The U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy recently released a Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Parents, highlighting the urgent need to better support parents, caregivers, and families to help our communities thrive.
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Change Your Environment, Change Your Habits: Why Designing Your Physical Spaces Is Critical to Creating Sustainable Habit Change
We tend to over-rely on goal setting, motivation, discipline and willpower to create change in our lives. It’s likely that we’ve all experienced how goal setting can be tricky, motivation is fleeting, discipline makes change feel like work, and willpower is easily zapped.
We need more than measureable goals and inspiration to get the job done when it comes to changing our habits. One often overlooked method is changing our physical spaces.
The environments in which we live and work have an enormous impact on our behaviors and choices, yet we tend not to notice how much influence they have on us.
“The environments in which we live and work have an enormous impact on our behaviors and choices, yet we tend not to notice how much influence they have on us.”
We typically don’t consider that our environments are designed with a specific purpose in mind. For example, cubicles exist to promote focus and efficiency, while elevators provide a safe, quick means of transportation.
There is an overwhelming amount of research in support of the power of nudges and environmental design to positively impact our behaviors. In fact, changing our physical spaces is one of the fastest, easiest ways to change our habits.
Take a moment to reflect.
What would be possible if you designed your home or workplace in support of the habits that generate health, happiness and performance in your life?
Designing a High-Performance Office
At Habits at Work, every nook and cranny of our office space is intentionally designed to generate performance and make it easy for our team to practice positive habits, including movement and exercise, healthy eating, collaboration, learning and mindfulness.
Playful Entry Zone: This serves as a reminder to our team and our visitors that a playful mindset is the key to unlocking creativity. Having a global view expands our thinking, and including people from all corners of the world, of all colors, is the way to build a company that flourishes and shines with the brightness of primary colors.
Adaptable Workshop Space: Our training and yoga studio doubles as a customizable space that is often used for group learning, workshops and events.
Clean Slate Creativity Room: Here, we’ve intentionally created a blank slate filled with whiteboard walls to facilitate conversation and collaboration.
Trust + Reflection Space: Looking into someone’s eyes for 20 seconds releases oxytocin, the trust hormone. Here, you’ll find a room full of faces staring back at you. We use this room to have informal conversations and meetings to build trust. It also doubles as a quiet space for reflection and relaxation.
Mental Break Wall: People are most effective at work when they take a short, physical and mental break every 45 minutes. And, the human brain is attuned to focus on things in the environment that are surprising, disgusting, sexy or novel. This wall is intended to pull your attention away from work using images that represent exactly those things.
We believe that work can be a source of wellbeing, fulfillment and safety if we intentionally design it to help us thrive as human beings, which is why it was critical for us to create a physical workspace that reflected our beliefs.
We’d love to give you a tour of the office, show you our living plant wall and get you to play a game of Ellie’s Drawers (come visit us to uncover the secrets of the drawers!).
Sign up for a Context Design workshop
Habits at Work helps people become the best versions of themselves so they can live big lives. Our team delivers workshops, online courses and coaching to help people practice the habits that get them what they really want. We have spent over a decade researching which habits make the difference for individuals and teams, and creating a framework for habit change.
Context Design Workshop
Want to leverage these concepts in your organization? Learn more from Andrew & Habits at Work with this unique face to face opportunity.
About the Author
Andrew Sykes is CEO of Habits at Work and the Founder of BRATLAB. He is a professional speaker, habit designer, formula fanatic and father. He is on fire and inspired to change the world of work.
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