The Discipline of the Dessert Drawer
During my third year of college, I lived in an apartment with three other roommates. Through this experience, one thing I learned is how to share the common spaces where you store food, cook and clean. And in what he thought was kindness, my roommate Ryan always seemed to bring home sweets, snacks and various desserts, placing them in the middle of the kitchen counter for everyone. I can’t remember if it was because of free events or that he went to the discount section of the grocery store, but there was always something unhealthy that he brought home to share.
In the beginning, I thought this was great. Who doesn’t want free cookies, muffins and brownies? As time went on, though, I realized that no one else was eating these sweets. In fact, I don’t know if Ryan even liked sweets that much. This left me, with a knack for sweets, eating way too many unhealthy snacks each week. In frustration, I demanded that we have a new process for desserts, and I created the dessert drawer. This was a bottom drawer next to the dishwasher that would house all snacks or sweets that people brought home and would like to share with others. It left the desserts out of sight and out of mind, leaving me with less daily temptations.
I thought the dessert drawer was an ingenuous invention, but my roommate Logan would say that I lacked self-control. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and the lesson from this silly experience is that it taught me an important conclusion about life: designing your environment is one of the easiest ways to change your habits. It’s not a novel idea, and you’ve probably been affected by your environment without even thinking about it. This doesn’t simply relate to dieting or exercise, either, it has to do with any behavior we want to change, remove, improve, or reduce. Some people don’t have a TV and it completely changes the living room. Some people use specific paintings or colors in a house to reflect a certain aura when people enter their homes. Other people, like me, try not to keep candy or sweets in the house because they don’t want to eat all of them in one evening. There’s so much variety when it comes to your environment, and that’s where individual creativity shines.
No matter what, whether you are trying to make a room feel more nature-esque or you are trying to curb a bad behavior, designing your environment matters. We’ve all been in a room that makes us feel at peace, perhaps because of the warm colors or a fireplace in the living area. On the other hand, we’ve all been in a bland classroom or hospital that gives off a completely different energy. Design your environment to match the goals, values, and life you want to live, and you’ll be surprised how dramatic of a difference it can make.
