Around 30 days ago I wrote an article in which I talked about wanting to find a way to keep on learning German using Duolingo on a daily basis without constantly forgetting about this activity or not even trying to do it because I would come home exhausted from work.
I tried a bunch of things to motivate myself to learn every day, at least a little bit, but nothing really worked. Out of all the things I was doing daily, Duolingo was the one I least wanted to busy myself with. I realized that thinking like that was bad, since I really wanted to learn German, but I couldn't make myself want to use the website every day after hours and hours spent at work.
Discipline was obviously not working, nor was a reward based system. So, I decided to conduct a little experiment in which I would set Duolingo as one of the websites that automatically open whenever I would use my browser. I thought that not having to consciously make the decision to use the website every day, and instead having it there already for me to use, would make it easier for me to do at least one lesson a day.
One week later I wrote another article called "My little experiment" in which I talked a bit about my results. To my surprise, my experiment was a success - I managed to use Duolingo up until that point for 8 days in a row, which was way more than I managed to do since I came back to work here.
Apparently, my strategy is actually quite a common practice when trying to form a habit. I discovered that while reading the book "Atomic Habits", in which James Clear talks about how often the environment we live in can dictate the habits we have and the difficulty involved in adopting or dropping other habits.
If you live in a hostile, dirty environment in which stress and anxiety are things that you experience all the time, and in which you are surrounded by the wrong type of people, it's very easy to pick up bad habits that will decrease the quality of your life, that will ruin your health and that will ruin your chances of improvement, simply because willpower alone might not help you go through all those unpleasant things.
If, however, you live in a safe, clean environment, deprived of stress and anxiety, and in which you are surrounded by great people who support you and want the best for you, then it becomes easier to drop bad habits and instead to pick good ones such as regular learning, cleaning, exercising, and so on.
Apparently, our environment has a bigger influence on us than we usually think, and I noticed this first hand with my little Duolingo experiment. The simple fact that I didn't have to close Facebook and YouTube to open and use Duolingo any more, but instead I had the website already open for me every time I would use my browser, made it much easier for me to just do even one lesson a day.
That can be easily seen in the fact that I am currently at day 27 of learning. It became an easy to do activity that doesn't take me more than 10 minutes a day, unless I want to do more than one lesson.
What can you learn from all this? That your environment matters way more than you think, and that if you want to improve your life and your habits, you can start by trying to improve your environment, to make the things you need to do much easier to begin, and to surround yourself with better people.