Setting the Conditions is the Key to Making Habits Stick

Our surroundings can make or break our habits.

Dec 15, 2023

Habits are built on the conditions that surround them. Not in the isolation of our desires.

This faulty thinking is called the introspection bias. It’s believing actions are controlled by our internal thoughts and nothing else.

Attempting to form habits in our heads rather than in real-world conditions is a big mistake.

I avoid this trap by asking myself— How can I set the conditions to make this habit easier to start?

Setting the conditions is everything except willpower and motivation. It's a strategy that takes into account the outside influences that affect behavior.

Setting conditions works by increasing the processing speed of your thoughts.

Strong Habits Aren’t Easy, They Are Fast

In weight lifting, you can figure out if someone’s comfortable with a certain weight simply by checking how fast they’re knocking out their reps.

Lightweight reps are performed at a fast rate. Heavy reps, even with more effort are done slower.

This mirrors the difference between strong established habits and weak ones. We try harder with weak habits but are still slow to act versus ones deeply ingrained in our lives.

We take brushing our teeth in the morning for granted. It only became mainstream in the 1950s.

Do you ever wake up and make intentions to brush? No. Strong habits have little thought.

Contrast this with getting enough sleep and sticking to a bedtime routine.

It’s a hard effort for a lot of us. Taking action to turn off screens and get into bed is deliberate. Often, we negotiate.

The lesson here is we want our rate of thought — fast and automatic for new habits.

Luckily we only need to focus on the starting behavior to make new habits thrive.

Start with the Igniting Behavior

Most of the habits we want consist of a series of behaviors versus a single one.

Wearing a car seatbelt is habitual. Going for a run can’t be.

There are too many behaviors and situations for running to be automated.

But the good news is the starting behavior of any habit usually can. And the starting action is the ignition that makes everything go.

The first step is to deconstruct a habit into smaller sequential actions.

For example, if you wanted to cultivate a journaling habit, it would go something like this:

See the notebook
Hold the notebook
Open it to a new entry
Grab a writing utensil
Start writing

If you only focus on your desire to write (motivation) and the feeling of clarity you get by writing (the reward), you miss out on the opportunity to set the conditions to boost adherence.

We can tilt things in our favor by focusing on the conditions. This way when motivation starts to lag, we still do it.

And those “I don’t feel like it” days are the crucial moments when habits endure or break.

How to Set the Conditions to Start

Rather than “doing” our habits, I think of my habits like running into a friend on the street.

Noticing our friend on the street is the visual cue. It’s the reminder. Make them prominent, so they stick out from the the sea of other people (behaviors).

Saying “hi” is the starting act. It’s the start of the habit.

Once we have initiated, it causes us to stop and have a conversation (performing the rest of the habit).

If we go back to our journaling habit, we need to determine when and where the habit needs to be performed. These parameters are called an implementation intention. These are the conditions.

If we decide journaling before bed is the best time and place, we can set the conditions so they happen.

We could put the journal on our bedside but placing it on our pillow is the better option. Not only does it stick out, but we are putting our journaling habit front and center.

This also turns picking up the notebook the default action, even if we choose not to write. We are forced to move it off our pillow.

This is a forcing function. We have to say “hi” to that friend. And it's more likely we will be polite and have a chat.

Gentle Nudges Towards Our Intentions

Setting the conditions are gentle nudges. The hardest part is being creative and curious about how to stack the deck in your favor.

Nudges will vary based on the type of habit and the context. Sometimes you will tweak the physical environment in your favor. Other times, you will nudge yourself by doing the starting behavior in advance.

Here are a few examples of nudges I set for my habits:

Yoga class on Sunday morning — I sign up for the class Saturday night before bed to lock up good intentions.
Writing first thing in the morning — I have the document I am writing the first thing I see when I wake up my computer.
Vitamin D — I put the bottle inside a box of coffee stirs. I have to move the bottle to stir my coffee with my oat milk.
Reading a book — I put the book I am reading, open and face down on the exact spot on my sofa, where I sit. I have to move the book to sit and watch TV.
Floss — I hang floss picks in my shower. It gives me another place to floss that I don’t mind spending extra time in.

Nudges can be one-time setups. I live right next to an elevated running/walking trail in Chicago. It makes running often and easy.

Other times you are going to need regular pre-rituals to help you start.

Setting the conditions is all about smart design. But isn’t bulletproof.

They should be used to buy us time and reps for another force to help us cement a new habit.

Repetition.

Repetition Breeds Speed

Repeated habits are easier habits. Enough reps build a connection in your brain and make things click.

It’s like getting behind the wheel for the first time. You are freaking out the first time. But by the 300th drive, it’s routine.

Any new behavior requires cognitive energy. Anything repeated requires less. Less energy means faster. We are offloading the behavior to the non-executive part of our brain.

It also means our habit is the first thought in our heads. And the one we act on. It's tunnel vision for our decision-making.

The paradox is motivation fools us. When we have it, we feel it will never go away. But motivation always wanes. Novelty dies. The results you want look further away than you imagined.

Forward Thinking

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