The impact of your environment

[00:00:00] You're listening to the Daily five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? Whenever people want to change their lives, they start with looking inward. They try to change their mindset. They try to change how, what their habits are. They, you know, sign up for a new gym membership.

[00:00:32] Maybe they get new shoes, just kind of external, but still it's about you, your person. And what I have realized is that instead of looking inward, it actually makes a lot more sense to change what's around me and that sometimes, I don't know why, but that feels like a failure. It's like, oh, you need external reasons or [00:01:00] external things to motivate you.

[00:01:02] And I feel like we've all been somehow culturally told that extrinsic motivation is a bad thing or extrinsic factors affecting your behavior or needing that stimulus is a bad thing. It should all come from all inside. But of you leave a plate of cookies out, you're probably gonna wanna eat it, right? And if you don't leave the plate of cookies out, you just won't eat it and you'll be a little bit healthier.

[00:01:37] We've all heard that study, right? The marshmallow test with the children, and if they eat the marshmallow, they won't get a second marshmallow and it's that delayed gratification is a good thing, the children who were able to distract themselves and not eat the marshmallow, got another marshmallow and I, I guess, you know, that makes [00:02:00] them better able to perform in life and be more successful and that's fine.

[00:02:05] That's cool. Sometimes, yes, we do need the ability to not do the thing that's right in front of us, be able to practice delayed gratification, but that is willpower in action. And we have a limited resource, in that form, right? We don't have unlimited willpower, so what can we do to stop having to rely just on willpower and instead, you know, just do the thing without it.

[00:02:41] And I think the answer to that is to make our environment better, to make our environment work for us. It's all around us. We have the ability to change it, hopefully, in the important ways, and we should. So if you're trying to get work [00:03:00] done, make sure your office is a welcoming place to go to, if you often find yourself getting hungry or thirsty when you're working,

[00:03:08] make sure you have some healthy snacks available to you instead of a plate of cookies. And if you find that a small area in your brain is constantly occupied by that one messy place in your house, oh my goodness, go clean that place because you deserve to get back that corner of your brain that is occupied by agonizing and worrying and thinking unconsciously about that one corner in your house.

[00:03:38] That happens to me, and when I clean that corner up, I feel so much better. I can think better, and it means I am in control of my own actions and my own environment, and I'm asserting myself right? When we let our environment [00:04:00] dictate our choices, first of all, our environment does dictate our choices in a lot of cases.

[00:04:07] So if we know that's the reality, then we should help our environment dictate the choices we want it to dictate, right? If you think ahead and make sure your environment is working for you, then in the moment when you don't have as much willpower or motivation, you're able to make the right choices because those are the choices that are easy to make in the environment that's around you.

[00:04:35] That's kind of what I've been thinking about today and how I can improve my own environment. So yeah, , thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.