I love sweets—regardless of type (cake, ice cream, candy) or flavor (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry), I am drawn to anything with nature’s most powerful stimulant in it, the unforgivingly addictive soluble carbohydrate known as sugar. Sugar is a legal version of cocaine and can be found in everything from fruits and cereal to pasta sauce and yogurt; even BBQ sauce is high in sugar (West, 2020). Simply put, sugar is everywhere, but it is a substance that should be consumed in small quantities—and that requires discipline.
Since sugar is such an attractive ingredient, discipline is especially needed when grocery shopping. Unfortunately, grocery stores seem to have other plans and are designed to derail your self-control while you shop. Bakery departments are at the front of the store to entice you with sugary goodness as soon as you enter. Aisle endcaps (which are known to increase sales due to the prominent location; Oracle, 2018) are stacked with Krispy Kreme donut displays just to see if you are weak enough to slip a box into your shopping cart when no one is looking. Then, just when you think you have escaped, you enter the checkout line only to find seemingly endless shelves of candy bars on sale with colorful wrappers that scream “Eat me, I taste delicious!” It is the most difficult to stay disciplined in those moments; the candy is easily accessible and cheap. Plus, other customers will not be judging you like they would if you were walking around with 2 boxes of glazed doughnuts in your cart. In short, the grocery store environment is not designed for disciplined spending; it is designed for impulsive purchasing.
The lesson: A carefully curated environment can support or hinder your ability to ward off temptation. In other words, living a disciplined life is about arranging your environment to prevent impulsivity as much as it is about overcoming impetuous behavior when it occurs. Your environment is a constellation of stimuli that can impact your behavior (Pierce and Cheney, 2014) negatively or positively, depending on the organization. Environmental design therefore means devising strategies that promote healthy behavior by arranging stimuli in order to cue and control your actions.
First Strategy: Control the Cues in Your Life
How many times have you seen notifications on your phone and said, “I’ll just take a quick 5-minute break to check out social media and then go back to work. The break will help me get through the day.” And how many times did that work out? The answer is not often. The truth is, negotiating with yourself is difficult because you have a dual relationship; you are simultaneously a supervisor who wants to complete tasks and a supervisee who wants to avoid tasks to surf social media instead. Behavior scientists refer to this duality as a competing contingency. A competing contingency is when two (or more) different activities are simultaneously available to you, each with its own set of cues informing you of its availability. Simply put, you have multiple options of what to do with your time—in this case, to do work OR to check social media.
Cues help to trigger your behavior by signaling that, if you engage in a certain activity, you will be rewarded. In other words, cues (a.k.a. discriminative stimuli; ScienceDirect, n.d.) are kernels of information that predict outcomes in your life. The cues in this example are the notifications telling you that picking up the phone will result in you being rewarded with a message. These same types of cues can be found everywhere in your life. They were even on display, so to speak, in the grocery store example with the candy on sale in the checkout line. For me and my affinity for sugar, such cues would send me a clear message: if I buy the candy, I would be rewarded with sweet-tasting nourishment. In a sense, the cues, just by being present, would help control my actions by tempting my behavior and eating away at my self-discipline.
These triggers are important because you can learn to control your behavior (i.e., be disciplined) if you can learn to control the cues in your environment. That means leaving your phone on silent and in the other room when you are working or choosing the self-checkout lane at the grocery store, which does not have candy on display, so you are not tempted to check your messages or buy unhealthy goodies, respectively. This kind of environmental design supports a disciplined life and can be applied anywhere, from your workspace to your kitchen. After all, when it comes to cues for unhealthy behavior, “out of sight…”, really is “…out of mind”.
Second Strategy: Make Choosing Discipline Easy
My wife and I watch TV shows together before bed every night on different networks and streaming services. Recently, we noticed an interesting pattern: we stay up later when watching shows on Netflix versus cable TV. After careful analysis, we identified the problem. Netflix gives you 10 seconds at the end of each episode before starting the next episode in the season/series. You have 10 seconds to decide whether to get up, walk to the bedroom, and get ready for bed OR do nothing and enjoy another episode. It does not take an expert in behavior science to guess what we usually end up doing. It is easier to do nothing; we do not even need to click “next episode” because Netflix does it for us. And that is how they get us. They make it easy for us to decide to binge versus go to bed.
Exercising discipline is a choice, a choice to do what you have to do, despite what you feel like doing at the moment. These choices are made easier or more difficult depending on the structure of your environment. If the feel-like-doing choices are less effortful than the have-to-do choices, the effortless decisions will win. In the grocery example, sugar-laden foods conveniently placed on aisle endcaps mean I don't even have to walk down the aisles to pick up items, and candy is cleverly situated on easy-to-grab shelves in checkout lanes. In a nutshell, the store makes it easy for me to purchase the sweets I enjoy so much. The Netflix system designers do the same thing; they just replaced sugar consumption with episode consumption. In summary, both environments require that I expel less energy, and that results in more engagement.
The most precious commodity we have as humans is energy. Everything we do requires it. Whether walking, talking, or thinking, we are expending energy. Anything we do therefore has a cost paid using that currency, and like we would do with any other valuable commodity, we strive to secure as much as possible by being as efficient as possible with our lives. In a word, humans are lazy. We will naturally choose the path of least resistance. In behavior science, we refer to this energy consumption as response effort. Response effort is the amount of energy a person must put forth to successfully complete a specific behavior (Friman & Poling, 1995).
A disciplined environment, therefore, is one that accounts for and maximizes this human nature rather than ignores or struggles against it. That means changing the settings on your streaming devices so that the response effort involved in watching another episode is increased. It means using the self-checkout lane at the grocery store so that shopping trips are a “piece of cake” instead of something that ends with you buying actual cake.
In the end…
The most disciplined people in the world do not have more willpower or mental toughness than you; they are just better at arranging their lives for success. Prosperous CEOs, victorious athletes, and thriving performers do not fill their lives with temptation and then spend time and precious energy resisting it. Instead, they remove tempting cues and make it more difficult to indulge in fleeting pleasures. This dynamic highlights how discipline is more about design than determination. Ultimately, your environment will be one of two types: discipline DRAINING or discipline SUPPORTING. Your success in life will be the product of that arrangement. So, if you want to improve your discipline, establish a disciplined environment, and you will be better able to shop at the grocery store and avoid what tastes good NOW so that you can feel good LATER.
If you want to learn more about discipline from a behavior science perspective, there is an exciting conference I am co-hosting in October called Self-Set Go: A Behavior Analyst’s Self-Care and Grit Summit.
Check out the link here to register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/Self-set-go/home
References:
Friman, P. C., & Poling, A. (1995). Making life easier with effort: Basic findings and applied research on response effort. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 28(4), 583–590. https://dx.doi.org/10.1901%2Fjaba.1995.28-583
Oracle Retail. (2018, November). Grocer research guide: Endcap display optimization: Beer for the win. https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/s/adv/doc1/Grocery-Optimization-GB.pdf
ScienceDirect. (n.d.). Discriminative stimulus. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/discriminative-stimulus
West, H. (2020, June 26). 18 foods and drinks that are surprisingly high in sugar. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/18-surprising-foods-high-in-sugar
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