How to overcome barriers to better health
When they want to make a change, many people assume that good intentions and willpower will be enough to carry them through. (And when they fail, naturally, they blame themselves for being “bad” or “weak.”)
We often forget about the context and environment that shapes our behaviors—making certain actions more likely or less likely to occur.
A recent review from Nature Reviews Psychology ranked different behavior change strategies and found that access was the number one influencer of people’s behaviors. (People who lived in neighborhoods with affordable grocers close by ate better, just like people who had to drive a long distance to the closest gym were less likely to exercise.6)
Not everyone can change neighborhoods, but most people have some degree of control over their more immediate environments, and can leverage this power to shape desired behaviors.
One example is the “kitchen makeover,” where you make sure foods you want to eat are washed, prepped, and at the front of the fridge, ready to eat on a whim. Meanwhile, foods that don’t support your goals get tossed, or relegated to the highest cupboard. (When you need a stepladder from the basement to reach the cookies, you might find you eat them less.)
(If you want to try it out, check out our Kitchen Set-up Assessment worksheet.)
Think about the goal you want to achieve, and the behaviors that support it. Then, evaluate how you might make small changes to your environment by:
- Using a trigger: Sometimes called a “cue” or a “prompt,” a trigger is simply a reminder to do a desired action. For example, you might block the door of your home office with a kettlebell, reminding you that, every time you leave or enter the office, you have to do ten kettlebell swings. If you’re trying to cut down on mindless phone time, you can install an app that reminds you to shut things down after 20 minutes on social media.
- Decreasing “friction”: Supermarkets put candy next to the checkout, making it easy to slip that chocolate bar into your cart while you’re standing in line, likely bored and hungry. You can be equally sneaky about encouraging positive behaviors too, such as putting fruit on your counter, ready for a quick snack, or packing your gym bag the night before, so it’s ready to grab on your way out the door before you change your mind.
- Constraining available options: Whether it’s deleting time-sucking apps off your phone, removing foods you know you lose control around from your kitchen, or heck, creating a capsule wardrobe so you waste less time in the morning getting dressed, constraint can actually free up a lot of time, brain power, and energy.
Invest your energy building the ecosystem that nudges you to make desired actions the obvious choice. This requires a little more work on the front end, but the payoff will be greater for less overall work.
