Your environment shapes your life—every single day. Environmental cues trigger up to 70% of your daily habits.[^1] From the phone on your nightstand to the snacks on your counter, your surroundings can propel you toward your goals or drag you away from them. To optimize your body and life, start by optimizing your environment. I need to preface this chapter by saying, if you are not a generally organized person, you need to become one. In order for your environments to benefit you, you need to be generally clean and organized. ## Why Your Environment Matters Your environment influences your actions through the **habit loop**: *Cue → Craving → Response → Reward*. Consider this Bad Habit Loop scenario: - **Cue**: You see cookies in the cupboard. - **Craving**: You want to open them up and eat a few. - **Response**: You start eating them. - **Reward**: You get a feeling of satisfaction and a dopamine spike from eating them. The goal of fixing your environment is to remove negative habit loops and add positive ones, reducing reliance on your finite self-control. ## How to Fix Your Environment: A Step-by-Step Guide You can control most of your environments most of the time. Whether it’s your home, car, or phone, aligning these spaces with your goals is key. Here’s how to do it: While completing these steps, fill out the companion Environment Worksheet. Each one of the sections in the worksheet are labeled with the associated section numbers below. ### 1. Identify Your Environments Break down your world into different environments (most typical examples are included in the worksheet). For example: Kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room, office. Even in less controllable settings (e.g., a friend’s house), you still have your own environment, like your phone or clothes. ### 2. Define Your Intended Purposes Write down what you want each environment to support, for example: - **Bedroom**: Promote restful sleep and a calm morning routine. - **Kitchen**: Encourage healthy eating and meal prep. - **Workspace**: Planning, researching, communicating with family, friends and business associates. ### 3. Assess What Actually Happens Document the current reality of each environment, for example: - **Bedroom**: Cluttered with clothes and other items, leading to distractions on the phone or computer. - **Kitchen**: Junk food on the counter, tempting you to binge eat. - **Workspace**: Messy desk, a lot of tabs open, encouraging multitasking and unintentional browsing. ### 4. Identify the Mismatches Do your Intended Purpose and Actual Purpose match? For instance, is your kitchen a hub for binge eating, or healthy eating (what you actually want to engage in)? ### 5. Identify Negative Cues Negative cues are elements or habits in your environment that trigger unwanted behaviors, pulling you away from the intended purpose of each space. These cues initiate the habit loop—Cue → Craving → Response → Reward, leading to actions that don’t align with your goals. For example: - **Bedroom**: A phone on the nightstand (cue) sparks a desire to check social media (craving), leading to scrolling (response) and a dopamine hit (reward), which disrupts your goal of restful sleep. - **Kitchen**: Visible snacks like chips on the counter (cue) trigger a desire for those chips (craving), prompting snacking (response) and temporary satisfaction (reward), derailing healthy eating. - **Workspace**: Open browser tabs or notifications (cue) create fear of missing out on emails or news (craving), leading to checking email/news and procrastination (response) and fleeting engagement (reward), hindering productivity. - **Car**: A cluttered dashboard with fast-food wrappers (cue) may prompt a desire for a quick meal (craving), leading to a unhealthy drive-thru stop (response) and overeating less healthy foods (reward). - **Phone**: Social media app icons on the home screen (cue) trigger a desire to see if there are any notifications (craving), resulting in mindless scrolling (response) and finally a cheap dopamine rush from seeing notifications and other people's posts (reward). To identify negative cues in your environments, ask: What objects, digital elements, or social influences in this space lead to habits I want to avoid? Write down specific cues that conflict with your desired purposes for those spaces. ### 6. Identify Missing Positive Cues Positive cues are elements that already exist, or can introduced into your environment to trigger desired behaviors, making it easier to achieve your goals. These cues work within the habit loop by sparking productive cravings and responses. For example, placing running shoes by your bed cues a morning jog, or keeping a timer on your desk makes you want to set it up for a focused work session. To identify missing positive cues, ask yourself: What’s absent from this environment that could nudge me towards my goals? Here are strategies and examples to get started: **Make It Visible**: Place items that support your goals in plain sight. For example: - Bedroom: Set a book on your nightstand to cue evening reading instead of scrolling. - Workspace: Create a checklist of things you want to get done. **Make It Accessible**: Reduce friction for good habits. For example: - Eating vegetables: buy frozen vegetables that can be easily warmed up in the microwave. **Habit Stacking**: Pair cues with habits you already have. For example: - Flossing: Place single use flossers next to your toothbrush, so you floss when you brush your teeth. - Consuming Books: Get a books on CD and listen to them in the car. Every time you turn the car on, the book will automatically start playing. ### 7. Determine a Mitigation Tactic for Negative Cues When it comes to mitigating Negative Cues, the most extreme option is to Eliminate Cues entirely, and then less extreme options are to: Hide Cues, or Complicate Cues. For example: - **Eliminate Cues:** Delete videogames from your computer. Throw out junk food from your fridge/freezer and pantry. - **Hide Cues**: Charge your phone in another room to avoid morning scrolling. Store your gaming system in the closet on Sunday night. - **Complicate Bad Habits**: Keep social apps on an old phone and put leave that phone at home during the day. Don't allow yourself to bring junk food into your home/apartment. ### 8. Execute on Negative and Positive Cues Create two checklists (fill out worksheet): one for negative cues to mitigate and one for positive cues to add. [^1]: Wood, W. (2019). *Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick*.