Changing 3 things in your environment to change 3 healthy behaviors - does this actually work?

1. Examples of Using Your
Environment to Change Behavior
Cristina Leos
(cristina.leos1@gmail.com)
Stanford University

2. Use Your Environment
to Spur Change
Your environment impacts many of the
things you do every day, structuring
your environment to change
behavior is one of the quickest and
most effective ways to change what you
are already doing

3. Changing My Behavior
I aimed to use my environment to help me
change three personal behaviors:
▫ to stop snacking between meals
▫ to take my vitamin consistently each morning
▫ to follow my running training schedule more
closely

4. Using My Environment
Goal #1: stop eating snacks between meals
▫ I chose to stop carrying cash or cards with me
while in class.
▫ This meant that I had no money to buy snacks and
I had to wait until I returned home for my next
meal to eat.
▫ Successful? Yes, but was problematic when I
forgot I didn’t have money and tried running
errands.

5. Changing my environment
Goal #2: take my vitamin each morning before
leaving for class
▫ I set my vitamin jar and a bottle of water on my
dresser next to my lotion, make up, etc. that I use
every morning.
▫ Successful? Yes, I am already in the habit of
performing specific actions, so embedding this
into that sequence made sure I didn’t forget to do
it

6. Changing my environment
Goal #3: perform my daily training activity on
my running plan
▫ Often I will skip days on my training plan because
I am not in the mood to exercise
▫ I created an inspiration board that I keep near my
running shoes to trigger me to do my daily activity
▫ Successful? Yes, I mostly only needed a trigger to
keep on track

7. Ripple effects
(or unexpected consequences)
1. Not carrying money with me intruded on other
aspects of my life, not just my eating habits
2. Following my training plan made me eat better
and drink more water because I associate all
these behaviors with running

8. Insights and future directions
In order to change the hardest behavior (stop
snacking), I targeted my ability to do it
For less difficult behaviors to change (vitamin,
training plan), I targeted triggers
Next, I might push more extreme environmental
changes to gauge the limits of successful and
unsuccessful changes

9. Interested in behavior sequences, triggers, and
other fun stuff?
Visit BJ Fogg’s website on behavior design
captology.stanford.edu
Or follow me on Twitter (@consider_change)
Thanks for viewing!