This article is based on a talk I gave at TEDxEmiyCarrU this past summer. It follows the script that I prepared and includes a few notes (presented in parentheses) that provide some context and additional ideas. I hope that this article is useful for those who want to learn more about these topics and for those who are looking to improve other areas of wellness that weren’t mentioned in the talk.
Building new habits— this feels like one of the hardest things to do, right? Every year, millions of people take on the ritual of defining a new year’s resolution. Often people start strong and are on the heroic path of change, but then life happens, things get in the way, and two weeks later the majority are back to where they started. Traditional self-help wisdom often tells you that what you’re lacking are willpower and motivation, but I think what you’re missing is just a few tricks… Let me explain.
I’m an interaction designer as well as a retired part-time professional magician, and through making the switch from magic to design, I learnt that these two things are really doing the same thing. You’re creating interactive experiences based on principles of storytelling and using behavioural insights to capture and manipulate attention. So just like how a magician uses sleight of hand, designers, we use sleight of mind, and both are based on psychological techniques. Now what I find interesting, and kind of empowering, is that you can actually use these techniques in your own lives to trick yourself into building better habits, and they work even if you know the underlying mechanisms behind them. It’s pretty simple.
There are three key steps to do this:
Step 1 is to have a goal. So if you don’t have a goal, well then… go get a goal. It’s completely up to you to start. This goal will be your source of motivation. If you’re stuck, perhaps think of an area of wellness that you want to improve. (The wheel of wellness typically splits wellness into eight subcategories: physical, social, intellectual, emotional, occupational, environmental, financial, and spiritual. This can be a useful model to think about when setting goals if you want to live a more balanced life.)
Step 2 is to understand the habits that will help you to achieve your goal. So, say if your goal is to lose weight, then building the habits of exercising and eating a healthier diet will help you get there. If your goal is to be more environmentally friendly, then developing the habits of recycling and reducing your plastic usage will help you to make an impact.
Step 3 is the important step that most people miss — design your environment for success. Allow your motivated self, the one who is ready and wants to change, to design your environment for your less motivated self, so that even on the days that you don’t want to go through the motions, it makes sure that you do. This can be a little tricky (pun intended…), because to do this, you need to set up interventions that persuade and manipulate your attention just enough to help you to change your behaviours when motivation and willpower aren’t enough.
Here are some tricks that I learnt during my short-lived career as a magician that can help you with this.
The first is misdirection — which is a fancy term for “misguiding your attention”. This tool is often used to take your focus away from where YOU want to look, to where WE want you to look, and helps to cover up those secret moves that are being performed that creates the effect of an illusion. Misdirection is based on the insight that we humans are really only good at focusing on one thing at a time and that our perceptual systems can easily be used to misguide us. It follows the simple idea of “if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind”, and the opposite which is sometimes more powerful which is “if it’s in sight, it’s in mind”.
Knowing this, how can we use misdirection in our own lives to help us to build better habits? As an example, let’s take wanting to improve our diets as our goal. If we have a bunch of foods at home that we know we shouldn’t be eating, we can misdirect our attention away from them, simply by hiding them inside of generic opaque food containers and placing them behind some healthier snack options in our cupboard or fridge. Simply placing the treats in a container might be enough to add some friction to curb our behaviours, but this intervention is more effective when there are healthier and more visually attractive food options present to act as misdirection. That way, when you open your fridge or cupboard, those tasty but unhealthy snacks won’t be the first things that you see, and you’ll be less likely to impulsively snack on them. Over time, you might even forget that they are there.
(Here are some additional ideas for how to use misdirection that weren’t discussed in the talk:
If you want to take back your mornings and get out of the habit of scrolling through your phone from the moment that you wake up like 66% of millennials do, simply leave your phone outside of the bedroom and use a $10 alarm clock to wake yourself up instead. If you don’t use your phone to wake yourself up, you won’t be receptive to the slew of notifications that appeared during the night before, and you won’t be tempted to click into your social media or your news feed from the moment you wake up. Likewise, if you constantly find yourself being distracted by your phone and you want to be more productive while you work, don’t keep your phone right beside you on the table where it will distract you every time it does something to steal your attention. If it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind.
If you want to get into the habit of recycling instead of throwing everything into the garbage, put your recycling bin right beside or in front of your garbage bin to remind and give yourself the choice to make the right decision. If it’s in sight, it’s in mind. (This also takes advantage of choice architecture which is another principle that we will discuss below.)
Lastly, if you want to save more money by reducing your online spending, use an ad-blocker and download an extension that will prevent you from casually visiting and browsing through your favorite online stores. Marketing banners and ecommerce websites are designed by experts who know how to steal your attention and will cause you to add things to your cart that you don’t truly need. If it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind.
All of these ideas probably sound ridiculously simple, but trust me when I say that they actually work. If you don’t believe me, try them out for yourself 😉.
Back to the main talk…)
Now obviously it’s better and probably more efficient to just prevent those snacks from appearing in your house in the first place — luckily there’s another trick that we can use for that as well: it’s choice architecture. Choice architecture refers to the way that you can present a set of options to people to influence their decisions. This takes advantage of our default bias, which is our natural tendency to follow things as they are and to accept defaults when making decisions, as well as the framing effect, which describes how peoples’ decisions may be influenced based on whether the options are presented to them in a positive or negative way.
When a magician asks you to pick a card, chances are there’s a bit of choice architecture at play. Sometimes the deck can be stacked in a particular way, or cards are manipulated and presented to you in a manner that increases the likelihood that you’ll pick a certain one.
Going back to our example, what if you were to make a list of all the snacks you would normally go out to buy, that is, your default options, and look at them through the lens of why you want to improve your diet. If your reason for wanting to improve your diet was to lose weight or to have more energy throughout the day by eating more natural and nutrient-dense foods instead, then frame, and look at each snack option through the lens of whether or not it will help you to achieve that goal. That way when you go out to buy some snacks, you’ll be less likely to follow your defaults as you’ve been habitually conditioned to do, and you can instead architect a new set of snack choices based on your goals. (TL;DR — if you only allow healthy foods into your home, you will only be able to eat healthy foods when you are at home, and you’ll achieve your goal as a result.)
(Again, here are some additional ideas for how to implement choice architecture that weren’t discussed in the talk:
If you want to get into the habit of exercising first thing in the morning or as soon as you get home from work, then make the decision now and create defaults for your future self to follow later. Plan your day and block out time for that activity in your schedule the night before so that you don’t have to make the decision of what important thing you should do in the moment. Additionally, prepare your workout clothes and leave them next to your bed. By deciding what to wear ahead of time you reduce friction costs and the opportunity for procrastination to arise later, thus making it easier to follow through with your goal when the time comes. No matter what your goal is, think about the choices that you might have to make in the future and make those decisions now to create defaults that will make it easier to follow the right path later.
If you find yourself habitually reaching for your phone and instantly clicking into a certain app from your homepage (it could be a game, news feed, social media app, etc.) then remove the default shortcut and make it harder to choose and access that app. By removing addictive apps off of your homepage and moving them onto a separate page, or even better, in a separate folder on a separate page, you will remove the default choices and consequently the impulse to click into that app will eventually disappear.
At its core, using choice architecture is all about mindful decision making. By reflecting on your habitual behaviours and making conscious choices you can more effectively design your environment (whether that’s physically, digitally, or otherwise like in your schedule) to make it easier to make the right choices in the future.)
Tristan Harris (former design ethicist at Google and star of the documentary The Social Dilemma) from the Center for Humane Technology, who is coincidently also a magician turned designer says that “if you control the menu, you control the choices”. In other words, if you’re the one architecting the choices that are being presented, you control all the options available to the person on the other side of the interaction, and if that person is you, what options would you want to give yourself?
So now I’ll hand it off to you. How might you use misdirection and choice architecture in your own lives to trick yourself?
Let me know in the comments down below.
