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Navin Jitt
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© © All Rights Reserved
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who were also heroin users, and they were thousands of miles from

home. Once a soldier returned to the United States, though, he


found himself in an environment devoid of those triggers. When the
context changed, so did the habit.
Compare this situation to that of a typical drug user. Someone
becomes addicted at home or with friends, goes to a clinic to get
clean—which is devoid of all the environmental stimuli that prompt
their habit—then returns to their old neighborhood with all of their
previous cues that caused them to get addicted in the first place. It’s
no wonder that usually you see numbers that are the exact opposite
of those in the Vietnam study. Typically, 90 percent of heroin users
become re-addicted once they return home from rehab.
The Vietnam studies ran counter to many of our cultural beliefs
about bad habits because it challenged the conventional association
of unhealthy behavior as a moral weakness. If you’re overweight, a
smoker, or an addict, you’ve been told your entire life that it is
because you lack self-control—maybe even that you’re a bad person.
The idea that a little bit of discipline would solve all our problems is
deeply embedded in our culture.
Recent research, however, shows something different. When
scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-
control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from
those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at
structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic
willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in
tempting situations.
The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who
need to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you
don’t have to use it very often. So, yes, perseverance, grit, and
willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these
qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but
by creating a more disciplined environment.
This counterintuitive idea makes even more sense once you
understand what happens when a habit is formed in the brain. A
habit that has been encoded in the mind is ready to be used
whenever the relevant situation arises. When Patty Olwell, a
therapist from Austin, Texas, started smoking, she would often light
up while riding horses with a friend. Eventually, she quit smoking
and avoided it for years. She had also stopped riding. Decades later,
she hopped on a horse again and found herself craving a cigarette

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