Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(70)
1. INCREASE THE TIME REQUIRED
You can make a habit less likely if you change the environment so the bad habit requires more time. Let’s say the general habit you want to stop is eating sugary snacks. You created a Swarm of Behaviors, and you found a specific habit to stop “eating ice cream while watching TV in the evening.”
You can’t remove the prompt because it’s internal. Something inside you was saying, “Hey, ice cream would taste great right now.” And you can’t ignore that kind of prompt because your sweet tooth always wins out over willpower. So what’s next?
One option is to redesign your environment so you don’t have any ice cream in your home. About fifteen years ago, Denny and I created a policy of no ice cream in our freezer—ever. Perhaps you can make this a policy in your home as well. That means the next time you start binge-watching a new Netflix series and that inner voice pipes up, you can’t get out the entire container and grab a spoon. You’d need to put on your shoes, get in the car, drive to the store, find the ice cream, buy it, and come home. All that takes a lot of time. In the ideal scenario, the extra time might be enough to make you say, “Hey, that’s too much trouble. I just wanna watch Modern Family reruns.” This redesign can reduce—or eliminate—your evening habit of eating ice cream.
2. INCREASE THE MONEY REQUIRED
The next factor in the Ability Chain is money, and the question then becomes: How can I make this habit more expensive?
This is a bit tricky if you are designing habits out of your own life. You are probably not going to charge yourself ten dollars to eat a bowl of ice cream. Even so, you should consider making a habit more costly, then move on to other links in the Ability Chain if this doesn’t work.
If you are designing habit change for other people, then money may be a viable option. Suppose you don’t want your kids to play video games so much, so you charge them five dollars an hour to play. If you don’t want your employees to drink so much soda, you raise the price in the vending machines. If you don’t want your university staff to drive to work, you increase the price of parking on campus.
This approach should be familiar to you as there are taxes imposed on cigarettes and soda. When the price goes up on these kinds of products, people buy less and overall consumption declines. This works because charging more money decreases some people’s ability to do their bad habits.
3. INCREASE THE PHYSICAL EFFORT REQUIRED
To make a habit harder to do, you can change how much physical effort it requires. The ice cream example required more time but also some physical effort. This double whammy is one reason that the “no ice cream in the freezer” policy works so well in our home.
I don’t have a desk chair in my home office in California. I removed it by design in order to make sitting all day harder to do. Yes, I can sit in my office—it’s not forbidden. But I’d have to go to another room and drag a chair into my office. Too much work. For the most part, I just keep standing.
In our Maui home, we don’t have a TV that’s easy to watch. We have one, but it’s stored away. And that’s by design. In order to watch TV, I have to get it out of storage, physically carry it to a spot in the living room, and plug in the cables. Making this hard to do means that we never turn on the TV randomly. We watch only when we decide it’s worth the trouble.
If you want to take this concept to the limit, you could do what I did in my twenties. When I was studying for my master’s degree, my younger sister moved in with me. I didn’t own a TV, but Kim brought one along. I didn’t want either of us to watch lots of TV, and I couldn’t imagine trying to study with the TV blaring so I came up with a plan. I bought an old exercise bike and hired an engineering student to rewire the TV so it would turn on only if the bike pedals were moving. After spending sixty-five dollars, we had our solution: the Bike-TV. If we wanted to watch, someone had to get on the bike. If the pedaling stopped, the TV would turn off. This Bike-TV worked much better than I expected. Not only did we watch less TV, we also got in better shape.
Of all the factors in the Ability Chain, physical effort is my favorite one to leverage in stopping a bad habit. You can redesign at a time when your motivation is high and you’re not tempted to do the habit. Then, when your mood changes and you want ice cream or TV or wine, you realize that your habit is harder to do and maybe not worth doing at all.
4. INCREASE THE MENTAL EFFORT REQUIRED
For some habits, the best solution is to require more mental effort. This factor exploits our human tendency to be lazy, which is a crass way of saying we’ve evolved to conserve our energies when we can.
Consider how this might work with social media. If you reset your password to something complicated like 1Lik3be1ng0uT51de (translation: I like being outside) and don’t allow your system to save it, you’d need to enter this crazy string of characters each time you want to access your feed or post something. Since true habits are behaviors we do without thinking, requiring yourself to concentrate can be a good way to stop a habit or reduce its frequency.
When people count calories or track points, as they do in Weight Watchers, they eat less in part because they have added an extra step that requires thinking.