How to Make Better Decisions by Designing Your Environment

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Behavior change isn’t commanded by motivation and willpower.

There’s a limit to the number of times you can beat your inner-self and go running. Soon enough, the routine gets boring, you skip a few runs, and fall back to binge-watching Netflix. In the long-run, motivation is not a sustainable way to change behavior.

And willpower is like a muscle: we can strengthen it but ultimately it needs time to recover from overuse. Make too many decisions during the day to deplete your willpower and you suddenly crave fast-food for dinner, instead of your well-thought balanced diet.

But if neither can change behavior, how can we become the best version that we can be? How can we make sure we consistently make better decisions regarding our body and mind?

The answer: designing smart choice architectures.

What Is Choice Architecture?

Small and perceptibly insignificant details can have major impacts on our behaviors. And those details are often a result of how we design our environment. Thus, most of our decisions are not made by deliberate choice, but by…