One of the bad habits I had back in a day was spending hours and hours on Facebook I was an avid user during my teenage years when the platform first came out it was the best way to socialize with your friends and plan events but the reason why I spent so much time on the platform wasn't because I was talking to my friends or organizing a party it was because of the newsfeed
the newsfeed is designed to put you into a sort of trance because well Facebook wants you to spend more time on their platform and it worked like a charm I was easily spending one two and sometimes even three hours every single day mindlessly scrolling down and down and down watching pointless videos being bombarded with ads to buy stuff and worst of all looking at the supposedly better lives of people that I kind of knew so later on when I discovered the world of self-development
I realized that I had to get rid of this bad habit but I didn't want to delete facebook altogether how else was I gonna chat with my friends or get invited to do fun things and that's when I realized that I needed to change the environment within Facebook so I decided to download a plugin called newsfeed Eradicator which like the name suggests gets rid of your newsfeed and instantaneously I saw a change I went from spending two to three hours a day on Facebook to spending less than 10 minutes all in the course of just one day with only the 5 minutes it took for me to install that plug-in and I had no cravings for it whatsoever it almost felt like
I forgot that the newsfeed ever existed what I learned from that experience was just how powerful changing your environment can be in fact it is without a doubt the easiest way to change your habits but you'll want to pay close attention to two things when changing your environment number one you want to increase and decrease certain cues in your environment we talked about cues in a team course which I will link to in the description box below every habit begins with a cue it's what starts the whole process in the case of my bad facebook habit the cue was the newsfeed simply seeing the newsfeed made me want to scroll down so by getting rid of this cue completely it became almost impossible for my bad habit to even begin
I basically forgot about the newsfeed, on the other hand, you should increase the queues for good habits in your life a couple of months ago I moved into a new office and decided to install a pull-up bar under one of the main doors and just by having that bar there I found myself doing an additional 10 to 20 pull-ups a day without even thinking about it because every time my walked under the door
I was confronted with the cue for my pull-up habit which is being under a pull-up bar the second thing you want to keep in mind when it comes to changing your environment is you want to make it harder to follow through with your bad habits and easier to follow through with your good habits what I mean by this well there are certain habits with cues are unavoidable let's say you're a bit overweight and part of it is because you snack on junk food a lot looking at this habit you can't really get rid of the cue here because the cue is hunger but what you can do is throw out all of the junk food in your house and then stock your fridge up with a bunch of healthy alternatives so when you do feel hungry which is inevitable
it becomes extremely hard for you to snack on junk food you would have to get dressed go to the store buy it and come back which would probably take you at least 10 to 20 minutes why do all of that when you have delicious but healthy food in the fridge which is literally only seconds away by changing your environment like this you've made it harder to stick to your bad habit and easier to stick to your good one or let's say you want to make going to the gym into a habit one of the biggest factors that will determine whether or not you actually go to the gym consistently is how far away your gym is if it takes you an hour just to get there chances are you're going to end up skipping out quite often the easier it is for you to actually get to the gym the better another thing you can do is prepare all of your gym equipment the night before gym clothes water bottle lock gym bag etc by having all of this stuff ready and packed the night before it makes it easier to follow up and it also serves as a visual cue a packed gym bag means that you're going to the gym and here's one more interesting trick that has actually worked extremely well for a lot of my clients which is wearing your gym clothes to sleep this actually builds off of an old habit of yours from your past which is gym class back when you were in elementary or high school every time you wore your gym clothes in school you ended up doing some sort of fitness related activity for years and years and years and this over time has become a habit so when you wake up wearing your gym clothes you unconsciously expect yourself to workout so that serves as a cue as well so remember guys if you want to change your life then you need to carefully look at the environment around
you ask yourself this I'm in an environment that promotes my good habits or my bad ones and what changes can I make to my environment that would benefit me that would make it much more likely for me to stick to my good habits and stop doing my bad ones I'd love to hear about what you guys come up within the comments this article.
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