If You Want to Change Your Life, Change Your Environment
During the Vietnam War, nearly 20 percent of U.S. soldiers developed an addiction to heroin. The U.S. government foresaw a huge heroin epidemic if soldiers returned home without taking precautions. Therefore, before returning to the U.S., all soldiers were tested for heroin use. Those who tested positive had to wait until the heroin was out of their system before returning home. Then, once they arrived home, the soldiers would be monitored to check on their recovery.
The researchers were shocked by the results of their study. Only 5 percent of veterans relapsed. The other 95% completely kicked the heroin habit for good. So what happened?
The answer was so simple no one could figure it out for a long time: the soldiers changed their environment (and everything that came with it). In Vietnam, soldiers were surrounded by people, places, and things that made it easy to sustain their heroin addiction. In their hometowns, it was the opposite. Veterans were surrounded by people, places, and things that made it difficult to be a heroin addict.
For all of you who want to change your life, your answer is simple: change your environment. This is the message of motivational speaker Benjamin Hardy’s powerful new book Willpower Doesn’t Work.
Why willpower doesn’t work
You may set a plan to lose weight, exercise, get started on a new business, or spend more time with your family. However, as the days go on, your initial enthusiasm wanes, obstacles crop up, and you falter. Your willpower cannot combat the exceptions that keep interfering with your new plan in life — tasty doughnuts, sleeping in, chilling with Netflix, or staying late at work. Soon these exceptions — your old pattern of life — become the norm again.
According to Hardy, your willpower is weak for several reasons: you don’t know what you want, your “why” for changing isn’t strong enough, you aren’t invested in yourself, and especially because your environment doesn’t support you. Whatever your goal is, your willpower is no match for an environment that is not built to support your goals.
Change your external environment to change your life
You can’t lose weight in a candy shop, stop drinking in a bar, or start a business while binge watching Netflix. If you want to achieve your goals, Hardy says you need to change your external environment.
The external environment is anything outside of your mind: your physical surroundings, the people around you, the food you eat, and the media you consume. Your external environment will shape everything about you, including your income, value system, waistline, and hobbies.
So if you want to achieve your goals, you need to change your environment to support your goals. Most environments are optimized to keep us exactly as we are. But be warned. To reach your goals, you will need to remove things from your life that will distract you.
For example, if you’re cutting sugar out of your life, you need to take all the sugar out of your house; if you want to exercise more, then surround yourself with people who exercise; or if you want to get more work done toward creating your new business, go to a space where you can work without distraction, where there is no Netflix.
The method is simple. It doesn’t mean the execution is easy. But if you set up the right environment, you will see the changes you want to see in your life and be able to sustain them.
Kyle Crocco is known around the BigSpeak talent agency as a content marketing coordinator, star of the music video So Sexy, and holder of a Ph.D from the amazing school: UC Santa Barbara.
