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Dr Todd Mei

Editor & Founder of Philosophy2u

Content for April 2024

Our focus this month is Habit.

1. What is Habit?

2. Practice: Mastering Success through Atomic Habits

3. Ideation: Imitation & Moral Exemplars

4. Dealing with Workplace Stress with Biophilic Design

   by Dr Vanessa Champion (Founder and Editor, Journal of Biophilic Design)

~

“For me, having a space to unravel, somewhere to retreat is essential for my wellbeing, or just being able to get up and walk out of the door and around the block or better still into a park to let off steam and think.”

What Is Habit?

“For habit is easier to change than nature, and this is why even habit is hard to change, because it resembles nature . . .”
 

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

* * * * *

Good habits are virtuous. Bad habits are vicious.

What makes a habit good or bad involves both moral and practical elements. The explicit moral dimension involves whether the conduct that manifests through our habits conforms with societal expectations. For example, having a habit of “double dipping” when eating from a vegetable platter at a party will be morally unacceptable due to hygiene.

The practical dimension of habit involves whether or not the habit that you have impedes or enhances your capability to engage with others and do the things you set out to do. For example, making eye contact with others (versus looking at your phone!) when they are speaking to you is a form of hospitality and helps to create an atmosphere more conducive to conversation.

Another way to think about the distinction between habits:

Good habits are enabling; bad habits are corrosive.

The difficulty with habits, nonetheless, is that the majority of them occur at the subconscious level. A major feature of habits is that they are dispositions that we cultivate to the point where we don’t have to activate them consciously. Habits emerge in response to the appropriate cues that we have learned over time.

This is problematic with bad habits, which can manifest without our full awareness and are not brought to our attention until someone (embarrassingly) points them out to us.

We’ll explore a range of tips and strategies in the Practice, Ideation, and Guest Column (Biophilic Design!) sections of this month’s Newsletter to get those bad habits under control and those good habits out in the open.

Practice:

Mastering Success

through Atomic Habits

This month we're delving into the transformative power of Atomic Habits, inspired by James Clear's acclaimed book. Atomic Habits, as Clear defines them, are the small yet impactful changes we incorporate into our daily routines, setting the stage for remarkable growth over time.

The Ice Cube Analogy: Patience in Progress

Imagine yourself in a freezing room with an ice cube. As the temperature gradually rises from -15 to -1 degrees, the ice cube remains intact. Then, at just one degree above freezing, it melts seemingly overnight. This analogy mirrors the journey to success, where the incremental steps we take often go unnoticed until a breakthrough occurs.

In business and personal development alike, we're often fixated on outcomes rather than the process. But as UK Boxer Chris Eubanks once noted, success is forged in the early morning runs and relentless training sessions, not just the moments in the spotlight.

Similarly, Simon Sinek's insight on love applies to organizational change: it's not about one grand gesture, but the multitude of small actions that shape a culture over time. Whether it's fostering teamwork or enhancing performance, real change emerges from consistent effort, not quick fixes. In one of his talks, he asks the person interviewing him the exact time, moment, and date he fell in love with his wife. When the person couldn't answer, but he knew it happened over a period of time, then that proved Simon's point that big life changes happen as an accumulation of thousands of tiny ones.

Harnessing Habit Stacking: Building Momentum

Now, let's delve deeper into the concept of habit stacking. Habit stacking involves integrating new behaviors into existing routines, leveraging the power of consistency and momentum. For example, if you already have the habit of cleaning your teeth every day, you can stack a new habit onto it by doing ten push-ups immediately after brushing. This simple addition to your routine not only strengthens your dental hygiene but also contributes to your overall fitness goals.

Habit stacking is a highly effective strategy because it piggybacks on behaviors that are already ingrained in our daily lives. By attaching new habits to existing ones, we reduce the friction associated with behavior change and create a seamless transition towards our desired outcomes.

The Journey to Success: Persistence and Resilience

As we navigate the journey towards our goals, it's crucial to remain patient and resilient. Success isn't always immediate, but by focusing on continuous improvement and showing ourselves kindness along the way, we pave the path to lasting success.

Embracing the Process: Cultivating Excellence

As we embark on our spring adventures (in my view the perfect time for new resolutions!) let's remember:

It's the small, consistent actions that drive progress. So, whether you're pursuing personal growth or leading organizational change, commit to the process, and success will follow.

Thank you for joining me on this journey of exploration!

I look forward to sharing more insights with you next month. Until then, stay focused, stay resilient, and keep striving for excellence.

Joseph Smart 

OD&D Consultant, Smart Joseph Consulting

joe@smartjoseph.com 

Ideation:

Imitation & Moral Exemplars 

One of the most effective ways to eliminate bad habits and cultivate good habits comes straight from our history books. Most ancient and indigenous cultures have a form of ethical practice based on imitation and the use of “moral exemplars” to form good habits and break bad ones. Imitation can be a powerful tool, but it needs to be applied appropriately.

Moral exemplars are members of a community who exhibit certain moral qualities that we find admirable. Whether it’s hard work, compassion, or resilience, outstanding figures act as beacons by which we want to live our own lives.

Interestingly, success is not always a key ingredient as to whether someone might be seen as an exemplar. We might admire someone despite their misfortune or even because of it.

What is important to bear in mind about moral exemplars is that they are more than just the sum of their actions. That is to say, seeking to be like them takes more than just imitating their actions. This is because it’s not their actions alone that suffice in being good or admirable.

Rather, it’s what informs their actions.

For example, a habit of being courageous can take many forms in a given situation – whether it involves putting one’s life at risk to help another or calling for additional help.

So if imitating moral exemplars is more than just mimicking their actions, what is involved?

Understanding their lives as a story.

Grasping a person’s life as a story is a more complete form of comprehension when compared to just imitating actions. Why?

Think of it like this:

It is often the complexities and nuances of a story that reveal how and why a character might have acted. We learn about the principle of their actions, as opposed to the mere surface grammar of what they did.

Stories also involve us in ways that develop our cognitive and emotional capacities in how we are moved by the characters, their trials, and their success or failures. It’s a deep semantic grasp of the meanings and values underlying and underwriting what one does.

Actions only scratch the surface; and a specific action taken in one instance may not necessarily be the best action in another instance.

Charitable giving is a classic example of this conundrum.

While generally, it is a good habit to be charitable to others in need, when taken as an action to resolve inequalities, it becomes problematic. This is because charitable giving can often hide or encourage us to ignore the deep causes of a problem like poverty. Giving to those in need does not solve the problem, only the symptom.

While admiring actions is an important part of cultivating good habits in ourselves, genuine cultivation runs much deeper. It involves shifting one’s perspective from within life to align with certain values and meanings. This shift is not easy to do because it requires reinterpreting ourselves and re-imagining how our lives go as stories.

Yet a key to helping initiate this change is being moved by the stories of those whom we admire . . . not just their actions.

If you want to carry on this conversation, please feel free to reach out!

Dr Todd Mei

Founder and Consultant for Philosophy2u

tsmei@philosophy2u.com

Dealing with Workplace Stress

with Biophilic Design

Dr Vanessa Champion

Founder & Editor, Journal of Biophilic Design

In 2021 it was found that about 17 million working days are lost each year as a result of ill health caused by work stress, depression, or anxiety; combine that with 19% of workers in the UK alone who say that their employer has no measures in place to help alleviate the stress.

Now while it would be a pie-in-the-sky dream job that might present no stress at all, it is a fact that every single one of us will experience high levels of stress at some point in our working life. In fact, the average working adult feels stressed for almost a third of their working day.

While we can’t control what causes the stress, we can control how we react to it. Ideally, we’d make all the negative forces, deadlines, KPIs, and personalities disappear with a magic wand, but reality isn’t like that. We are more likely to be snowed under with another project or task even before we finish the first one.

So, what can we do?

There are a lot of “self-help” stress management books out there, where one of the key messages to helping control stress levels is to look at how we react to the stress inputs. So, in other words, that’s how we respond to Jack from Finance who rants at our marketing expenditure, or how we feel when we go to use the printer and it’s run out of ink again and it’s left to us to replace the cartridge. “Why can’t someone else do this for a change?”.

It is true, how we respond to a stressful situation is key. It is also true that our physical environment has a direct and profound impact on how we cope with things.

From an environmental psychology point of view, we know that clutter, certain colours, lack of natural light, and bad acoustics, for instance, all negatively affect our cortisol levels. If we put that as an additional layer on the stress cake, we are not doing ourselves any favours. And, let’s face it, most workplaces are still designed with that open-plan cacophonous factory mentality.

Most office designs do not allow anyone to find a space to let off steam. I am founder and editor of the Journal of Biophilic Design, and a brilliant article written for our Wellbeing issue by Dr Harriet Shortt describes just how many people use the toilet as a place to hole up and “be”. For me, having a space to unravel, somewhere to retreat is essential for my wellbeing, or just being able to get up and walk out of the door and around the block or better still into a park to let off steam and think.

Over the past couple of years, I have devoured all I can about the science and research behind Biophilic Design. If you’ve never heard of it, this is a topline explanation and is well worth a further bit of study:

Biophilia refers to our innate connection to nature: “Bio” means life, nature, and natural living systems; and “philia” means “love”.

When we cut ourselves off from nature and natural systems, we get sick.

If you think about most workplaces, they are white boxes with rows of desks. Or, they are functional spaces, white melamine desk tops, black wheelie chairs, grey filing cabinets, and plain grey carpets. The lighting in most places is functional and untenable, and the acoustics are unbearable with a cacophony of voices, printers, phone alerts, webinars, Teams meetings, and more all vying for space in your brain while you are trying to write that report.

What Biophilic Design aims to do, is to bring that harmony we “feel” in nature into our built environment, so that we flourish.

It is what is also called sensory design. This isn’t a 1960s tree-hugging theory. It is based on scientific research, from NASA to thousands of papers examining the positive impact relating to views of nature, a direct connection to plants, natural paint colours, noise reduction, curves vs straight lines, zones, acoustic booths, access to natural light, circadian lighting, natural textures, and so on.

There are essentially 14 patterns of Biophilic Design, and including just one or two can have a phenomenal impact on how people function and flourish in the workplace.

We have forgotten that we are nature. It is not, us and it.

Our physical biology is the same as it was when we were roaming the plains in search of food 100,000 years ago. So, when we hear loud noises, or bright lights, or if it’s too quiet, our brains respond in exactly the same way: we are being attacked.

In an office environment, the malfunctioning printer isn’t the same as a tiger coming to eat us, but our brains respond in a similar way. The office lights that don’t change during the day are telling our bodies to stay awake, which eventually causes exhaustion as we are not giving ourselves time to restore. This causes our stress hormones to rise even more.

So if you do one thing, position two large green leafy plants near your desk so you can see them, move your desk near the window, or create a zone where you can unwind and engage in some “ART” (Attention Restoration Theory):

Look at a view of nature and allow yourself a moment of respite to renew and rebuild and help yourself flourish when you’re at work.

You’ll be happier, more creative, and more productive, and your boss will love you for it (and you are less likely to go home and kick the cat).

To find out more, visit www.journalofbiophilicdesign.com, listen to the podcast on all RSS feeds, or join us at our conference on 12th November 2024 at London’s Barbican www.biophilicdesignconference.com.

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