Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(61)

This is a slight variation on what we discussed in chapter 3—but here I want you to focus on what surrounds your habit instead of scaling back the habit to make it easier.

When I first decided to get serious about flossing, I looked around my bathroom. I usually kept the floss tucked away in a cabinet behind the mirror. I wondered: How can I make this habit easier? The answer was pretty clear. I took the floss out of the cabinet and put it next to my toothbrush on the counter. That would be its new home. This one-time action was huge in making flossing a solid habit.

Let’s say you’re a week into your new habit of eating sliced cucumbers as soon as you get home from work. You used to go straight for the corn chips, so your hope is that eating some sliced cucumber will hold you over until dinnertime. The first couple of days this habit works, but then you start skipping a cucumber here and there, and reaching for the corn chips that live right on the kitchen counter. Okay, time to troubleshoot and ask the next question: What is making this new habit hard to do?

You then realize that you skipped one of the days because you couldn’t find any cucumbers in the fridge. You fumbled around for fifteen or twenty seconds, cursing under your breath about how no one but you ever cleans out the fridge. The cucumbers are gone—just the excuse you needed to reach for the chips. Another day, you found the cucumbers easily enough, but they weren’t ready to eat. You were tired and not in the mood for washing and cutting. So chips again. Now you’ve got some important clues for a habit redesign.

Make a new habit of washing and cutting cucumbers the night before (ongoing habit)



Tell everyone to leave your cucumbers alone (one-time action)



Make sure the fridge is sufficiently tidy so you can find your cucumbers immediately (once-a-week habit)





By layering your habit with environment redesign, you will reduce friction and set your habit free to go above the Action Line. All hail the mighty prewashed, presliced cucumber.

Some of these environment redesign moves are one and done—telling your family to back off the cucumbers and moving the floss to the counter.

In pursuing one habit, you may be inspired to create other ones that deal with your environment. Remember Sarika? When she noticed that her cluttered counter was getting in the way of her breakfast-making habit, she recognized that design flaw and addressed it with another habit—cleaning the night before.

You’ll get better and better at finding ways to redesign your environment to support your good habits. Once you start looking at the world this way, you will see how miniscule obstacles can get in the way of your good habits.

When you consciously and thoughtfully design your environment to accommodate new habits, you make your whole life easier.

Here are some further guidelines for redesigning your environment:

When you design new habits, invest time in redesigning your environment so they’re easier to do.



As you begin doing your new habit, make the environmental adjustments as you go along, redesigning as needed to make your habit easier to do.



Question tradition. Who says you have to keep your vitamins in the kitchen or floss in the bathroom? Maybe your vitamins need to be next to your computer. Or maybe flossing works best when you keep floss next to your TV remote. You’re a Habit Ninja, not a conformist. Find what works for you.



Invest in the gear you need. Suppose you want to bike seven miles to school even when it is raining and cold. Design out these demotivators by buying what you need to make biking in the rain and cold less painful.





So far, I’ve focused on systems and principles. In this book I’m sharing a process, not prescribing specific habits for specific outcomes. However, I now want to shift gears and share a technique to help you eat healthier food.

Given that I suspect some people reading this book want to lose weight and keep it off—or you have a loved one who does—I want to share my best weight-loss solution from the last ten years.

I call it SuperFridge.

Weight loss happens mostly through changing how we eat. Although exercise is beneficial in many ways, it is not the key to weight loss. Focusing your time and energy on nutrition makes all the difference, but eating better by relying on willpower is a bad approach—we already know why: too many conflicting Motivation Vectors make it nearly impossible to stay the course over time. Unfortunately, the food environment in today’s world works against our aspirations to eat better. We have so few good options at work, when we travel, and when we dine out. So many factors work against us. That’s just the reality.

Now I’m going to give my opinion: One practical way to change how you eat is by redesigning your food environment, especially your fridge at home.

Denny and I have changed a lot of habits together, but SuperFridge may be our best household shift yet. Thanks in part to our fridge redesign, we have each lost more than 15 percent of our body weight, and we’ve stayed at our ideal weight for years. And the whole process—even keeping the weight off—has felt easy.

Here’s what it’s like to live with SuperFridge.

When I open our fridge, I see a bunch of glass containers filled with food ready to eat. The broccoli is in one container already washed and cut up. Same with the cauliflower, celery, peppers, and onions. There’s a container with cooked quinoa. I see fresh fruit and boiled eggs ready for a quick snack. We have plain full-fat yogurt, various krauts, and condiments like mustard. You get the idea.