Exercise is crucial for lasting fitness, but many other factors outside the gym also matter. If you’re tackling a New Year’s resolution, look at your environment. It’s often the number one contributor to your current health state, whether you’re sedentary or eating improperly.

Escaping the Past: Environment, The Habit Loop, and Identity

It’s not just your environment today; it’s the old habits and deeply ingrained patterns formed over the years within that setting that make change brutally difficult. Your brain is wired for efficiency, repeatedly firing the same neural pathways built by comfort and convenience. These patterns have literally become part of your identity – who you are, on a personality level.

To truly break free from patterns like consistent processed food cravings or skipping your twice-weekly 21-minute X Gym-style workout, simply willing yourself to change is often not enough. You must disrupt the cue-routine-reward loop where it starts: the environment.

• Sedentary Traps: Does your environment demand sitting? Change that. Schedule movement breaks.

• Nutritional Influences: Openly available junk food is an environmental cue for poor eating. Remove it. Stock your kitchen only with nutrient-dense foods. If it’s not there, you can’t eat it.

• People you hang out with: You are a product of the people you spend the most time with. Humans are pack animals and tribal in our brain wiring, so those around us have significant influence over us. Being aware of this is the first step. The second step is noticing the influence in patterns we have with those people. The third step is adding people to your “tribe who will influence you and help you toward the goals you have for your health and fitness.

• Household Habits: The habits of those around you are powerful, often subconscious forces. Their choices influence yours.

Two Paths to Progress: Change Your Setting, Change Your Self

Your current results are a reflection of your system. To change the outcome, you must change the system.

1. Change Your Environment: This is the most effective path. Create an “X Gym” mindset at home: design your space for movement and healthy eating. By redesigning your setting, you erase the old cues and replace them with new, healthy ones. Change your settings to change yourself.

2. Cultivate Awareness: If you can’t fully change your surroundings, you must become hyper-aware of the negative cues. Recognize the influence, acknowledge it, and consciously choose a different path. This requires disciplined mindfulness—a core biohacker skill.

3. Appreciate the Identity shift: When you focus on atrophying old nerve pathways and strengthening and deepening the new nerve pathways with the new habit loops and routines, you are creating your new rewired brain. Just like your old identity was formed with patterns, habits, and routines, your new identity will be formed the same way. Remember this to keep the importance and a priority in your mind!

Biohacking Your Brain for Breakthroughs

To make this transition easier, understanding your unique neurology is key. I offer a Brain Type Test  (braintype.me) designed to help you:

• Determine which specific techniques will work best for your unique brain type to successfully break old habits and form new, lasting ones.

• Develop strategies for busting persistent food cravings tied to environmental triggers.

• Identify your best workout style—moving past generic programs to find movement that aligns with your brain’s reward system, ensuring consistency in your high-intensity functional training.

Take control of your environment, then leverage your brain type. That’s the science-backed path to lasting fitness success!