A couple of years ago, our team at the Change Anything Labs brought twenty tired and hungry ten-year-old soccer players together for a macaroni-and-cheese feast. We were replicating a study done by Brian Wansink and discussed in his fascinating book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. This was no ordinary macaroni and cheese—it was a scrumptious blend of delicious cheddar, perfectly finished noodles, and savory seasonings that made the kids drool with delight.
As the kids arrived, we assigned them to two different tables—each set up in a different room. As we gave the go-ahead nod, the hungry subjects surrounded the pot of pasta in the center of their table and dug in. At the end of the meal, a host circulated through the crowd to ensure that the kids had eaten to their heart’s delight. All twenty reported feeling well fed and satisfied.
But, despite the fact that they were equally satisfied, not all were treated equally. At one table kids were given nine-inch paper plates to eat from; the kids at the other table were provided with twelve-inch plates. In both cases, most of the subjects went back for more food, and all stopped when they said they were full and wanted no more.
Our goal was to test whether plate size affected how much the subjects ate despite the fact that they could—and did—reload them. Not only did plate size affect consumption—but it affected it a lot. The kids with the large plates ate 70 percent more pasta. Most surprisingly, they didn’t know they ate more, nor did they pay much attention to the plate size. Nevertheless, the plate size had an enormous impact on how much it took the kids to get equally full.
These junior soccer players aren’t the only people who have fallen victim to a large plate. Take a look in your own cupboard. There’s a good chance that the dinner plates you’ll find there are the same size as your grandmother’s serving platters. Over the last couple of generations, the plates sold in stores have inched larger without our noticing.
This would probably be no big deal except for the fact that research conducted by eating expert Brian Wansink at Cornell University shows that people eat 92 percent of whatever is on their plate—regardless of how big it is.1 The difference between twelve-inch and nine-inch plates totals 33 percent more calories! It’s little wonder that we’re growing larger as a populace. Our plates made us do it!
Of course, this chapter isn’t about plates, per se. It’s about the entire physical world out there and how it affects our behavior in ways we rarely see. Plates are just one example of how the physical world influences our behavior. The presence or absence of a dining table affects the frequency of a family’s interaction. The amount you exercise drops directly with the distance between your TV and your exercise equipment… you get the idea. Things quietly affect all of our choices—and our bad habits are hardly immune.
For instance, Katie B. struggled to stay up-to-date in her field. To make sure that she didn’t slide into a career slump, she stacked piles of professional journals next to her reading chair. Unfortunately, her home was not designed for reading. It was designed for viewing. Katie’s fifty-inch flat-screen stood like an altar in the center of her living room. Her DVR recorded fascinating fare for any occasion or mood. The surround-sound speakers made her feel as if she were in the middle of the action. It was like living in a movie theater.
So when Katie arrived home at six thirty every night, the living room she had so carefully outfitted conspired against her best intentions to read journals. It was as if she had purposely plotted against her own wishes—while in truth, Katie had given no thought to the fact that the way she was constructing her physical space was undermining her career.
It seems most Americans are not thinking about how their home’s design affects their family’s behavior. Today’s consumers often buy nifty new devices because they can, not necessarily because they’ll help them achieve their family goals. And guess what the results have been. Supply your home with four different video platforms, populate them with dozens of exciting video games, add a home theater complete with several comfortable couches, and—voilà—you’ve compiled the perfect recipe for childhood obesity.
How about the impact of things on a problem such as drug abuse? Changer Wes M. woefully underestimated the roles things in his environment were playing in his cocaine addiction. The mild-mannered accountant from San Diego was highly motivated to get off drugs—but he also had a Facebook account and owned an iPhone, and both were working against him.
After five disappointing relapses, Wes began to realize that he wasn’t a match for his digital foes. He would be toeing the line, and then a tantalizing text message from an old accomplice would tempt him to use drugs, or perhaps he’d receive a Facebook invitation to a party he just couldn’t miss.
These alluring electronic reminders were often more than Wes could resist. Technology was bringing temptations closer and more frequently than he had the will to overcome. His physical surroundings lay in wait for him so that at any moment when his personal motivation flagged, his fall would be inevitable. Wes continued to struggle until he eventually made a digital overhaul.
You live in that same powerful physical world. Every single day of your life you face opponents that are always around you, never sleep, are completely unyielding, and are so quiet that you stop noticing they’re even there. Such is the power of things. So, if you ever hope to take control of your life, you’ll have to first take control of your space.
The good news is that when you do, you gain the same sleepless ally supporting your change effort. Your job is to find the subtle ways your personal environment currently enables your old habits and then redesign it to support your new ones. When you transform your environment from foe into friend, you can make the changes that sometimes feel impossible practically inevitable.
According to historians, it took fences to tame the Wild West (good news if you’re the tamer, bad news if you’re the tamed). When it comes to your own wild world filled with enticing temptations and dangerous consequences, you’ll need to build some fences as well. Of course, the fences we’re talking about aren’t barbed-wired barriers; they’re simply boundaries you create in your life. They come in the form of intractable rules and decisive actions that keep you out of harm’s way. These personal fences make it easier for you to stand up to certain threats.
For example, when Michael V. got serious about sobriety, he put a fence around the most dangerous, tempting places in his environment.
“I made a rule about the route I took home from work,” Michael explains. “I would never drive by Toni’s, my favorite bar. I knew if I drove by that bar, chances were good I’d see a friend’s car in the parking lot, and I’d be tempted to stop. So I stopped driving by Toni’s.”
In fact, Michael put a fence around all bars.
“Why would I go into a bar,” Michael continues, “except to drink? I don’t need to be in a bar.”
Further, Michael put a fence around his home. “I no longer keep any alcohol in my home. I don’t need it calling out to me.”
These intractable rules made his personal environment safer by fencing out the bad stuff. Michael used fences to create an environment he could master.
Consider the following financial fitness example. When June W. needed to get her debt under control (at one point the interest payments on her debt matched her rent payment), she built several fences that protected her from uncontrolled spending. First June cut up her credit cards. This decisive action made it impossible for her to go into credit card debt, period. She also made all visits to malls off limits unless she had a list of specific items she would buy. Her list limited her to planned spending and fenced off any impulse buying.
Katie B., the woman who wanted to read work-related journals (but then built a veritable temple for watching TV), used a fence to help change her evening habits as well. She moved all of her digital temptations to the spare room in her apartment so that the path of least resistance was to pick up a professional journal and study up on her career rather than plop in her chair and veg out. She still enjoyed some TV time in the evening—but she had to “hop the fence” to get to the TV and DVR, which made it an intentional rather than a default activity.
Fences can be quite helpful, but they can also create unintended problems if you don’t prepare for a world without them. If you’re only successful when fences make bad choices impossible, you might not fare so well when the fences come down.
Here’s the problem: Fences work so well that we often rely on them as our sole solution. We put criminals behind bars; we send addicts to rehab; and some overeaters even wire their mouths shut. These fences work fine as long as they are maintained, but most criminals, addicts, and overeaters eventually leave these fences behind. Then old problems recur, and if those who needed the fences in the first place have made no other changes, they immediately fall prey to their old habits.
Two rules of thumb can help keep fences functional.
Make Sure You’re the One Who Builds and Maintains the Fence. The decision to fence off a temptation should be yours. It’s not the choice of your friends, co-workers, loved ones, or family—no matter how well intended. Michael V. talked about the early days when his family and friends tried to get him to make bars out of bounds. Unfortunately, since it wasn’t his decision, he experienced their fences as meddling. The fence became a challenge rather than a tool—so he spent his time finding ways around it rather than benefiting from its protection. Create your own fences by asking yourself what you really want and then putting up barriers that help you achieve it.
Don’t Use a Fence in Place of a Six-Source Plan. Some people find such comfort in fences that they end up relying on them exclusively. For example, a rehab facility can protect you from bad choices for a few weeks or months, but eventually you’ll need to manage these temptations outside the walls of the facility. Supplement the fences. Use the fenced-off rehab facility to build delay-of-gratification and other sobriety skills, but then add other six-source tactics that will assist you in the real world. Otherwise, when the fence comes down… be prepared for a disappointing crash.
Ricardo N. had to change his schedule to save his marriage. He and his wife, Helen, lived on opposite ends of the day. She would leave for work at five a.m. and return just as he was taking off at three p.m. And they wondered why they were drifting apart—despite a variety of heartfelt efforts to relight their flame.
When Ricardo eventually changed jobs after a new opportunity arose—a job that coincided with his wife’s schedule—he quickly learned that all of his attempts to improve their relationship paled in comparison to the simple act of creating more time together. He discovered that he had to increase their proximity before they could improve their intimacy. Distance affects behavior.
When it comes to distance, it’s not just about love. For example, consider Changer Liz P. Her workstation sat only fifteen feet away from what she and her co-workers referred to as “the trough”—a large metal bin that was always stocked with candy. Liz and her colleagues engaged in ritual feeding from it every day. The trough quietly sat there and played the role of siren seductress as Liz fought the battle of adhering to a balanced diet.
But one day Liz began to see how the physical world was acting on her and decided to take charge of her surroundings. Rather than put up a fence by making it a rule not to eat from the trough (a rule she might find hard to follow), Liz took a different approach. She asked to be moved to an empty workstation fifty feet away from the trough, and a week later, when her request was granted, she dropped her candy consumption altogether. By changing work spaces, Liz was adhering to the adage
Keep good things close and convenient,
and bad things distant and difficult.
Okay, maybe this expression isn’t exactly an adage, but when it comes to Source 6, it should be. If you can create a distance between yourself and temptation, do so. You can stare in the face of temptation and try to tough it out—stepping once again into the willpower trap—or you can use distance to your advantage. Choose distance every time.
But was fifty feet really a large enough distance to make a difference for Liz? Psychologists study the role physical distance plays in our choices, and they’d be the first to say that moving a temptation just a few feet one way or another can have a huge impact on one’s behavior. For instance, if you finish half your meal at a restaurant and sit there with the plate in front of you while you talk to your friends, twenty minutes later your plate will be empty. Move the half-full plate six feet away to the other corner of the table, and it’ll remain half full.
Here are just a few of the curious effects distance can play in one’s life outside a restaurant: It is one of the best predictors of friendship and love; it predicts scientific collaboration; and it largely accounts for one’s leisure-time activities.
It turns out that humans are far more governed by distance than anyone would guess. Here’s how you can use it to your advantage.
If you want to exercise more, keep workout equipment conveniently close in your bedroom or living room, not in the basement or a distant gym.
If you want to quit or cut back on smoking, place your supply in a distant room and up on a shelf—or banish it altogether.
If you want to reduce spending, remove Internet bookmarks for all of your shopping pages. Just a little electronic distance can change your spending habits. You get the idea. Turn space from the final frontier into your change ally.
Like it or not, your environment can have a huge impact on what gets your attention. Signs, colors, shapes, sounds—anything that might grab your attention—can affect your opinions, emotions, and choices. Remember the kids in our Change Anything Labs spending study in the chapter “Escape the Willpower Trap”? When our subjects entered a lab with bare walls, they saved an average of $6.22 in the first round. But when, in addition to a couple of other small changes, they faced four colorful posters of tasty treats, their savings plummeted to $3.23. The kids scarcely remembered the signs, but the subtle visual cues appeared to have an impact.
Visual and other cues help set your mental agenda. They tell you what to think about, what to worry about, and what to want. In fact, Stephen Hoch of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania suggests that one reason visual cues are so powerful is that they turn things from a “want” into a “need.” When you see something you had not formerly been thinking about, you are suddenly reminded that you don’t have it—which creates a sense of dissatisfaction.2
Think of it this way: Before you saw the new mobile phone features, you were perfectly happy with the phone you had. But after seeing the full-page ad about the latest model, your phone seems outdated and frumpy. You want—no, you need—to be current and not frumpy. That’s right; you don’t just want that new phone. You need it.
It’s time to get these same cues pushing your wants and needs in the right direction. Take charge of what catches your attention by giving yourself little wake-up calls at crucial moments. Use cues to remind yourself of your resolutions in the very moments you’re most likely to forget.
The best cues are the ones that kick you off autopilot and remind you of the commitments you’ve made and the results you want to achieve. They also suggest an immediate next step. For instance, June W., who was trying to reduce her debt, used a cell phone application that asked her periodically to input how much she had spent. It then tallied up her budget standings and let her know whether she was over or under budget for the week and month. Just this small regular nudge and a cue about her “score” made June far more mindful of her choices and changed her habits almost immediately.
Maria O. cued herself to practice her vital behaviors for improving her relationship with her life partner by simply putting what she called a “preflight checklist” on the dashboard of her car. After a stressful day at work, the card would remind her to pause; take four deep breaths; recall one reason she adored her life partner; then enter the house with a smile. Like a pilot, she found that if she went through her checklist before taking off, things went a lot more smoothly each evening.
At work, cues can also play an important role in keeping you on track. For instance, individuals who attend leadership training courses often hang up posters summarizing the skills they just learned to remind them that when faced with new challenges, they need to implement the skills rather than fall into their former habits.
To cue themselves not to be angry when addressing a problem with a direct report (a mistake they had often made before and that had caused them no end of problems), one group of leaders we worked with placed mirrors in their workstations. When they heard about a problem that needed to be addressed, they stood and walked to their cubicle doors, but before they exited they looked in the mirror to ensure that they weren’t entering the upcoming conversation feeling angry—or at least looking angry. If an angry person looked back at them from the mirror, they took a deep breath and practiced the anger-management techniques they had learned.
Still another group we worked with placed small orange circles at locations where they tended to feel stress (certain meeting rooms, their steering wheel, and so forth). The colored circles served as cues to remind them to employ the stress-reduction tactics they had learned at a recent seminar.
Laura A. created an interesting physical cue that helped her become more mindful of her tendency to be critical of friends and family and replace it with a habit of building others up. When she would hear herself say something hurtful, she would open and close her right hand three times. When she made a supportive comment, she would open and close her left hand three times. Over the course of a week, she found she was far more mindful of the comments she would make and well on her way to changing her words and her relationships.
Some of the best cues are scorecards you can place in prominent locations to keep your progress at the forefront of your mind. Of course, these days some come in the form of electronic mobile phone applications. But Scott H. found that simply placing a checkmark on an old-fashioned wall calendar every day he practiced his vital behaviors was enough to keep them at the forefront of his mind.
One important thing to remember about cues is that many of them have a half-life. Over time they become one more invisible part of your environment, so they stop working. The solution is to conduct a regular environmental audit. Conduct a review of your home, your car, your neighborhood, and your workplace and look for places where cues would help you stay on track. Then create little reminders, not so obvious that they’re embarrassing, but obvious enough to grab your attention. As you repeat this process, you’ll discover that your crucial moments change over time. Creating new cues is a powerful way of taking charge of your space.
It turns out that you can actually make laziness a tool in your change arsenal. For decades, social scientists have demonstrated that we humans have a default bias. That’s a nice way of saying we would rather not mess with things once they’re arranged. Once you get comfortable with a certain aspect of your life, say, the route you drive to work, you don’t easily make changes. Once you’ve picked a path that seems to work, you follow it for decades—even if a better one surfaces. You save your brain capacity for heftier challenges—such as the meaning of life or figuring out whether the guy ahead of you in the ten-items-or-less line actually has twelve items.
For example, economics professor Anna Breman asked donors to a large charity if they would be willing to donate more to their worthy cause. Everyone wanted to but few would agree to do it today. So instead, she offered them the option of putting small monthly increases on autopilot in the coming months. Once people set up this default condition, most let it run—increasing their donations by 32 percent over time!3
How can this proclivity be turned in your favor? By setting up positive defaults in your life. You can set things on autopilot and then count on your tendency to go with the flow to structurally enable you to make better choices. For example, Steve and Tina G. noticed they were drifting apart, so they created an autopilot to bring them back together: They bought season tickets to a local theater and placed dates on their calendar for the next six months. The default condition was now that they would have a date. It would take an active effort to cancel it. This couple who had struggled to find time together made it to every one of the six performances… together.
You can set autopilots for yourself by using standing appointments, automatic withdrawals, long-term subscriptions—and any other mechanism that takes advantage of your desire to avoid thinking.
How would you like to join an extraordinarily successful health club? It’s made up of people who are rarely obese (around 4 percent), and yet they consume heaping mounds of meat, potatoes, gravy, eggs, vegetables, bread, pies, cakes—all oozing in fat and refined sugar. What’s the group’s secret? Well, on a slow day they walk well over ten thousand steps and the other six days of the week they put in huge amounts of exercise. Which, of course, leads to the question, How do these folks get themselves to do all that?
Did we mention that the group also spurns modern contrivances such as automobiles, blenders, mobile phones, and the like? By now you’ve perhaps guessed that the “club” we’re referring to is made up of the Amish,4 and they make our next point for us. Many of the tools we’ve created to make our lives easier have landed us in the fix we’re currently in.
For instance, it requires virtually dozens of contraptions to keep us stationary most of the day, and most of us have access to every single one of them. It has taken more than a century of culinary analysis to produce amazingly unhealthful foods that a child can nuke in seconds—and many do. TV sets strategically positioned in nearly every person’s bedroom can isolate individuals to the point where conversation becomes a rarity. According to the latest Nielsen study, the average American spends about seven hours a day using some type of media. Television alone counts for four hours a day during which the average child views twenty thousand advertisements a year and two hundred thousand acts of violence by the time he or she is eighteen.5 It’s a wonder we’re not all 350-pound, bankrupt, divorced ax murderers.
But what if we took these same tools and used them to our advantage? That’s exactly what many of the Changers we studied did. For example, as several lost weight, they made use of an electronic device that displayed their current calorie burn rate along with total steps and calories per day.
“It was amazing,” exclaimed Rod M., one of our Changers. “I could see in real time the impact my activity was having on my calorie burn. Plus seeing how increasing my effort on the treadmill also increased my caloric burn rate was a big motivator.”
The chances for making good use of tools only increase with each new invention. For instance, the Internet can provide a social network for both motivating and enabling your change as well as dozens of tools for tracking and broadcasting your efforts. With new advances in software, you’re able to track your budget by category—at the very moment you’re spending.6 Cuing devices planted into your computer can remind you to do everything from walking for five minutes every hour to stepping up to a crucial conversation with your boss.
Or you can go old school. For instance, if you want to increase family unity, change how you use the microwave oven. This revolutionary, time-saving device can turn a family of four into four separate individuals who make their own quick meals, at their own times, which they then eat by themselves in front of a TV or game module. But if an entire family were to sit down to eat at a family table…7
Speaking of furniture, Ricardo N. reports that a porch swing helped save his marriage. He and his wife, Helen, went through a troubled time after they aligned their jobs. They now had time to spend together but had fallen into the habit of winding down after work by plopping in front of a TV (he in the den, she in the family room) and then settling into a solitary activity of some sort. They just weren’t used to spending time together.
Enter the porch swing. Ricardo and Helen committed to sit for fifteen minutes and just talk about their day and any concerns they wanted to air. To signal their commitment, they bought the porch swing and designated it as the location for their nightly parleys. The swing served as a cue that reminded them of their agreement, and it also offered an attractive and comfortable place that made talking less stressful. Finally, it had an unanticipated positive effect. Somehow sitting side by side in the confined space created a warmth that soothed their emotions and made understanding come easier. Less physical distance led to less emotional distance.
As we’ve studied how Changers have succeeded at overcoming the pull of the past, we’ve learned that all use things to make new habits practically inevitable. You should take advantage of the same resources.
Build Fences. What rules should you set to keep you acting in healthy ways? What decisive actions, if routinely taken, would keep you out of harm’s way? Remember, don’t use these fences as a sole source for change, and don’t let anyone else set them up for you. Create your own rules, and use them in conjunction with the five other sources of influence.
Manage Distance. What are you doing to keep good things close and convenient and bad things distant and difficult? Have you thought about moving tempting items away from the places you work and rest? It won’t require miles or even blocks; sometimes a few feet one way or the other will be all it takes.
Change Cues. Are there places you can put up reminders that will help keep you on track? Think of your crucial moments; if they come at predictable places, you can post reminders to stay true to your plan. If they come at predictable times or events, you can have them appear on your computer or phone—just before the event, as a timely reminder.
Engage Your Autopilot. Are there standing commitments you can make that will make positive change the path of least resistance? The more you structure good choices as the default in your life, the easier change becomes.
Use Tools. Speaking of your computer and phone, what are you doing to transform electronic devices and other tools into valuable change allies? How is everything from your TV to your phone to your computer currently conspiring against your plan to improve? What can you do to transform this silent enemy into a genuine tool for change? While we’re on the topic of using tools to assist your change effort, don’t forget to use your pencil (digital or otherwise). As you read, be attentive to ideas that come to you for how you can try a principle or tactic to see what results it produces for you. For example, what is a simple step you can take right now to use fences, distance, cues, and tools to control your space? Write it down. Next, write down when you will try it. As we saw in Chapter 2, the simple act of writing will substantially increase the likelihood you’ll take action.