Program Your Environment For Positive Focus 

Environment is the context of activity. Whether the physical surroundings, the social atmosphere, our emotional states, or thoughts, these inputs impact your ability to behave in new ways and perform well. To level up performance you’ll need to Assess, Change, Measure, and Evolve, ACME for short. In this article we’ll look at assessing and changing.  

The most important information you have is what you know about yourself. Remember, good systems serve the person, not the other way around. Who are you and what do YOU need to create that sweet spot where motivation and enjoyment work together? Be super honest with yourself. No one else needs to see your answers. You’re the one who will act on them. If messiness keeps you from starting tasks, don’t pretend you need the mess to be “creative.” Add a clean‑up step to the end of your work sessions as a new behavior to practice. Assess your own preferences first.  

• What kind of lighting do I like? 

• Are windows inviting or distracting? 

• What colors do I like? 

• Am I into things matching, or do I prefer a curated/collected vibe? 

• What sounds and levels of sound help me focus?  

• Do I have a clean, well-supplied space where things are easy to find and put away?  

• Is my equipment easy to find, charge, store, and retrieve? 

• How do I FEEL when I look at my space? Ready to dive in? Overwhelmed? Anxious? Bored? What can I change to feel good? 

Self‑Determination 

The reason to develop strong executive functions is to increase your independence as you mature. With strong planning and execution skills, and the habit of seeing things through to the end, you can achieve great things. In psychology, believing that what you do has a strong impact on your life is called having an “internal locus of control.” It means you feel empowered and that you take action toward your goals. You see yourself as someone who makes things happen. Someone with an “external locus of control” takes the opposite view. They tend to feel things happen TO them and that they have very few choices in how their lives unfold. You can guess which type of person feels more successful and fulfilled.  

Cues & Neural Cascades 

How exactly does your working environment make you feel empowered? It’s a brain thing. The human brain evolved to be efficient. Since it takes about 1/3 of our calories to run a human brain, and we lived in a low‑calorie world until the modern era, it helped individuals survive if their brains could save effort by automating certain functions. That’s where neural cascades come in. ` 

A neural cascade is like a brain waterfall. You learn to do some action that is the same every time. After some repetition, you don’t need to focus on the individual steps anymore. You brain just needs the jump start of the first step or cue, and it takes over from there, sending signals through your nervous system and causing you to behave in the pattern that you learned, sometimes against your own desires! 

Our coming home routine is a good example. If you always come into your house through the same door, put your keys in the same place, go to the kitchen and grab a snack, then check your phone for messages, your brain has that pattern stored. If you were to come through a different door, you’d be confused for a second when you first enter because the place you put your keys is no longer in the same spot relative to the door you came through. But, once you resume your location at the drop point, your routine will also resume. The cues are environmental, but they’ve been there so long, they are also subconscious.  

Change the Cue, Change the Behavior 

Programming your environment is about changing those initial cues to disrupt old patterns. If you are used to snacking in your workspace and want to stop that, figure out the cues that come BEFORE the snack gets to your work area. Change that pattern and you’ll quickly replace the old habit with a better one. There are some tips that make it easier. 

1. Don’t just eliminate a behavior. REPLACE it. It’s very difficult to NOT DO something. It’s much easier to DO something else.  

2. Chain it. Look at your existing habit patterns. Find things you already do and want to keep doing and add new habits to the end of an existing neural cascade.  

3. Adjust the environmental cues. Put up signs, sticky notes, magnets, objects, as visual or tactile reminders for behaviors you want to start. Change the layouts of rooms to interrupt neural cascades from old habits. Add a clothing element like a hat or bracelet to go with certain tasks, and put it on as the first step.  

4. Add something rewarding to the environment as the last step; looking at a view, a stick of gum or mint, a photo of someone who supports your efforts, a sticker in a book or an x on a calendar to count repetitions. 

5. Rehearse: even when the new behavior isn’t necessary, go through it as a dry run with all the cues and steps acted out. Similarly, just reviewing it in your imagination, with details, is practice. 

Novelty! Candy for Your Brain 

So you’ve got a space that feels right, cues and layouts that trigger NEW behaviors, and a few tricks to reward yourself and practice. Now you just need to maintain that shift mindset. Here again, you need to combat the natural tendency of your brain to save energy, and balance it with the right amount of stimulation.  

Whatever cues and reminders you’ve placed in the space, your brain will start to ignore them as “normal” after a while. Update them every 4-6 weeks to keep them triggering the new behavior. You can make new cues, move the old ones to new places, or change their position, like turning them upside down. Anything to make them “new” to your brain.  

Refresh those rewards. If you’ve been texting your best friend after homework, try calling them instead. If you give yourself candy for finishing a task, switch to your favorite gum. Make sure any reward still feels rewarding. If you aren’t excited about it, it’s not a reward anymore. Ways to update rewards: 

1. Don’t make it bigger, make it more intense. 

2. Change it from a single small reward to collecting a series of markers over time. Set a total that earns a bigger reward. Instead of a cookie after clearing your desk for the night, put a checkmark on a calendar. After 21 continuous days with checkmarks, go out to lunch with friends or buy something you’ve wanted for a while. 

3. Gamble. Roll a die or spin a wheel that has different rewards possible. To activate your brain chemistry even more, make one possibility no reward. The threat of losing something can increase engagement. 

4. Go without. Put a halt to the reward for a week and see if you find yourself thinking about it. If so, bring it back. If not, replace it with something you look forward to.  

Next issue learn what to measure about your performance.