The Power of Environment in Shaping Health Habits
Exercise is often seen as a battle of willpower. Gym enthusiasts are associated with extreme discipline and motivation, while those who don’t exercise are frequently labeled lazy or apathetic. However, our environment plays a crucial role in shaping our habits. A 21-year-old bodybuilder may have a flexible schedule and ample time for training, whereas a busy parent juggling childcare, work stress, and other commitments might find it challenging to prioritize exercise.
While I can’t change your boss’s schedule or make your children behave perfectly, I can offer some practical tips from experts to help you manipulate your environment for better health. This week’s newsletter focuses on this very theme.
Dan John, one of my favorite coaches, has provided advice that has stood the test of time. During our recent conversation, he shared a fitness tip that surprised me: exercising outdoors. “When you train outside, people start to gravitate towards you,” he explained. “If you go to a park every Saturday at 9 o’clock and invite friends, and your friends invite friends, then pretty soon you’re going to build an intentional community.”
Socializing with friends might be more appealing than the exercise itself. On the flip side, you might want to avoid receiving texts like “Where on earth are you?!” on a Saturday morning. Either way, you’re held accountable, and a more consistent (read: effective) exercise routine usually follows.
This doesn’t mean you have to join a grueling bootcamp class. You could simply schedule regular slots for a brisk walk and talk with a friend, or do a quick kettlebell workout with a partner wherever is practical.
John’s bonus tip for making these habits stick is to occasionally enjoy a relatively nutritious bite to eat afterwards. “By the time everyone has food in their bellies, talk turns to next week and how you can make things better,” he says. “It becomes more normal for people to give a damn about the workouts.”
Another way to manipulate your environment is by keeping exercise equipment accessible around the house. Unroll a yoga mat next to your home office setup, or keep resistance bands in the kitchen and work through a few exercises while the kettle, microwave, or oven does its thing. Even putting the kitchen bin on the other side of the room, or placing a few work essentials away from your desk, will add a surprising amount of movement to your day.
These environmental changes extend to diet too. I recently had a fascinating chat with Dr Thomas Sambrook of the University of East Anglia, who led a study into why we can’t stop snacking. While I will share the full interview when it’s published, here’s a taster. His team found that even when people felt full, seeing food still stimulated electrical impulses in the part of the brain “that kicks off not only when you see pictures of tasty food, but also when you eat tasty food, win money, or look at racy photographs.”
“The short story is that you can eat a food until you are completely sated on it, but your brain still says ‘yum’ when you see pictures of it,” Dr Sambrook explains. A subconscious habit is created in which seeing tasty food makes us want to eat. This might have served our ancient ancestors well, but in the modern world, where food (and adverts for it) are everywhere, it can override our body’s natural appetite controls and lead to overeating.
Dr Sambrook uses the example cue of sitting with friends around an open packet of crisps or biscuits – the food is in your hand and then your mouth before you’re even aware of your actions. He provides some interesting solutions. “It’s all about stimulus control,” he says. “It may seem daft, but if there’s a food advert coming on the television, get up and stretch your legs or put the kettle on.”
Dr Sambrook also suggests swapping your usual packet of crisps or biscuits for rice cakes. You still fulfill the cue-response relationship by eating something from a rustling packet, but what you’re eating is less calorie-dense, and because it doesn’t taste all that great, it can weaken the habit over time.
Fat Loss Habits author and long-time personal trainer Ben Carpenter agrees; engineering your immediate food environment is one of his 13 aforementioned habits. This could mean keeping pre-cut vegetables at the front of the fridge for snacking, then keeping less nutritious snacks such as crisps, chocolates and biscuits out of sight at the back of the cupboard. Or you might avoid having these snacks in the house – the added friction of needing to leave home to buy a bar of chocolate is a surprisingly strong deterrent.
Now, none of this is to say you need to be puritanical in your fitness efforts. Realistically, regular exercise is hard (given the many benefits, everyone would probably do it if it weren’t), and tasty food offers immense social and cultural value. Almost all things can be enjoyed in moderation.
These tips are simply meant to help you nudge the needle of your health in the right direction rather than overhauling your entire life – moving a little more, eating a few extra nutritious foods, and treating treats as their name suggests: as treats.
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