I landed upon a very useful environmental reinforcement for habit building in an unlikely moment of inspiration, if I may say so myself 😉 It happened when I was trying to resume my habit of reading non-fiction books last year. For every 5 minutes I read, I would spend the next 20 browsing my phone. It was an unconscious motion, my hand would already be unlocking the device before my brain caught up to what I was doing.

That is when I got this genius idea. I set a stopwatch on my phone for one hour. Every time I reached for the phone, I would see the timer on the home screen and my finger would pause. It worked beautifully! After the first 15 minutes, I realised that I had not checked my phone in 5 minutes and by the end of an hour, I was immersed enough to increase the timer by another 60 minutes.

I did this often until one day I noticed that I had not needed the support in order to settle down with a book in the past few weeks. Environmental reinforcements and deterrants are simple yet powerful ways to shape habits. I learnt about them a few years back in a book written by the Heath brothers, Switch. The lesson continues to serve me in good stead till date.