Control Your Environment

Environmental control is 75% of discipline. This is why it is critically important to learn to control your environment.

The majority of the actions you take are done for the sake of convenience. We will do what is easy, convenient, and right in front of us. In reality, we were designed to be this way, it does not have to be a negative fact.

We can use this facet of human nature to our advantage by structuring our environment in strategic ways.

By learning to control your environment and set it up to encourage the behaviors you want, you become powerful. You make it more likely that good behaviors will happen naturally, or at least with less effort than they required before.

Make it easy to do what you need to do and what is right and you will win.
Make it easy to do what is wrong and you will always lose.

If you can control your environment, you can control your life.

You begin by identifying the behaviors you most want to engage in.

What is it you actually want to be doing? You need to write the answers to these questions on paper.

What is getting in the way of you doing what you want to do?

Answering these questions will give us the foundational blueprint for how you should control your environment.

If your desired behavior is to read the Bible, but the rest Bible is locked away in a drawer or somewhere out of sight, you are going to have a hard time reading it. And if your phone or computer is in plain sight, you are going to opt for what is right in front of you. Next thing you know, instead of participating in your desired behavior, you are wasting the time of your life.

All of this happens because the environment was not controlled and we did not set ourselves up for success.

You have to rearrange your environment to be congruent with the desired behavior. If you want to read the Bible, it must be in plain sight, where you can see it. Anything that would compete with that behavior must be relocated.

The simple act of rearranging your environment can do wonders for your behavior. Try it for yourself. Take advantage of those moments where you feel extremely motivated to change yourself and start new habits. Instead of starting the habit immediately, use that energy to rebuild your environment in a way that would best support that goal. Once you have that finished, then start your habit.

This ensures that by tomorrow, or the next day, or the next week when your inspiration fades, the environment is still set up in your favor. you have built it in such a way that your desired behavior is easier, so you do not need as much of the motivation to begin.

You must also control your environment in the opposite way.

You must put up all kinds of barricades and friction points against negative behaviors and competing interests. The more points of friction you can put between you and the behaviors you do not want to perform, the better off you will be.

This makes it so that it is automatically harder to complete the unwanted behavior.

If you are playing too many computer games, it could be that you uninstall the games or uninstall Steam after you are done playing. Or you take the batteries out of your TV remote and unplug the TV. Anything you can do to add more points of friction for negative behaviors, the better off you will be.

The upside is that in both cases, it is not hard to do. It is not hard to take the batteries out of the TV or uninstall Steam, especially if you finish a binge and are disgusted with your lack of drive to achieve in life. Use that energy to drive change.

Drive change by learning to control your environment.

Many of these ideas come from the excellent book Atomic Habits by James Clear. I would highly recommend reading that book.

In the book, the author also talks about the classic data from the Vietnam war. Many soldiers were addicted to heroin while they were overseas. This turned into a crisis in the minds of the American government. The leaders had no idea how they would be able to rehabilitate all these soldiers and send them back into the civilian world after the war.

What shocked the American government was the fact that after returning home, most soldiers were able to quit cold turkey, had no problems with withdrawal, and never went back to their old habits.

This is because the environment associated with the habit was completely gone. They were not overseas, around war, in the military, or around their friends who were users as well. The environment in America was nearly 100% different than the environment in Vietnam.

Because of this, there were no environmental triggers pushing the soldiers back into their negative drug-using behaviors. Without the trigger for the behavior, there was no more behavior.

This common drug habit that so many people struggle with for years upon years was gone in a matter of weeks for these soldiers. And this is a testimony to how powerful your immediate environment is to your habits. It also tells us how difficult it is to rse out of our old habits if we exist in the exact same environment with all the same environmental triggers.

You will continue to get squashed by your negative behaviors if you cannot control your environment.

This is the same for every person who has ever lived before.

To identify your desired behaviors and strategize about how you can make it easier to complete them. Think about how you can remove every single point of friction from those behaviors that you possibly can. you do not want anything getting in the way of what you want to do. The fewer “sticking points”, the better.

Additionally, you want to add as many friction points for negative behaviors as you can. If you can think of any possible way to make a negative behavior harder, then do it. It does not matter how small it is. Putting the unhealthy snacks in the back of the cupboard is a start.

Putting water closer to you and candy farther away is a start.

It does not matter how small it seems, you have to make those changes to the environment. This is the best way to ensure that you are consistent with your good behaviors and inconsistent with your negative behaviors.

Small changes maintained over time lead to massive results. Rearranging your environment is an investment that will pay you dividends in the long run.

Think long and hard about how you can make these changes. The next time you feel all fired up and motivated to make a change, start by making a change in your environment. then go from there.