Organize Your Home: Be a New Year’s Resolutions Rock Star!

Are you one of the few who made New Year’s Resolutions for 2022?

How is it going so far?

Did you know that nearly 2/3rds of people who make New Year’s resolutions give up within the first month? (1) And of those—nearly half are giving up on the very same goals they had the year before.

Is this you? Is your mojo gone? Are you just about ready to throw in the towel and let it go again this year?

Before you do that: Have you thought about structuring your environment to support you to achieve your goals? 

The environment around us— including our homes— shapes and influences our behaviour in many ways. This is exciting news. It means we can change our environment to support our behaviour in ways that can encourage—and discourage—the changes we want to make in our lives. 

What we know about how the environment and our behaviour interact comes from a diverse field of research populated by many professions, from urban planning to economics to the world of habits and behaviour change.

And that’s the world we’re in when we make common New Year’s resolutions like “read more,” “get in shape” and “be better about my self-care.” 

These are not goals in and of themselves. You don’t achieve them and then, boom bam boom, you’re done. “Getting in shape” is something that happens because it’s the result of certain actions you take over and over through time. In other words, these New Year’s resolutions are all about developing and keeping habits. And that’s great because there’s a lot our homes can do to help us with our habits.

Use Cues to Change your Habits

A cue comes at the very start of the habit forming process. Simply put, a cue is that thing which prompts you to act.

Sometimes all you need is a simple reminder: you put the books by the front door so that the next time you leave the house, you take them with you. Some mornings, you set the alarm and you jump out of bed when it goes off. 

Right?

Hardly! 

It is true that cues prompt us to take action, but when we use our alarm clock exactly the same way we have always used it before except for setting it an hour or two earlier, this cue is not really any different than it’s always has been, especially to a sleepy brain.

Likewise, if we go out the door and ignore those books time and time again, these single cues simply become part of the background of everyday life. 

When we ignore the cues we set for ourselves, unfortunately, all we are doing is training ourselves to ignore these specific, singular cues. They lose their potency and power to help us change. 

Single cues also lose their potency when they are not conspicuous enough. The empty pill bottle on the counter cluttered with papers and dishes and odds and bits won’t stand out enough to remind you to get a refill. 

Contextual Cues are Powerful Cues

However, one of the most effective ways to use cues to achieve your goals — and this is true regardless of your physical environment — is to tie them to things you are already doing. So, for example, if you have a habit of taking medication in the morning, taking your vitamins when you take your medication is a good strategy. Of course, you still need to have the vitamins at hand. Will you need a larger container so they’ll be together?

But the best way to prompt yourself to perform your new habit is to set up multiple cues connected by context. That’s because we associate and perform certain behaviours within a particular context.

“Our environment is not filled with objects but with relationships.” 

James Clear, Atomic Habits.

Take the social smoker, for example. Being out at a bar with friends on an evening is the context which prompts this person to smoke who otherwise wouldn’t. The bar contains multiple cues for the person to smoke: the bar itself, being with friends, the noise, the beer, having fun. 

An experiment in a sleep lab (2) showed how you can manipulate these relationships to help with insomnia.

Researchers asked insomniacs to get into bed only when they were tired. If they couldn’t fall asleep, they were to get out of bed, leave the room and stay out until they felt sleepy. 

It’s important to note that the only thing that happened in that room was sleep. No reading. No TV. No tossing and turning. After a while, the participant’s began associating sleep—and only sleep—with the room—and it became easier and easier for them to fall asleep quickly.

In this example, the cues; the bed, the room and feeling sleepy are bundled together and all together they make up the contextual cues to go to bed and fall asleep easily. 

Limiting the number of specific contextual cues is crucial to creating new behaviour. When everything in a room is there for one purpose and one purpose only: it’s pretty hard to get distracted and do something else! 

The principle of one space: one use, is something both organizers and interior designers do their best to create. A craft room may have many different supplies for different crafts, for example, but the sewing stuff will be with the sewing stuff and not with the knitting tools and supplies. 

Activities are easier and more enjoyable when they are organized into zones or spaces where all of one kind of thing is grouped together. When they’re organized, each room has what it needs (and no more) for the activities that take place in it. 

So what does all this mean for you if you want to “read more?”

There are a number of ways you could achieve this goal:

You could simply put your current book on your nightstand to remind you to read it. That may work for a time. 

You could create an environment specifically for reading—set up a comfortable chair in a corner or by a window with a small table for a drink and your book. Throw in a pillow and a blanket and you’re all set.

If you want to “read more” and watch less TV but you do both in the same room, a singular super cosy chair may not cut it. An easy fix might be to rearrange the room so the TV can’t be seen from the reading chair. 

If that’s not possible, you could also paint the walls and redecorate. Of course, you can always do this to refresh your rooms. Doing this can break most—if not all— of the associations you had with watching TV in that room—until you watch TV in there again, of course. 

But the room is now a different room. It’s not one where you “just watched TV”, now it’s where sometimes you watch TV and sometimes where you read. 

To recap: changing behaviour begins with cues. 

Cues work when they are obvious and obeyed. 

Cues work when they are bundled with something you already do. Do you have what you need for that to happen smoothly?

Cues also work when there are a lot of them connected by context.

It can be difficult—very difficult—to change your behaviour in a messy, cluttered environment. That’s because there are too many objects calling for your attention in the same ways they always have. The entire context of your environment can be working against you. The struggle is real.

This is why I love to declutter. It is a fresh start, the creation of a whole new context —absent all the cues and relationships that came with the old and familiar. There’s possibility and hope in spaces cleared of all those things.

Even so, sometimes decluttering is not enough. Sometimes you have to change up the environment, or the room in ways that make it fresh and new. That’s because we have relationships with the things in our environment. And sometimes we have to break up with them to move on.

Do you have any New Year’s resolutions that your home could help you with?

Resources:

1. Nearly 2/3rd of people give up on their New Year’s resolutions within one month. Joanne M. Dickson, et, al., “Self-regulatory goal motivational processes in sustained New Year resolution pursuit and mental wellbeing” in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 90 at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

2. Charles M. Morin, et. al., “Psychological and Behavioural Treatment of Insomnia: Update Of The Recent Evidence (1998-2004)” in Sleep 29, no. 11 (2006) https://aasm.org/resources/practiceparameters/review_insomnia.pdf