Change your life by changing your environment.
In 1967, a cell biologist called Bruce Lipton conducted a simple but startling experiment with stem cells. He cloned a single stem cell, making three groups each with 50,000 of the same cell identical to the original. Stem cells are embryonic cells that are the building blocks of all humans; in other words, they’re raw material that can become any type of cell. These three groups of identical cells were placed in slightly different petri dish cultures (material they could grow in) — and then left for a while.
The first group of cells all became muscle cells. The second group all became bone cells. And the third group all became fat cells. Remember, these were genetically identical cells. The only difference between these three groups was the environment they were placed in, which radically altered what they became.
Like the ending of a good book, this seems simultaneously inevitable and yet also surprising. Take a moment to consider it and the implications are profound: at a cellular level, human development is hugely dependent on the immediate environment surrounding us.
The implications of this for us as human beings is huge — both at a macro and micro level, with everything from saving the planet to eating less chocolate (although, why would anyone want to do that?).
Changing the world isn’t about changing what we do individually.
At the macro level, humans are faced with challenges that are almost too big to comprehend: a changing planetary climate, global water shortages, destruction of the natural world, obesity and opioid epidemics, and so on. These are huge, species-level challenges. Yet for every one of these examples, there’s a prevailing view that one of the primary ways to tackle these requires change and willpower at the individual level:
- Want to tackle climate change? You should stop using vehicles, stop eating meat, don’t take flights.
- Want to protect nature? You should buy ethical products, recycle, stop using plastic.
- Want to avoid becoming obese or diabetic? You should eat healthy food, exercise, cut down on sugar.
All of these are worthy, individual behaviour changes that can undoubtedly make an impact in achieving the wider goal. Yet they rely on individuals to summon the resources and action, in systems and environments that not only don’t enable that change but often actively oppose it. How likely is it, for instance, that an overweight person can change their eating habits if they live in a food desert, are bombarded with junk food advertising and the most affordable food available is unhealthy and lacking in nutrition?
How likely is it that people will stop using cars if public transport remains expensive, fuel remains cheap and cycling infrastructure is inadequate? Relying on the moral conscience of car owners will not drive enough change to save the environment but they will soon change if incentives change.
Dan Buettner’s groundbreaking Blue Zones research identified the areas across the world with the highest health and longevity, and the themes that linked them all. His work refers to the immediate environment surrounding us as Life Radius. It’s where we spend most of our time as individuals and therefore optimising our living environment is critical if we want people to be healthy, happy and behaving in a way that has benefits for the planet.
It is in conditions like the ones above that we rely on a significant change in the systems we live in to effect the outcome needed — at the macro level, this means governments and organisations with power and resources. Only governments can make laws, invest in infrastructure, change regulations and develop policies that nudge or influence behaviour change at the individual level. The levy on shopping bags has been incredibly successful at reducing plastic bag consumption. Investment in cycling infrastructure in cities has seen enormous increases in people cycling, to the extent cycle networks are overcrowded in some places.
When it comes to climate change, for example, only governments can truly create the system or incentives that creates the change required to pull us back from the brink. Expecting individuals to choose to stop buying plastic goods whilst oil companies still receive billions in state subsidies to pump out cheap fuel makes little sense.
When macro-level challenges are viewed in this way, then the change required at the individual level is put into perspective and becomes simpler. If, for example, you want to tackle climate change, the biggest thing you can actually do is also the easiest: vote for leaders who make that a priority, and encourage other people to do the same.
Willpower is overrated and misunderstood in making personal change.
At the micro, or individual level, the importance of environment is just as influential in making change. There is an abundance of advice telling people, in different ways, that to make change in their lives they need to summon willpower, beat resistance and persist for the long-term. This is not bad advice; I agree with much of the sentiment. But taken in isolation, it overlooks the crucial role of the immediate environment in making individual change.
There’s a lot of great thinking around at the moment on creating powerful and lasting habits for change (see the excellent work of James Clear and BJ Fogg). One of the common principles in forming good habits is to remove barriers.
Let’s take a simple example. If you want to make sure you go for a run tomorrow morning, one of the things you can do is to lay out all of your running kit the night before, leaving it arranged in a way that means you almost have to summon energy to ignore it, rather than put it on. This is in stark contrast to the mental and emotional energy required to dig out your running trainers from the back of the wardrobe when it’s dark and cold outside — it removes the inherent hurdles to not going for a run. In other words, a simple change of environment, can be huge in enabling change.
This adjustment of the physical environment to nudge for change is similar to the Poka Yoke principle in lean manufacturing. Translated literally, poka-yoke means ‘mistake-proofing’ and was developed to prevent errors not just in manufacturing but also in consumer usage of products. For instance, if you want to increase safety by preventing someone from driving without their headlights on, you build in automatic sensors as standard.
The principle of tweaking your physical environment to influence change, applies to many other personal habits:
- Want to drink more water? Carry a water bottle with you at all times.
- Want to eat healthier at home? Remove all junk food from your house.
- Want to read more? Carry a book with you wherever you go.
It’s all about removing distractions and obstacles that are bad for you and adding the things that make good habits and behaviour easy.
But what about change that might require adjustments that aren’t obvious? This is where it gets difficult. If you’re feeling deeply unhappy, frustrated, sad, it might not be obvious to you why that is the case. Or you might think you know but end up changing the wrong things.
There’s no simple answer to this. When dealing with emotions, it often requires some practiced self-inquiry to understand the root cause of what is influencing your emotional state. That deep feeling of discontent could be driven by any number of things: low self-esteem, a lack of fulfilment, a pessimistic outlook, a feeling of lacking purpose.
And these, in turn, could be driven by many things: too much time on social media, reading the news too often; a toxic relationship, an unsafe or unpleasant work environment.
It usually requires space and self-reflection to get to the bottom of what’s really going on, and when you do, you may still be faced with some difficult decisions about what to do next. But you will know that making the right change to your environment will have a huge impact on your wellbeing. It might, for instance, mean making a difficult decision about your career, it might mean having a challenging conversation with your partner or family, it might mean deleting your social media accounts, and it might even mean exiting friendship groups that no longer serve you.
The short version of this article.
We’re deluged with messages telling us that making change is our personal responsibility. That’s very alluring because there’s a sense of empowerment in saying, “I can do whatever I want if I put my mind to it”. However, the reality of the world is that it’s full of obstacles, hurdles and incentives that often make it really damn hard to make the change you want to.
So if you want to make an important change in your life, think of yourself as cells in a petri dish: it’s not just about you changing yourself, it’s also about you changing your environment.
