The Willpower-Environment Tradeoff

The less an environment supports a desired behavior, the more willpower is required to do it. Conversely, the more conducive an environment is to a given behavior, the less willpower is needed.

Every permutation of an environment has some behavioral default. Most people’s living rooms, for example, make sitting on the couch and watching TV the behavioral default.¹ If you ever need willpower to perform some desired behavior (like running on your nearby treadmill), it means that that behavior is not the environment’s behavioral default.

So instead of mustering willpower every day to perform your desired behavior (willpower being some finicky thing subject to many whims), you can instead modify the environment, one time, to a permutation that makes your desired behavior the default. By doing so, you will have designed your environment for optimal defaults. After this, you no longer need any willpower to perform the desired behavior because it is simply the path of least resistance, the behavior your lazy limbic system wants you to perform.

A thought experiment:

Suppose you wanted to modify your living room such that instead of watching tv on the couch when you got home, you ran on the treadmill. Imagine now that your living room has no furniture, except for a treadmill in the middle, and a TV that only turns on when the treadmill is running and detects your weight on it. When you arrive home, with no better alternatives, you’d have no choice but to get on the treadmill. But suppose you revolt and decide to sit on the floor! So imagine that the floor is covered with small dull spikes, such that sitting is less comfortable than simply standing on the treadmill, and that a constant annoying sound plays whenever a sensor detects you on the floor, much like a persistent seatbelt alarm in a car. And imagine, placed on the front of treadmill, is a box containing a piece of chocolate that only opens once you start the treadmill. A small easy step later and you’ll be walking on the treadmill eating your chocolate, knowing that if you start to jog, the TV will turn on.

In this contrived permutation of your environment, we’ve made the desired behavior, running on the treadmill, the environment’s behavioral default. We’ve thus designed the environment for an optimal default. No willpower was needed, you simply performed the most enjoyable action in your environment. Better yet, the environment was modified one time, and every subsequent day no additional willpower was needed to perform the desired behavior.

Now of course, we don’t want to resort to such extreme modifications of our environments to accomplish some behaviors. Furthermore, suppose sometimes you want to run on the treadmill, but other times you want to read a book in that environment. You would constantly have to modify the environment to handle these cases, which too takes just as much willpower.

Fortunately, the world of technology allows for very flexible, dynamic environments. Since most rewards come from our digital devices (TVs, phones, computers) which are flexibly programmable, and other devices can be created to distribute other kinds of rewards (our chocolate-holding box that opens upon treadmill start), and we can measure whether behaviors occur through different types of sensors, and connect them to such rewards, we can dynamically allocate top tier rewards to desired behaviors at any desired time. This is temptation bundling in action. And because we can couple this with other habit tactics, like rewarding tiny actions that accumulate gradually (e.g. the piece of chocolate for standing on the treadmill), and subtly disincentivize undesired actions (e.g. the annoying, persistent sound when sitting on the floor), we can combine together many kinds of items that already exist in your environment, dynamically modified with technology, to create environmental permutations whose behavioral default is the desired activity, all without needing consistent willpower day in and day out.

This allows us to utilize the willpower-environment tradeoff to our benefit: we dynamically adjust the environment to a permutation that makes the desired behavior the optimal default, necessitating zero willpower because it is the action you naturally want to perform.

Besides, there are only a few core behaviors we want to perfect (high quality sleep, daily exercise, clean diet, and focused work on your core goals) since these behaviors make almost every other behavior easier. So if we can design optimal defaults around just these few domains, the compounding gains are enormous.

Notes

1. The behavioral default is, in the absence of any willpower from your cortex, the action that your instinctual, primordial, subcortical system wants to perform ↩