The Only Three Ways to Change (and Why Most People Bet on the Wrong One)
By Andrea Spyros & Nancy DeFina | BD3 Solutions
If you've ever tried to stop procrastinating, you probably have a small graveyard of failed attempts. Maybe another new planner. Or a productivity app you used for three days. Perhaps a morning routine copied from someone whose life is nothing like yours. Each one seemed promising at first. Each one eventually joined the other ghosts in the graveyard.
It is easy to see that pattern as a personal failing, as if you simply lack the discipline that others seem to have. But the more likely reason is simpler: most of what we try focuses on the wrong lever.
Decades of research from Stanford's Behavior Design Lab show there are only three things that actually create lasting change in a behavior. Not ten strategies, not twenty different hacks. Just three things.
An epiphany
A change in your environment
A change in your behavior, made tiny and easy to do
That's the entire list. Everything else—every trick, every app, every ninety-day challenge—works (if it ever does) because it happens to tap into one of these three. So it's worth understanding each one on its own, starting with the one everyone secretly hopes for.
The Epiphany
An epiphany is like a lightning bolt. It is the moment when something clicks so quickly and completely that you cannot go back to who you were five minutes before. It is that flash of insight that suddenly changes how you see a part of your life, all at once, without you having to do anything to earn it.
Everyone wants one. It's the most seductive of the three, because it promises change without the slow work of building anything. One clear thought, one "aha moment," and suddenly the old pattern just... releases.
This is the problem with epiphanies as a strategy: you can’t force one to happen, and you definitely can't build a plan around waiting for one to arrive. As a result, many people end up waiting for their epiphany about the same stuck habit, even months or years later. They keep hoping for the one lever that's continually out of reach.
So let’s set epiphanies aside, since they are not something you or anyone else can reliably produce. That leaves two levers within your control.
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The Two Levers You Can Count On
The first is your environment, which is a bigger category than most people realize. It's not just the physical room you are in, though that matters plenty.
It's your digital environment: the things just one tap away on your phone or the notifications set to interrupt you.
It's your social environment: the people around you and what they expect, model, or make harder (unknowingly or knowingly).
It's your time environment: the way your day is structured and where the gaps are, or aren't.
It's even your internal environment or state: the emotions, judgments, doubts, and running commentary you bring into a task before you even start.
Change any one of these, and you often don't have to change yourself very much. The behavior becomes easier because the environment is more supportive. That’s the main idea, and, it's much more reliable than trying to summon more willpower. In our next article, we will go deeper into this, including a few small, one-time moves across each of these environments that make everything downstream easier.
The second lever is changing your behavior in tiny ways. Not a sweeping overhaul, not a crash diet started on a Monday. An easy-to-do version of the behavior so small it hardly feels like effort. Easy enough that motivation and willpower are almost irrelevant.
Both of these levers have something the epiphany does not: you can design for them. You can build a process around them. You can repeat what works, intentionally, instead of crossing your fingers, waiting to get lucky.
That's exactly where we're headed next. First, environment, and the different forms it takes. After that, we’ll look at why tiny, easy-to-do behaviors are much more powerful than they seem, and how the easiest possible version of an action can help you get untangled right now and also become the foundation for a habit that lasts.
For now, the useful shift is just this: stop waiting for the lightning bolt. You have two levers that don't depend on luck or timing, and both are available to you today.
If you'd rather work through all of this live, with us, we're teaching the full system in our Untangle Procrastination™ Workshop on September 19th.
We'll walk through your specific environments, your particular stuck spots, and build a plan around what's actually true for your life, not a generic template that assumes everyone's obstacles look the same. There's real value in doing this work in a room with other people who are untangling the same knots, and leaving with something concrete instead of just more ideas to sit on.
Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a science-based program built on models and methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab.
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