particular context - Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

particular context.
In one study, scientists instructed insomniacs to get into bed only when
they were tired. If they couldn’t fall asleep, they were told to sit in a
different room until they became sleepy. Over time, subjects began to
associate the context of their bed with the action of sleeping, and it became
easier to quickly fall asleep when they climbed in bed. Their brains learned
that sleeping—not browsing on their phones, not watching television, not
staring at the clock—was the only action that happened in that room.
The power of context also reveals an important strategy: habits can be
easier to change in a new environment. It helps to escape the subtle triggers
and cues that nudge you toward your current habits. Go to a new place—a
different coffee shop, a bench in the park, a corner of your room you
seldom use—and create a new routine there.
It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a
new habit in the face of competing cues. It can be difficult to go to bed
early if you watch television in your bedroom each night. It can be hard to
study in the living room without getting distracted if that’s where you
always play video games. But when you step outside your normal
environment, you leave your behavioral biases behind. You aren’t battling
old environmental cues, which allows new habits to form without
interruption.
Want to think more creatively? Move to a bigger room, a rooftop patio,
or a building with expansive architecture. Take a break from the space
where you do your daily work, which is also linked to your current thought
patterns.
Trying to eat healthier? It is likely that you shop on autopilot at your
regular supermarket. Try a new grocery store. You may find it easier to
avoid unhealthy food when your brain doesn’t automatically know where it
is located in the store.
When you can’t manage to get to an entirely new environment, redefine
or rearrange your current one. Create a separate space for work, study,
exercise, entertainment, and cooking. The mantra I find useful is “One
space, one use.”
When I started my career as an entrepreneur, I would often work from
my couch or at the kitchen table. In the evenings, I found it very difficult to
stop working. There was no clear division between the end of work time
and the beginning of personal time. Was the kitchen table my office or the
space where I ate meals? Was the couch where I relaxed or where I sent
emails? Everything happened in the same place.
A few years later, I could finally afford to move to a home with a
separate room for my office. Suddenly, work was something that happened
“in here” and personal life was something that happened “out there.” It was
easier for me to turn off the professional side of my brain when there was a
clear dividing line between work life and home life. Each room had one
primary use. The kitchen was for cooking. The office was for working.
Whenever possible, avoid mixing the context of one habit with another.
When you start mixing contexts, you’ll start mixing habits—and the easier
ones will usually win out. This is one reason why the versatility of modern
technology is both a strength and a weakness. You can use your phone for
all sorts of tasks, which makes it a powerful device. But when you can use
your phone to do nearly anything, it becomes hard to associate it with one
task. You want to be productive, but you’re also conditioned to browse
social media, check email, and play video games whenever you open your
phone. It’s a mishmash of cues.
You may be thinking, “You don’t understand. I live in New York City.
My apartment is the size of a smartphone. I need each room to play multiple
roles.” Fair enough. If your space is limited, divide your room into activity
zones: a chair for reading, a desk for writing, a table for eating. You can do
the same with your digital spaces. I know a writer who uses his computer
only for writing, his tablet only for reading, and his phone only for social
media and texting. Every habit should have a home.
If you can manage to stick with this strategy, each context will become
associated with a particular habit and mode of thought. Habits thrive under
predictable circumstances like these. Focus comes automatically when you
are sitting at your work desk. Relaxation is easier when you are in a space
designed for that purpose. Sleep comes quickly when it is the only thing
that happens in your bedroom. If you want behaviors that are stable and
predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable.
A stable environment where everything has a place and a purpose is an
environment where habits can easily form.
Chapter Summary
Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behavior over
time.
Every habit is initiated by a cue. We are more likely to notice cues that
stand out.
Make the cues of good habits obvious in your environment.
Gradually, your habits become associated not with a single trigger but
with the entire context surrounding the behavior. The context becomes
the cue.
It is easier to build new habits in a new environment because you are
not fighting against old cues.
I
7
The Secret to Self-Control
N 1971
, as the Vietnam War was heading into its sixteenth year,
congressmen Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy from
Illinois made a discovery that stunned the American public. While visiting
the troops, they had learned that over 15 percent of U.S. soldiers stationed
there were heroin addicts. Follow-up research revealed that 35 percent of
service members in Vietnam had tried heroin and as many as 20 percent
were addicted—the problem was even worse than they had initially thought.
The discovery led to a flurry of activity in Washington, including the
creation of the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention under
President Nixon to promote prevention and rehabilitation and to track
addicted service members when they returned home.
Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge. In a finding that
completely upended the accepted beliefs about addiction, Robins found that
when soldiers who had been heroin users returned home, only 5 percent of
them became re-addicted within a year, and just 12 percent relapsed within
three years. In other words, approximately nine out of ten soldiers who used
heroin in Vietnam eliminated their addiction nearly overnight.
This finding contradicted the prevailing view at the time, which
considered heroin addiction to be a permanent and irreversible condition.
Instead, Robins revealed that addictions could spontaneously dissolve if
there was a radical change in the environment. In Vietnam, soldiers spent
all day surrounded by cues triggering heroin use: it was easy to access, they
were engulfed by the constant stress of war, they built friendships with
fellow soldiers who were also heroin users, and they were thousands of
miles from home. Once a soldier returned to the United States, though, he
found himself in an environment devoid of those triggers. When the context
changed, so did the habit.
Compare this situation to that of a typical drug user. Someone becomes
addicted at home or with friends, goes to a clinic to get clean—which is
devoid of all the environmental stimuli that prompt their habit—then
returns to their old neighborhood with all of their previous cues that caused
them to get addicted in the first place. It’s no wonder that usually you see
numbers that are the exact opposite of those in the Vietnam study. Typically,
90 percent of heroin users become re-addicted once they return home from
rehab.
The Vietnam studies ran counter to many of our cultural beliefs about
bad habits because it challenged the conventional association of unhealthy
behavior as a moral weakness. If you’re overweight, a smoker, or an addict,
you’ve been told your entire life that it is because you lack self-control—
maybe even that you’re a bad person. The idea that a little bit of discipline
would solve all our problems is deeply embedded in our culture.
Recent research, however, shows something different. When scientists
analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out
those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling.
Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way
that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they
spend less time in tempting situations.
The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to
use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to
use it very often. So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to
success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a
more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.
This counterintuitive idea makes even more sense once you understand
what happens when a habit is formed in the brain. A habit that has been
encoded in the mind is ready to be used whenever the relevant situation
arises. When Patty Olwell, a therapist from Austin, Texas, started smoking,
she would often light up while riding horses with a friend. Eventually, she
quit smoking and avoided it for years. She had also stopped riding. Decades
later, she hopped on a horse again and found herself craving a cigarette for
the first time in forever. The cues were still internalized; she just hadn’t
been exposed to them in a long time.
Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the
environmental cues reappear. This is one reason behavior change
techniques can backfire. Shaming obese people with weight-loss
presentations can make them feel stressed, and as a result many people
return to their favorite coping strategy: overeating. Showing pictures of
blackened lungs to smokers leads to higher levels of anxiety, which drives
many people to reach for a cigarette. If you’re not careful about cues, you
can cause the very behavior you want to stop.
Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the
feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you
eat junk food, you feel bad. Watching television makes you feel sluggish, so
you watch more television because you don’t have the energy to do
anything else. Worrying about your health makes you feel anxious, which
causes you to smoke to ease your anxiety, which makes your health even
worse and soon you’re feeling more anxious. It’s a downward spiral, a
runaway train of bad habits.
Researchers refer to this phenomenon as “cue-induced wanting”: an
external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit. Once you
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