Environment shapes Behavior

The following post was first shared in my monthly newsletter, the Kinsei-Do Fitness Nuggets, back in March 2022. With the calendar turning another page recently, some people - perhaps you too! - will have made resolutions to live healthier, eat better, exercise more, etc etc for this year, and this advice is likely to be helpful!


According to James Clear, habit expert and author of the bestselling book Atomic Habits - a personal favorite of mine and one of my most-gifted books to clients and friends - whether you succeed in achieving your goals and desired behaviors has almost nothing to do with your willpower, or how much you think you want it.

Surprised? I certainly was at first.

So what is it then that determines your likelihood of success? Your environment.

Consider this cheeky yet so true statement, also known as "Berardi's First Law", after the co-founder of Precision Nutrition and coaching guru Dr John Berardi:​

If a food is near you and conveniently available, you will eventually eat it.

This appears so obvious that it doesn't even need to be stated, but if you think about it, it tells you exactly what you need to do (and not do) if you want to instil a new habit or positive behavior. You need to make sure that the "right" environmental cues are extremely obvious and omnipresent, and the "wrong" cues, the temptations, are out of sight and hard to do.

Or, back to James Clear, who says:

1. It’s easy to not eat fruits and vegetables when they are out of sight in the bottom of the fridge.
2. It’s easy to not do yoga when your yoga mat is hidden away in a box in the basement. 
3. It's easy to not... (you get the drift)...

For this reason, redesigning your environment can be one of the most effective steps you can take to instil good habits. James Clear calls this process “environment design”, and its key goal is to make the cues of good habits more obvious (and bad ones harder to follow through on).

Here are some examples:

1. Want to meditate more? Set up a comfortable, quiet place in your home where you practice meditation.
2. Want to get more exercise? Put your exercise mat, dumbbells or whatever you have in your home training kit where you'll see it every single day, or hang a pull-up bar in your bathroom door and crank out a set of pull ups every time you go to pee.
3. Want to sleep better and develop a wind-down routine? Move your phone charger out of the bedroom and place a white noise machine, your favorite candle, and a couple of books on your nightstand.
4. Want to eat less chocolate and junk food? Don't even buy and bring it into the house in the first place, and instead put more health goals supportive snacks out in the open so you can grab them when you need to.

Sounds obvious? Yeah. Easy to do even? Probably.

But are you doing it?



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