- There's a chance
that you're trying way too hard to change your life.
You're expending all of your willpower
on things that don't require it.
Let me give you an example.
I've been playing hockey for about 20 years.
I'm gonna be 27 this year
and I've been playing since I was like two feet tall.
So, after 20 years of conditioning,
what do you think happens to me
when I step inside a hockey rink?
I immediately want to play hockey.
I start thinking about scoring goals.
The environment and the smells
and everything about being inside a hockey rink
creates a downhill slope
that makes me just want to play hockey,
but, little do we realize,
everything in our life is like this,
especially the spaces that we most commonly occupy,
even the smallest things like the layout of our furniture,
what foods are on display in our kitchen.
Every room in your house is telling you
to live your life in a certain way, and, a lot of the time,
those ways are ways you want nothing to do with,
and then when we try to live our life differently
or we want to improve ourselves and improve our habits,
it just feels like we're swimming upstream all the time.
We can't figure out why nothing ever sticks.
We feel like some other force is working against us,
causing us to fail.
Now, I'm not trying to perpetuate
some type of victim mentality.
I'm not saying that there's nothing you can do about it.
Your environment is against you.
Some third party is involved
and responsible for changing your life.
In fact, I'm saying pretty much the exact opposite,
because our behavior shapes our environment, and, in return,
our environment shapes our continued behavior.
These things feed into each other.
So let's talk about how we can leverage this principle
to use our behavior to shape our environment in a smart way
to create downward slopes
into living the lifestyle that you've always wanted to live.
So, the first thing you should do is go room to room
and ask yourself, "What is the goal of this room?"
Then observe all of the little features of the room
that are inhibiting that intended purpose.
How do you make a better bedroom?
Well, what's your bedroom for?
It's probably for sleeping
and alternative forms of exercise.
So how do you create an environment
that fosters those things, that makes those things better?
Well, first and foremost, you probably want that place
to be clean, welcoming,
a nice, warm, comforting environment,
so when you rest your head on your pillow at night,
you're not shaken to your core
at the absolute chaos that surrounds you.
So, step one is probably to clean up your room.
Don't have (censored) lying around everywhere.
- [Narrator] Uh-oh. That's no way to treat your clothes.
- If you're like me,
your bed takes up 85% of the real estate of the room
'cause I live in a little closet,
but even with my limited floor space,
I can still have a nice little lamp in the corner,
maybe buy a plant, put up a mirror, maybe a painting,
buy one of those little closet organizers,
get rid of a lot of the clothes that I don't wear.
After I do these things, then, all of a sudden,
sleeping in my bedroom is just a more enjoyable experience.
- A change like that can be restful.
- It doesn't work that way for me.
- It works for your father.
- You'd be shocked as to how much better
you'll sleep in a clean room
versus a chaotic, dank, used-underwear-laden goblin hole.
- You know, I bowl with your dad every week.
He has a great time.
(dramatic musical sting)
- Another thing I noticed that was
seriously inhibiting my quality of sleep
was the fact that I was just on my phone all the time
before I go to sleep and the minute I wake up.
There's a couple ways you can tackle this.
In previous videos, I've suggested
putting your phone on a charging station
across your room at night
so that you have no option but to just sleep in your bed.
You can't go on your phone if it's across the room, right?
- [Narrator] No.
- That works great, but, honestly,
I have a hard time sticking to that as well,
so what did I do about it?
Clearly, I don't have a ton of willpower at my disposal,
so I bought blue blockers,
so when I'm on my phone at night,
I'm not assaulted with the blue light
which inhibits my ability to get into deep sleep.
Here's the trade off though.
You're like, "Okay, you're just gonna be
on your phone in bed for like three hours?"
No.
What happens is, when I'm on my phone at night
with my blue blockers on,
all of the colors on my phone are so washed out
and my phone charger cable is so short
that it's just so uncomfortable to be on my phone
that I don't go on it anyways and I go to sleep.
The solutions don't have to be neat and perfect,
but that's what's working for me.
So I went from a messy room
with a long iPhone cable and no blue blockers
to just cleaning up my room, adding a couple decorations,
having a shorter iPhone cable and blue blockers,
and, all of a sudden, I'm getting way better sleep.
- [Narrator] They didn't say much,
but you knew they were pleased as punch.
- Now we move into the kitchen.
So what's the goal of a good kitchen?
Is it to (beep) around?
Is it to sit there in despair as you eat Indomie
for the fifth day in a row,
feeling like (beep) about yourself?
No, the goal of a good kitchen is probably
to make eating and cooking healthy food as easy as possible,
so that you can energize your body,
so that you can go forward in life with exuberance and zeal.
So what does your kitchen look like?
How is it inhibiting those processes?
If you have different goals for your kitchen,
that's all well and good, but, for my kitchen,
I realized that I was eating way too much junk food.
I was buying things that I didn't actually want to eat,
but I was buying them
because I was hungry in the grocery store.
- [Narrator] He was hungry and he had some money.
- So when I walked into my pantry, I asked myself,
"Do I want to eat Indomie or Indomie?"
Because it's the only thing I bought.
I mean, I bought other things, healthier things,
but they're in my fridge and it requires effort.
I have to actually
cook the chicken breasts and chop vegetables.
I don't wanna do that.
I'll eat the Indomie.
Do you see how dumb this is?
Through my purchasing decisions,
I invited things into my house that were counterintuitive
to the way that I wanted to live my life.
Indomie is extremely delicious and easy to eat,
and it's very quick to eat, so that, when I'm hungry,
I come into my kitchen, and basically the question is,
"Do I want food now or do I want food in like 35 minutes
when I figure out the right way to cut a chicken breast?"
Obviously, I'm gonna choose the Indomie.
I was existing in an environment
that created a downward incentive slope into eating Indomie.
So what I did about it was two things.
First of all, obviously, I stopped buying Indomie
and other food that I don't actually want to be eating,
and then, secondly, I stopped buying chicken breasts
just to let it rot in my fridge.
- [Narrator] It's criminal to waste food like this.
Think of the sand wasp.
- I started buying other healthy foods
that are actually easy and quick to eat,
so that, when I'm hungry, I can eat quickly and healthily.
But, Joey, I don't know how to eat healthy.
What are these good, healthy foods that are quick to eat
that you're talking about?
The first thing, the first item on the menu
is what I like to call advanced granola.
I think it's technically called muesli. Moo-es-lee?
I don't know how to pronounce it,
but I'm sure you have this in your grocery store.
It's got a bunch of good stuff in it.
There's nothing sketchy, but I like to get my oats in,
if you respond well to oats.
It's high in calories. It's got good fiber.
I don't just eat the oats 'cause I'm not a mad man.
I like to douse it in ultra-filtered milk.
If you have this where you're from in your country,
I would highly recommend it,
because it's kind of a cheat code.
The nutrition facts on the back are insane.
It has so many vitamins and nutrients in it
and the protein is way higher than regular milk,
and it's lactose-free,
so if lactose tends to make you feel weird,
it won't be a problem with this milk.
Another thing I like to eat all the time is eggs.
You can't go wrong with eggs.
Eggs are a super food.
You can only go wrong with eggs if you're a vegan.
Everyone knows I don't need to talk about eggs.
Just eat your eggs if you're not morally opposed to it.
I don't buy chicken anymore.
Why? Am I morally opposed to chicken?
No. Chicken's delicious when other people cook it.
Chicken is sketchier to cook. More food poisoning involved.
I just buy steak now because you literally can't go wrong.
You slap it on a hot grill.
You can cook it for like three seconds or three minutes.
It's still edible,
and it's like 40 grams of protein, good fats in there.
The final thing I'm gonna talk about
is just a little hack that I have,
and that's just to have some grabbable vegetables.
Grape tomatoes.
Can't go wrong with cucumber or carrots.
Just have things around that you can just grab.
When you're hungry, little easy solutions like this
solve the problem of, like,
reaching for something like Doritos,
reaching for something like Indomie.
It doesn't need to happen.
There's healthier alternatives to grab and go food.
So I hope you enjoyed this little breakdown.
- If I hadn't started
getting more sleep and eating correctly,
I might have lost my job.
- Okay, if you made it this far into the video,
look at the merch room.
Look at all this merch.
I physically have this merchandise,
these "inaction is a slow death" hoodies in my possession.
I lovingly pack it into a box when you buy one.
Actually, Jared does that shit. I don't touch it.
- Hm.
This is halal.
- But we've reintroduced the merch for a limited time,
so if you want a daily reminder
that inaction is a slow death, cop the hoodies.
They're dope.
In fact, they're so dope and made with such premium material
that if you buy them and you're an international person,
we actually break even or lose money every time you buy one.
So head on over to betterideas.com.
Get yours before they're gone forever.
All right. Let's talk about the house in general.
What is the goal for a house?
What do you want the goal for your house to be?
Maybe you don't have a house.
I don't own this one. I'm renting it.
Maybe you live with 16 different people.
Maybe you live in a college dorm room.
Maybe you live with your parents.
Whatever the case is, you have control over
probably a small section of it.
Maybe it's just your bedroom.
What do you want the goal for that space to be?
For my own house, I live alone,
so I get to have a lot of control over that question.
I get to have a lot of control over
the answers to that question, and, for me,
I want to create a space
that I don't actually spend a lot of time in.
You know, I want to go be a person in the world,
be part of communities.
I wanna go play hockey. I wanna go for walks.
I don't actually want to spend a lot of time in my house,
being a recluse,
but while I'm here in my little goblin hole,
I want it to feel a little less like a goblin hole.
I want to create a space that recharges me and refreshes me,
that's orderly, where I know where things are.
After a long day of being a person in the world,
I want to come home and feel like my life is in order.
You know, things are okay,
and I want to eliminate sticky corners of my house,
and what I mean by that
is not like a Shelob's Lair reference.
I wanna reduce sticky corners like my office.
When I'm at my worst, I spend a lot of time in my office
in front of my 42-inch OLED TV,
either gaming, browsing the internet, or gaming,
and I don't wanna do that all day.
That's just a sad existence.
That's not me taking action.
It's not me being a person in the world,
injecting myself into the various corners of the Earth,
as sexual as that sound.
That's me decaying.
That is exactly how I don't want to live my life.
So try to figure out the overall theme
of whatever space that you have control over.
Ask yourself, "What is the goal of this space?
How do I want this space to help me live my life?
How do I want my environment to
help shape my future behavior?"
Because when you figure out the answers to these questions,
you might be shocked as to
how counterintuitive your environment is
to achieving those goals,
and hopefully, through this video,
I've given you a couple of ideas as to
how you can can tweak your environment
to create downward slopes
into the behavior that you want to be doing
so that living the life that you want to live
is as easy and as simple and as irresistible as possible.
(lively jazz music)
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