Why making sustainable choices is like keeping a New Year’s Resolution
Our brains are cognitive ‘scrooges’. They prefer the option that requires the least effort to get the largest and most immediate rewards. If you doubt this, I’d highlight that globally there are more than 38,000 McDonald’s locations, and that almost 50% of people quit their New Year’s resolutions by the end of January.
Whether you’re trying to go to the gym more regularly or increase your savings, we often find ourselves making decisions that aren’t in our long-term best interest.
This is also the case for sustainability. For example, we have seen strong growth in consumer’s desires to make more sustainable choices via data from search engines. Yet many people don’t make the most environmentally conscious choices all (or even most) of the time. A well-intentioned and proudly announced decision to be more sustainable might start well… but as time goes by, and the everyday stresses of life demand attention, even the most well-intentioned plan can quickly come to a halt.
What can we do about it
So if good intentions and willpower aren’t going to cut it, then what strategies can we use to make more sustainable choices a greater percentage of the time? If being sustainable is like losing weight, maybe we can look into that toolkit to find some answers.
1. Make the solution fit for you.
Google’s former Chief Decision Scientist, Cassie Kozyrkov has a great article on New Year’s resolutions and why you should fit solutions to your own life. People are all different and have different lives, so while a solution might work for one person, it doesn’t mean it will work for you. Stop feeling guilty about the things you can’t do, but focus on what fits your lifestyle.
For example, I have two young twin girls. Any resolution that requires me to have several spare hours multiple evenings each week, isn’t going to work… For example, I’m unlikely to be able to have enough time to volunteer at a charity for several nights every week. However, I can start cycling to and from work instead of using my car because it only takes me an extra 20 minutes each way to use a bicycle. And because the overall bike journey takes 50 minutes, it means that during the spring and summer, I can cut the emissions of my everyday life. I will still have to find a different solution for winter in Helsinki, though…
2. Make sustainable choices convenient and accessible
As mentioned, our brains are cognitive misers. The more convenient you make everyday sustainable choices, the more likely you are to stick to them. And the more you stick to them, the more you will find that over time you will form ‘sticky’ habits and can then have spare the mental capacity to move to a new (more challenging?) routine.
As an example, having a pile of reusable shopping bags handy in the hall will increase the likelihood that you will grab one on your way to the shop. As the world consumes nearly xxx million plastic shopping bags every year, every bit helps.
One of the most powerful pieces of behavioral science is our brains’ tendency to take the default option, also know as the default bias. This means that if the choice is made obvious, we’re more likely to take the easy path. For example, you can limit eating unhealthy foods by not keeping junk food in your house. Similarly, the more you structure your life to make the sustainable choice the default choice, the more likely you are to take it.
3. Measure your progress and analyse your choices
If we don’t have visibility on the impact of our actions, we don’t know whether the actions are taking us in the right direction — and we don’t hold ourselves accountable. This doesn’t mean you need to do in-depth climate research on your actions, but you should know how much waste you generate or how much electricity you use. There are plenty of environmental footprint calculators that you can find online to help you out. (here is a simple one if you want to start today).
4. Create small, achievable goals and then incentivize yourself to take the right actions
The harder we make sticking to our actions, the more likely we are to abandon them. We are all guilty of rushing to meet a new goal by trying to set an unsustainable schedule. Deciding to get up at 6 am to go for a morning run sounds like a good idea — until the alarm goes off at 5.30am…
So if you want to make more sustainable choices, don’t be too ambitious initially. Pick actions you know you can complete (even when your kids are sick and work gets hectic), and then build on them as they become more automatic. And then make this even easier by rewarding yourself for each step to create a positive feedback loop. Combining your journey with (sustainable) rewards makes it more fun, instead of something that you view as a chore.
5. Remember why you want to be more sustainable in the first place
Motivation and resilience are two of the biggest factors in the success of any goal, and if you’re looking for motivation when it comes to being more sustainable -> I’ll share a reply that Chat-GPT gave to me when I was looking for ways to best explain the importance of recycling to my twin girls (in the style of Winnie the Pooh of course):
“Sustainability is about taking care of the things that are important to us, like our friends, our honey, and our beautiful forest. It’s about being kind to the world around us, and making sure that we leave it in good shape for the generations that come after us”.
