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 am I 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 with in the comments
this episode was brought to you with the help of the guys at audible one of the
best things you can do to improve your life is to adjust your environment so
that it's easier to learn an audible is perfect for this nowadays I do just
about all of my reading by listening to books on audible mainly because it
allows me to read in places where I can't physically pull out a book such as
when I'm working out commuting somewhere or even when I'm doing my grocery
shopping by having audible on your phone it will become significantly easier for
you to start learning go to www.irs.gov
human nature by Robert Greene it is hands-down one of the most
important books out there because it shows you exactly why we humans do with
the things we do it's a book that will give you more clarity when it comes to
your own life so definitely check it out besides that guys stay tuned