Friction as a Habit Tool
TLDR: Manipulating friction in your environment makes consistency effortless. Removing small obstacles helps you practice habits, while increasing friction can help you avoid unwanted behaviors. Shaping your environment to align with your goals can lead to faster progress and greater success!
If you're like me and set new goals and habits to accomplish in the new calendar year, you're one week in, congratulations! It's likely been fairly easy until this point – you're riding high on motivation and haven’t yet faced many obstacles that would get in the way of you doing what you set out to do – but let's be real, we both know it's coming.
The sick kid(s) up in the night, the unexpected car repair, the tweak in the hip, argument with your spouse, or God forbid, anything worse. All of these things (and many many more) are major points of friction you'll have to consider when thinking about how you can accomplish your 2025 goals and pick up the new habits necessary to achieve them. Because we know that stuff happens and life gets messy, so we might as well have some strategies to keep making progress even when it does.
One of the most powerful aids in establishing the habits and accomplishing the goals that I've found after many years of repeated and miserable failures, is to shape the environment in order to reduce (or possibly increase) the amount of friction between you and the behavior you need to perform in order to reach your goal.
This year, one of my big goals (outside of continuing to grow the practice and help more cool people like you) is to learn to play the mandolin – why not guitar you ask? Well because I have small hands and I like the unique sound that music with a mandolin creates (folk/country/bluegrass/indie). So how will I be shaping my environment to help me learn and stay consistent with practicing a brand new instrument?
The main thing I'm doing to help reduce friction is to keep my mandolin out in the open – right in the living room. “Out of sight, out of mind” is a widely used aphorism for good reason, because it's true. I've kept my mandolin out in the living room (while instructing the toddler that it’s off limits no less than 2,316 times, luckily she's a good listener) and I have a tab to my online lessons set to automatically open when I open my computer. This will make practicing much easier by simply reducing the amount of small steps (or friction) it takes to pick up the mandolin and begin playing.
If my mandolin got put away every day it would require me to walk to a different room, open a door, get it out, walk it to the living room, and start playing. Not to mention, walking it back and putting it away when I'm done.
When I type it out and read it back it sounds extremely lazy. “You don't have enough willpower to walk to another room and back again?” NOPE. I’ve tried, trust me.
ANY amount of friction placed between you and your habit has the power to stop you in your tracks, compared to when it's removed. Most humans are inherently lazy when it comes to goals that aren't critically important to our survival, so it's best to pad the stats in our favor and remove as much friction as possible!
You can also use friction as an aid if the behavior you're wanting is to avoid something. Want to reduce your snacking in order to lose weight? Don't buy the snacks you're most prone to overeating for the house. If you're craving chips that aren't in the cupboard you'd have to
1) put your shoes on 2) get in the car 3) drive to the store/gas station 4) buy them 5) eat them – that's a lot of effort when you compare it to
1) open cabinet 2) eat chips.
So as we move into the second week of habit changes and striving toward new goals, think a bit about how you can use friction as an aid in accomplishing all you want in 2025. Shape your environment to better shape your behavior and watch the progress move quicker than it ever has! Good luck in 2025, I'm here to support you in whatever you’d like to accomplish!