. It is practical and does not try to keep selling itself, unlike other self-help books. It is a simple guidebook on how to adopt better habits.
The point that I want to focus on here is 3.2 in the above habit cheat sheet —
Prime the environment. Prepare your environment to make future actions easier.
which also is similar to point 2.2
Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.
I believe this to be one of the most important factors for developing habits and focusing solely on improving this has helped me develop better habits.
Apart from this book, the Yale Course on Coursera — The Science of Well Being, also talks about developing habits through priming your environment. Specifically, this is the paper (Slim by Design) that tells us how environmental factors influence eating habits and health.
I wish to document my own journey of environmental factors for building habits. This is what I have learnt about myself over the past couple of years of trying to build good habits, and getting rid of bad habits.
There are habits that I have tried to build where I have failed really badly, but since I know and understand that building habits is a combination of motivation, stimulus and environmental factors, it becomes a game of adjusting those instead of blaming my deeper soul for being a lazy bum.
What are your habit hacks?
