Healthy Tips Challenge

Week 4: Changing your environment to help meet your goals

For most of us, motivation and commitment are not enough to stay on track with our healthy goals. Not even the most driven have total and complete control over our habits and behaviors—that's partly why it's so hard to make lasting changes.

It's important to remember that our environments, our physical surroundings like our homes, workspaces, neighborhoods, and communities, have a significant impact on our choices, both good and bad. Any given day, our environment presents us with limitless cues, nudges, and temptations that can distract us and hijack our thoughts and actions (think fast food on our way home, Netflix and the couch at home, unlimited apps and games on our smartphones, etc.).

The more our surroundings are distracting or tempting, the harder it becomes to make the right choices. When we remove or reduce these influences, the right choices naturally become easier to make. This week, our tips focus on changing our environments to reduce distractions and limit unhealthy temptations, so that making the right choices is that much easier.