I got sick of productivity gurus saying that ‘you need to change your environment to change your behaviour’. They might make things slightly easier, but surely someone can change without changing their environment?
But lately, I’ve started thinking the opposite- the only way to meaningfully change your behaviour is to change your environment.
We follow a general pattern in your day-to-day life. We see the same people, follow the same schedule, and do the same things. If we need to change, these things come in the way.
Say you’re a high-school senior who desperately needs to get off of his laptop and out of the house to get fresh air and exercise (purely fictional example). You set a time, even get your clothes ready, but something always gets in the way. Maybe there’s some extra work to complete. Maybe you’re way too tired after school to run. Maybe you just can’t muster the right energy at the right time.
But then, all of a sudden, school gets called off. Now, somehow you always have the energy to run at the time you’d set yourself. Now, you run more than you ran in your last term of school in 2 months. (Again, this example is purely fictional but for some reason I relate to it on a very personal level)
And it’s easy to blame willpower or time management, which definitely do play a part, but I realised you can’t rely on those things. In your daily routine, the ‘forces’ acting on you are balanced. You’ve fit into a groove that you repeat daily. When you try and change, it’s like trying to move to a different location. It doesn’t happen.
In fact, as a basic physical principle, it can’t happen. Let’s get Newton to help out here:
<aside> 💡 Every object persists in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed on it
</aside>
I.e. movement without unbalanced forces is a no no
And that makes sense. With a bad environment, you're like a ball in a valley. Even if you do make an effort to change, your willpower has way less magnitude than the crushing force of inconvenience, routine and expectation. Trying to change is a losing battle.