This guest post was written by Elana Kann, Founder of Wood Doing Good and creator of the Bag and Bottle Dryer, with input and collaboration from Jay Sinha and Chantal Plamondon, Co-Founders of Life Without Plastic.
I’ve been reading up on the brain science behind habits. Why? Well, it’s the season of New Year’s resolutions.
Also, the Paris Climate Conference got me thinking about the post-fossil-fuels world we’re entering. Let’s look at what comes with relying on cheap dirty fossil fuels all these years. Since plastics are currently primarily made from oil and natural gas, doesn’t “post-fossil-fuels” mean “post-plastics”? At least oil-derived plastics? (And it’s time to accept that perhaps there are NO safe oil-derived plastics – even the BPA-free ones. Beth Terry and Life Without Plastic have been talking about this issue for years.)
Perhaps naturally-based will become a safe and sustainable replacement for traditional petroleum-based plastics, but the bioplastics world is still a grey and murky domain with rampant greenwashing. It’s hard to know all the ingredients of most bioresins, and some “bioplastics” are essentially traditional plastics that degrade faster and thus are actually more dangerous.
Since we rely on fossil fuels’ energy to extract and manufacture much of what supports our use-it-once-then-throw-it-away lifestyle, post-fossil-fuels also probably means post-pollution and post-waste of many kinds.
Synchronously, as the press and internet publicize trash turning our rivers, oceans, and lands into massive ugly garbage dumps; as plastic pollution (which never safely biodegrades) makes its way into our food chain, disrupts our bodies’ delicate endocrine balance, and contributes to many modern diseases including cancers; and as we run out of new places to create landfills – shock and horror are growing about how seriously we’re damaging our world and ourselves.
So, even though we resist much about the change, we are entering the Age of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which will also necessarily eventually be the Age of Reusable Durable Non-Toxic Goods. We resist because our habits have been around a while and are well-entrenched; it feels like we’re giving up part of ourselves, or at least many of the conveniences we’re used to. The challenge is to replace our old fossil-fuels-reliant, plastic-using, single-use, polluting, wasteful habits with new energy-efficient, renewable-energy, reusing-durable-non-toxic-goods habits that fit this new era. The sooner we embrace this big shift and resolve to adapt our habits to fit it, the sooner we can devise ways to make it fun!
Children and youth get these connections quickly. They play with new approaches. They aren’t as attached to old habits, so they can often lead the way into new worlds. Two cutting edge organizations combating ocean plastic pollution – Algalita Marine Research and Education and The 5 Gyres Institute – organize youth summits to educate students on the latest plastic pollution research and to galvanize their energy and enthusiasm into concrete projects aimed at finding solutions to plastic ocean pollution. The result is scores of highly motivated and informed global changemakers taking action.
Back to my study of habits: How do we successfully and joyfully change tour habits? How can we beat the current odds on New Year’s resolutions? Those odds are pretty dismal. One study, published in the University of Scranton’s (PA) Journal of Clinical Psychology in December 2015, suggests that just 8% of people achieve their New Year’s goals.
From everything I’m reading, based on a recent explosion of research into the neurology and psychology of habits, it seems those old habits have well-established neural pathways in our brains and therefore run our behavior pretty unconsciously. Simply eradicating them is generally impossible. And the success of adopting new habits has little to do with willpower, strength of goal, or how badly we want it. When we go all out with big grandiose goals, we go into overwhelm, we get stressed, we give up, then we’re disappointed, feel inadequate, and blame ourselves. We’re in our stress zones. The opposite is to stay in our comfort zones, and we don’t want to do that either.
There’s a middle ground, says Raghib Ahmed: our stretch zones where the magic and learning happen. That’s where we keep our brains active, healthy, and elastic. Hope lies in overriding the old habits with more appealing new routines, using strategies that optimize the way our brains already work. Taking action through tiny steps bypasses our defenses that want us to stick to what’s familiar. How to do that?
I like this quote from Aristotle: We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Changing a habit, according to New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg in his highly readable book The Power of Habit, can be accomplished through careful planning with a cue, a new routine (habit), and a reward. By understanding the cue and the real reward we seek, we can introduce a new enjoyable routine that achieves the reward in a healthy way. This usually takes some experimenting to discover what works. Duhigg gives the example of his habit of leaving his desk every afternoon to get a cookie from the cafeteria and chat with co-workers. He discovered that the cue was a particular time of day, the reward was a social break, and he was able to change the routine to finding someone to chat with for about 10 minutes before going back to work – without the cookie. A simple healthy shift.
Our brains avoid the path of difficulty, pain, and inconvenience and are attracted to ease, pleasure, and convenience. Practicing simple, quick and easy new habits that are in line with our bigger goals eases us into a manageable level of discomfort and makes success more likely. Author Raghib Ahmed with his book 1-Minute Habits, and Stanford psychologist BJ Fogg with his website Tiny Habits, both offer easy-implementation methods based on this recent brain research and their own behavioral experiments.
Tiny habits build muscles (brain patterns) for developing bigger habits. With practice we can increase our skill and tackle harder changes that feel more uncomfortable.
One of the most powerful ways to support a new habit is to change the environment in such a way that the old habit becomes inconvenient and the new habit convenient. In Ontario, the government is replacing standard trash cans at the desks in its office buildings with personal tiny trash bins and personal bigger recycling bins. Their waste reduction measures between 75% and 95%! And I like this one: there’s anecdotal evidence that if people like their recycle bins they’ll recycle more. Artists and engineers – please get together to redesign them!
As a society, we obviously need to question our habits of using carbon-producing fuels for transportation, heating, cooling, lighting, hair-drying, bags, bottles, etc. This will entail re-imagining much of our current infrastructure.
Meanwhile, at a household and business level, we can take a fresh look at our habits, for example, of using and tossing single-use plastic and paper products. When we make careful changes in our immediate environment, the “infrastructure” within our homes, we give ourselves powerful cues and new fulfilling routines that can make new adaptive habits quite easy. Like Ontario’s successful experiment, small well-designed environmental changes can actually make new habits possible overnight, if they introduce enough convenience, satisfaction, and even playfulness.
Those changes can strengthen our ability to adopt bigger, more challenging new behaviors. As we enter the Post-Carbon Age – and hopefully the Post-Plastic Age! – let’s get creative about redesigning around safer materials, and catch our habits up with what’s needed of us. Let’s find our Stretch Zones – in our homes, work places, and in the larger worlds where we meet, collaborate, and navigate together.
In closing, here’s an easy suggestion for helping to reduce the scourge of single-use plastic waste and pollution…
How about keeping a handy stainless steel or bamboo spork in your pocket, purse or glove compartment at all times?
Voilà! The birth of a new healthy habit, and goodbye disposable plastic utensils!
As owner of Wood Doing Good, Elana Kann creates remedies to our throwaway culture. After a family member discovered a malignant tumor (treated successfully through surgery), she realized that our pervasive plastic pollution contributes to the incidence of cancer. Determined to make reducing plastic waste an easy habit to develop, she improved her Bag & Bottle Dryer design, is offering it to a much wider public, and is designing other innovative, functional wood products that make reuse easy. She aims to make earth-friendly habits so much fun that those old wasteful ways don’t stand a chance!