MmamabearR wrote: »

I'm having a great/horrible week. I'm doing well overall in my life, but on tracking and keeping up with MFP groups, I've fallen short. I completely forgot about the Tiny Habits on Saturday cause I spend most of the day working outside. I spent Sunday helping my parents put a truck load of stuff in storage. Monday I was in horrible pain in my left shin. I'm not sure if it was a shin splint or not because it felt more like a cramp and then left me feeling like I'd been whacked in that leg all day.

I like reading how well everyone is doing and the habits you are working on. They give me ideas on some I can work on for myself.

@nebslp I love that you have a special room! I've often thought of making one for myself out of the "guest" room in our house. It's more of a storeroom. This past Saturday, I moved out a few of my parents' things that were taking up space, so there is more room in there now for me to work with. I'd like to repaint it or add some decor. I need to change the curtains and the blinds and organize it much better. Then perhaps I, too, can have a special room where I can go and feel happy.

@MmamabearR, I certainly understand how our lives can throw us curve balls that unravel our best plans. As it turns out, our challenge next week would also lend itself well to the Tiny Habits structure. If you or anyone else if interested in that, the deadline to signup is this Saturday March 17.

Just a cautionary note — the info packet you will get from the Tiny Habits program is sometimes getting routed to junk/spam folders, so if you don’t see it in your inbox, look for it there.

Your Environment Matters

I mentioned earlier the importance of environment in impacting habits, but I wanted to reiterate that point. Our habits are extremely contextual and dependent on the environment we are in. Knowing this, we should look for ways to structure our environment to make it easier to do good habits and harder to do the habits that set us back.

Massachusetts General Hospital is a great example of this. The nutrition services department there wanted to see if they could nudge people to make healthier cafeteria choices simply by making it easier for them to select a better option. Specifically, they wanted to reduce soda consumption and encourage people to drink more water when they ate at the hospital cafeteria.

Before making any changes, the only place water was available in the cafeteria was in one small refrigerator on the side of the room. Not a well traveled area. Most of the drink options available to people were in two large refrigerators right next to the two cashiers in the check out area. So you can imagine that most people selected their drink options from those two large refrigerators where water wasn’t available.

Nutrition services then made a few changes. They kept the soda option, but placed water in all the refrigerators and also in several other key areas in the cafeteria. The result? Over the next six months, sales of water increased by 26% and sales of soda decreased by 11%.

The take-home message is that we make choices based on what is presented to us, what’s convenient, and what’s easily available, and not necessarily based on our underlying goals. We see this in grocery stores too. The most profitable items and those the store wants to promote are put at eye level, where they are harder to miss.

I saw the impact of environment on my habits just this week. Like @77tes, I am trying to drink water the first thing in the morning before I have a cup of coffee. Most of the year I’m pretty good about sticking with this habit, but I noticed that it really falls off in the wintertime. And thanks to our challenge this week, I now know why. I don’t like extremely cold water and the water coming out of my tap from my well during the winter is very cold. Sometimes I run the faucet a little to warm up the water, but even that isn’t a great option because I don’t like to waste water. The net result is that I haven’t been drinking a lot of water. Now, having traced through this, I realize there’s an easy solution: I put a pitcher of water on the countertop and now the water is kept at room temperature. I’m drinking a lot more water.

BJ Fogg apparently likes popcorn but felt he was eating too much of it (how is that even possible?). So he put the popcorn container on a top shelf in his garage. Still available if he really wants popcorn, but much harder to access. And he’s eating less popcorn.

Please spend some time looking at your environment both at home and at work as well as other places you go. See if you can change things up a bit to make it easier to do the habits you want to adopt and harder to do the habits you want to avoid.

Convenience is a huge factor in the habits we develop.