When You Already Know What to do but Just Can’t Seem to Do It

Here’s How Behavior Chaining Can Change Your Life

There are times that I don’t drink water or eat a quality meal all day. I’m a behavior analyst, I’ve studied the science of behavior for over a decade, I have a masters degree, three children, a business, and yet. Sometimes I can’t do the easy stuff, like drink a glass of water. How is that many of us, successful both in careers and home, experts in our fields, functional in all the most adult ways, can know exactly what needs to be done (drink water) and still fail to do it? What do we do when having all the knowledge, the necessary resources and the motivation are still not enough to change our behavior?

In behavior analysis, we often break down complicated or complex behaviors into small pieces and teach each separate piece independently. What may be perceived as a simple task may actually require the completion of ten or more steps to reach the final desired behavior. A behavior chain is the combination of all of those small tasks strung together to reach a final goal. People often fail at goal accomplishment because they underestimate the amount of steps required to reach completion or they overestimate their ability to complete them, or both. These inaccurate estimations prevent effective preparation, which is why they can know exactly what needs to be done (drinking water/exercising/eating healthy) and still struggle to do it.

Eating healthy food is the most impactful behavior to facilitate weight loss and muscle gain but is arguably the most challenging to sustain, especially for busy parents. When you consider the amount of steps required to eat a healthy meal, from shopping for the ingredients to plating the meal, the number of small steps required could reach upwards of 50, depending on how you count them. When you then consider the steps needed to eat processed food instead, not only is the list of steps cut by at least half, but these foods are also manufactured to stimulate the pleasure centers of our brain, appealing to our evolutionary need to satisfy hunger quickly.

In order to hack your biology using the science of behavior analysis, three considerations must be made: 1) Acknowledge that when you are experiencing a setting event like hunger, your ability to delay reinforcement (aka eating) is going to be negatively affected as your body’s desire for highly satiating food is going to be stronger than usual. 2) The behavior chain (or list of tasks) required to engage in the healthy behavior must be made as short as possible and 3) the behavior chain required to engage in the unhealthy behavior must be made as long as possible. It may seem obvious to increase the effort required to eat the unhealthy food, but this can be a challenge for parents because it’s impossible to keep certain foods out of the house and out of reach when we hit 8:30pm and Netflix and sugar are calling. In this scenario, that pesky unhealthy behavior chain cannot be shortened easily, so we need a healthy behavior chain that is equally as convenient and even more delicious.

Given the limitations of living with other humans and their dietary habits, a couple of simple strategies could be the difference between making a choice that is in line with your values or not.

1. Put the unhealthy food out of sight and make it difficult to access (i.e., lengthen the behavior chain in order to access it). When you’re getting that late night hankering for something sweet, put the unhealthy food high on a shelf, out of reach, in the back of a cupboard, etc. If it needs to be available all day, move it to a less available spot right after dinner, when you are satiated and less likely to grab a few handfuls. You can also increase the behavior chain by brushing your teeth immediately after your last meal, meaning that should you snack again, you would have to brush, floss and redo the whole hygiene chain. These might seem like simple solutions, but will provide you with just enough pause to help you rally that additional willpower to redirect you to a choice more in line with your values.
2. Buy delicious healthy fruits or prepared foods and then place them in your line of sight. Make sure they are so delicious that you look forward to them each day. Place your healthy snack on the counter or in the front of the fridge so that you go for it immediately when you open the fridge looking for a snack after dinner. Make sure that it tastes good enough that it can compete with chocolate or chips. It doesn’t have to be a banana. It can be a banana sautéed in honey and then topped with a little granola and whipped cream. It can be a baked apple topped with a small dollop of ice cream and some cinnamon. Don’t make your protein shake with powder and almond milk alone- add some nut butter, a little fruit, top with some whipped cream and granola. The problem isn’t that healthy food isn’t as good as the other stuff. It’s that the companies who make the other stuff know how to light up the pleasure centers of the brain. It takes a little time and practice, but you can do the same with healthier foods.

These small changes can make it so that when you are in the moment of choice, your system essentially makes the right choice for you. You create an environment for yourself where the option that will take you down the path of satiation AND least resistance also happens to be the one that nourishes you well. People who are successful in living in line with their fitness values do not have higher levels of willpower, they are not more moral than others and they possess no particular special skills. They just know the power of their environment/context/systems and adjust accordingly.