Hi, Alex here. Here is a question for you: How easy do you find it to create all
the good habits that make a sustainable lifestyle and stick to them? For me, it’s hard! Now,
what if I told you there are tricks that can make it A LOT easier? With just tiny changes
here and there… Instead of listing dozens of things you should do every day, in this
video we’ll look at simple techniques to help you build the good sustainable habits that you want and
break the bad ones. And we'll use examples such as eating less meat, using fewer disposable containers,
driving less, shopping better, etc. Ok, let’s get drawing! What? Oh the jar?
We'll get to that in a minute.Just stick with me…
Ok, so I just read Atomic Habits. If you haven’t, I highly recommend it. As I was reading, I
kept thinking how it could applied to sustainability habits for people like me (and probably you
if you’re watching this video) who want to be part of the solution and create the
right habits to have a positive sustainable impact every day. The premise of the book
is that “tiny changes can produce remarkable results”. If you get just 1% better at having
a more sustainable or eco friendly lifestyle every day, you are getting 37 times better
after one year ! If you get 1% worse everyday, you end up close to zero.
In the book, James Clear presents 4 laws of behavioural change that helped me out:
1- Make it obvious (we are more likely to do something if it’s right in front of us)
2- Make it attractive (we are motivated by the anticipation of rewards)
3- Make it easy (that’s about reducing the friction to make it easier)
4- Make it immediately satisfying.
Let’s apply them to concrete sustainable decisions we face in our life, starting with
how to make it obvious.
Food waste is responsible for 8% of our global emissions. Now, I really enjoy eating leftovers
but sometimes I feel like I am wasting too much food because I forget about it. To make
it more obvious, I can replace my opaque containers with transparent ones and keep them at the
front of my fridge so I always know which leftovers need to be eaten.
If your usual grocery store does not have many organic products or products with little
or no packaging, try another grocery store where all the things you are trying to buy
are available in front of you and they are easy and obvious for you to buy. Or try and
do most of your shopping in the organic section of your store before you grab whatever you
are missing in the other aisles.
Our meat consumption is responsible for 15% of our global emissions so maybe you want
to start eating less meat. To make the meat less obvious, well, it’s pretty easy, don’t
buy meat. If you don’t have it in your fridge, you can’t eat it. But it’s not enough.
You will still experiment the craving. It can be helpful to create what they call implementation
intentions in this format “When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.” For
example: “I will eat a meatless dinner on Monday at home.” Then you can find a way
to make it attractive not to eat meat that night.
We are motivated about the anticipation of rewards so rewarding yourself for your good
habits will help you stick to them. To make your meatless meal attractive, you can plan
to eat it in front of your favourite show so you have something to look forward to.
If I am trying to reduce unnecessary purchases for example, I can create a special bank account
for my sustainable habits. When I decide not to buy an item because I have decided it is
not what a person who lives a sustainable life would buy, I put the same amount of money
in my “sustainable habits" bank account. Then I can use this money as I please or allocate
it to another habit I want to reinforce.
Conversely you can make a bad habit unattractive. For example: If I forget my travel mug and
buy my coffee in a disposable container, I have to keep the container on my bedside table
for a week. Or, if you find you are doing too much unnecessary driving, you can put
a cost on it: you can change your insurance to a pay as you drive contract for instance
and it will make it very unattractive for your bank account when you drive too much.
To build a good habit, you have to make it easy, like one or 2 minutes.
Here is an easy implementation intention I used when I was doing my masters program in
Sweden. I didn’t know it had a fancy name like that by then but it used to go like this
“when I don’t find organic bread at the grocery store, I will ask a clerk where it
is located.” Six months later, they had organic bread at the local grocery store.
I like to think that it was thanks to me but, probably not…
It is easier to build a new habit on an existing one. In the United States, 42,000 plastic
bottles are thrown away every minute so, for example, you could say “after packing my
bag for work, I will make sure that I pack my reusable water bottle”. It is very short,
it will take you only one minute but it is a start. As James Clear says in the book:
“You can’t improve a habit that does not exist”.
This works the other way around as well. You can make bad habits hard. Let’s get back
to my example about trying to reduce the amount of stuff that I buy. Online stores make it
very easy to buy stuff but you can make it harder for yourself. For example, I have this
other “implementation intention”: When I want to buy something online, I wait at
least 24 hours to make sure that I really need it and that it is really a good sustainable
decision before I complete the purchase.
Finally, you need to MAKE IT IMMEDIATELY SATISFYING.
“What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided”
says James Clear. If you think you should stop driving to your coffee shop every morning
for instance, you could use this implementation intention “Once a week, on Tuesday at 8am,
I will walk to the coffee shop to get my coffee.” And to make it immediately satisfying, you
can add “on that day, I will allow myself to buy a cookie with my coffee”. Maybe in
a few weeks, you will walk to the coffee shop two or three times a week and maybe you won’t
need to buy a cookie every time because you will be enjoying your new habit.
Going back to our driving too much example, you can make it immediately dissatisfying
by keeping in your car a jersey of your rival team and by making yourself wear it every
time you take an unnecessary ride in your car. You can take your family members as witnesses
and it can be a fun way to change your habit.
There is often a decisive moment that leads to the habit. For instance, when I put my
jogging shorts on, I know I am going to go for a run. The rest automatically follows…
You can use this and make it the cue to a good habit. For example, when you put on your
biking outfit in the morning, you know you will ride your bike to work instead of driving
that day.
Finally, the key is to not break the chain of making good sustainable decisions every
day. Whether it is by adding a rock in a jar every day or by making an X on your calendar
or any other fun way you can think of, make sure you track your habits because it simultaneously
makes a behaviour obvious, attractive, and satisfying.
There you go! I hope you got something interesting out of this video. If you have better ideas
or things that worked out for you, please feel free to share them in the comments down
below. Good luck! I will see you out there. Cheers!