Habits: Make behaviour easy or difficult
The easier it is to perform a habit, the more likely you are to do it.
Increase the chance of successfully building a new habit by making the behaviour easy, and of breaking an existing habit by making the behaviour difficult.
Humans are lazy by nature: we tend to put as little effort into tasks as possible because our brains are programmed to conserve our precious energy whenever possible. We follow the law of least effort: we are naturally inclined to follow the path of least resistance that requires the least amount of work.
Every action requires an amount of physical and mental energy. The less energy an action requires, the more likely we are to do it. That’s why we spend so much time mindlessly scrolling through social media and binge watching movies and series. And why we tend to spend much less time exercising regularly, preparing healthy meals and pursuing ongoing education.
You can see every habit as an obstacle: you don’t want the habit itself, you want the result that the habit delivers. You don’t want to exercise, you want to be fit and healthy. You don’t want to meditate, you want to feel calm. The harder the habit, the more friction there is between your current and desired state. Reducing the friction in performing desired habits increases the likelihood that you will build and maintain them. It allows you to achieve more with less effort. Increasing the friction in performing unwanted habits increases the chance of breaking them.
We are capable of doing difficult things like establishing a consistent workout routine, raising children, and learning new skills or languages. The idea behind making things easy is that by reducing friction in the moment you make it easier to do things that will benefit you in the future. Ask yourself: How can I make it as easy as possible to do what is beneficial in the long run?
There are various techniques to make behaviour easier or more difficult.
⚒️ Build and break habits: Change your physical environment
Create an environment where having desired habits is made as easy as possible (remove friction), and having unwanted habits is made as difficult as possible (add friction).
Build new habits
If you want to build a new habit, optimise your environment to make the behaviour easier, for example:
👉 Choose a gym close to home or along the route to work.
👉 Prepare your environment to make it easier to perform a desired habit. Prepare your workout clothes and shoes the night before so you're more likely to exercise. Encourage eating less by using smaller plates to reduce portion sizes. Place a full water bottle on your work desk to drink enough water. Organise your refrigerator to make healthy food options like vegetables, yogurt, and lean proteins easily accessible.
Break existing habits
If you want to break an existing habit, optimise your environment to make the behaviour more difficult, for example:
👉 Prepare your environment to make an unwanted habit more difficult to do. Remove unhealthy snacks from your house. Keep the TV remote control out of reach. Reduce the temptation to hit the snooze button by moving the alarm further away from your bed. Set a password for online shopping to limit impulse buying. Manage work emails on a separate device for a healthy work-life balance. Arrange your refrigerator so that unhealthy food options are not easily accessible.
👉 If you want to focus on what you're doing, have a family member or co-worker keep your smartphone with them for a few hours so you're not constantly checking your messages.
⚒️ Build and break habits: Control your decisive moments
Every day there are a few decisive moments of choice that have a major impact on what follows. Wake up early or hit the snooze button? Eat a healthy lunch or fast food? Order a takeaway meal or cook your own meal? Go to the gym or play video games?
Controlling these defining moments is important because they determine the path you take and limit the options available to you. These little choices add up because each one determines how you spend the next block of time. Making a few productive and healthy decisive choices can make the difference between a good day and a bad day.
⚒️ Build and break habits: Use commitment devices
A commitment device is a choice you make in the present to restrict your options in the future. This is a way to bind your future self to desired habits and save it from unwanted ones. The idea is to make it easier to perform desired habits than not to perform them. Or even better: to make desired habits inevitable and unwanted habits impossible.
For example:
👉 Leave your cash and payment cards at home so you can't buy anything when you go out.
👉 Pay for a course or session in advance so you have an incentive to attend.
👉 Don't buy unhealthy snacks while shopping, so that you don't have them at home when you crave them.
👉 Make one-time choices to automate desired habits. Set up automatic monthly deposits into a savings account to ensure consistent savings. Set up automatic payments for bills to ensure financial commitments are met. Use email filters to organise your inbox. Unsubscribe from non-essential emails to reduce the time you spend managing emails. Unsubscribe from streaming services to spend less time watching them. Turn off notifications on your smartphone so you are less distracted. Set daily time limits on your smartphone for social media apps to reduce screen time.
⚒️ Build habits: The Two-Minute Rule
The Two-Minute Rule states: When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes.
Make starting your habit as easy as possible by scaling down your new habit until it can be done in two minutes or less. Write one sentence, read one page, meditate for one minute, do one push-up. The point is to first get used to doing the habit consistently, which reinforces the type of person you want to be. After you have learned to show up and mastered the first two minutes, you can start scaling the habit up step by step toward your ultimate goal. Until you finally achieve the habit you want to build.
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Making behaviour easy or difficult is a powerful tool for building and breaking habits. It is based on the third step of James Clear’s four-step habit model: cue, craving, response, and reward. Always keep your ultimate goal in mind: becoming the type of person you want to be.
References
Atomic Habits, by James Clear
My blogposts about habits are available here:
https://www.a3lifedesign.com/blog-english/category/Habits
