Form a Habit of eating fruits by ensuring you keep repeating

This short read is about how you can engineer your life to increase the chances you keep repeating your desired behavior. If you haven’t done so already, we recommend to familiarize yourself with the concept of modifying your physical environment or in other words engineer your context by reading Create a Habit: Modify the Physical Environment first and come back afterwards.

We know that it easily takes several months (How long does it take to create a new habit?) to fully form a new habit. Until that automaticity is formed, we have to keep repeating our desired behavior. So how can we help ourselves to not give up when we missed a day but rather get back up and do it again?

How can we make ourselves repeating it over and over again?

Very similar to how we engineer our physical context to be reminded in the first place to perform our desired behavior, we engineer for repetition. We do this by not only preparing and setting up your environment to do it once but twice (or more).

If you wanted to increase your fruit consumption, you could...

Place two apples on your work desk: When you eat the first one, celebrate! And the second one reminds you to get a new apple and eat one again. There is always at least one apple in sight.
Have a fruit platter on your kitchen counter with different fruits you and your family like. Wash them before you place them on the platter, so everyone can easily grab and eat it right away.
Stock your fridge in a way that you see prewashed (and precut) fruit in large quantities at eye level in the front. This way, when you open your fridge, your eyes will always fall onto that fruit.

Would you like some company on the journey to eating more fruit?

After reading about how modifying your physical environment to ensure you keep repeating your desired behavior to create your desired habit, you can take different paths forward. You could use our app, that guides you with practical suggestions and checks in with you like a friend, until you fly free (no longer need the app). You could also explore this website, specifically the growing Habit Information Hub in which you find similar posts like this one. And if you wish to dive deeper into the scientific research and how the physical environment influences habit formation, have a look at the References and Recommended Readings below.

References & Recommended Reading

Lally, P., Van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology Eur., 40, 998-1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674
Wood, W. (2019). Good Habits, Bad Habits. (1st ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux