Current Meathead Minute Topic:

7/6/21 Change Your Environment To Change Yourself

I'm not talking about hugging trees either. Think of the environment as all of the things around you. Your friends, family, and work make up your social environment. Your physical environment can be your home, your office, or anywhere you find yourself. You can think of your schedule and daily routines as a temporal (time) environment as well.

Making healthy lifestyle changes can be very difficult! For some people, especially those who try and fail and try and fail to make a change, a strategy that is VERY effective involves changing the environment around them!

When looking at the physical environment, make changes that support what you are trying to work on. If you're attempting to ditch junk food and eat healthier, change the environment of your home to support this by removing trigger foods. Another example of a physical environment change could be finding a gym or workout space you enjoy being in to facilitate better and more consistent workouts.

Social environment tends to catch A LOT of folks up when they try making a change. Humans are social creatures. Sure, maybe you've decided to make healthier choices, or start new healthy habits, or stick to your guns and eat healthier food all week... but then your pals call you up and BAM suddenly you're sitting in BWW hammering down 3 pounds of wings and you don't know how you got there. If you are someone who has attempted to make changes in the past but has been hampered by your social environment, and you really want to or need to make some changes, it sucks but you may just have to cut some ties. At least in the initial stages of your change. From personal experience, when I went sober in 2012 the single smartest thing I did was go full recluse for a few months while I dealt with withdrawal. I eventually got to where I could go back out and had developed the willpower to not partake in things, but I attribute a lot of that to changing my social environment in those early stages.

Temporal environment changes just require some planning. If you wanna get to the gym more often, schedule it in where you can be consistent. Maybe you need to wake up an hour earlier to go to the gym before work. Maybe you go straight to the gym once you're off, before you even go home. Maybe you prepare healthy foods ahead of time so when hungry time strikes, you've got something ready!

Moral of the story, changing the environment around you will be one of the absolute BEST things you can do to support a lifestyle change you want to make. You'll be setting yourself up for success! If you've struggled in the past to make the changes you'd like to make, TRY THIS, and see if it helps you. Bet it does!