How to Redesign Your Home to Achieve Your Health Goals

Forget relying on willpower—your environment can do the heavy lifting when it comes to building healthier habits. By making good behaviors easy and convenient, and bad behaviors difficult and less accessible, you can set yourself up for success without constantly battling self-control. Instead of focusing on which habits are good or bad, this approach focuses on methods and new ways of thinking to simplify healthy choices.
Think about it: Is your phone right next to your bed, tempting you to scroll at night? Is junk food or fruit sitting on your kitchen table? Are your running shoes by the door, reminding you to go for a morning jog? These small changes can make a big difference.
BJ Fogg, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of Tiny Habits and founder of Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab, explains, “People often think, ‘I’ll just use willpower to change my bad habits,’ but that rarely works.”
“Instead of relying on willpower, we take a different approach. We redesign our environment to make healthy behaviors easy and natural, and in doing so, we transform our habits—and our lives,” says Dr. Fogg.
It’s important to recognize that our environment drives our behavior. For instance, seeing an apple on the kitchen table prompts a healthy snack, placing running shoes by the door encourages morning runs, and putting a photo of your family by the phone reminds you to call your mom.
Rather than relying on fleeting willpower to create healthy habits in 2025, invest some effort upfront to make changes in your physical surroundings. Walk into each room of your house and identify something that is prompting an unhealthy habit, such as having junk food on the kitchen table, making it easily accessible for a snack. Also, identify what you can add to that room to make a healthy habit more convenient, such as placing fruit in a bowl on the kitchen table instead.
So, how do you make good behaviors easy? Here are some examples from our expert team for things they’ve taken OUT and added IN to prompt healthy choices in each room of the house.
Make Healthy Habits Easier in the Following Rooms:
Kitchen
OUT: Throw away junk food (or put it in the back of the cupboard).
IN: Place fruit in a bowl on the kitchen table for a quick snack.
IN: Redesign fridge and cupboards to make healthy options more visible.
Living Room
OUT: Remove the TV remote from the coffee table.
IN: Add a stationary bicycle or rebounder to use while watching TV.
IN: Create a cozy reading nook with books and good lighting.
Bedroom
OUT: Take out the TV.
OUT: Charge your phone outside the bedroom.
IN: Place a glass of water on your nightstand to stay hydrated first thing in the morning.
IN: Optimize for quality sleep with blackout curtains, cool temperatures, and comfortable bedding.
Bathroom
OUT: Remove clutter from counters. Store products you don’t use daily out of sight to create a clean space.
IN: Place floss next to your toothbrush to create a visual cue for dental hygiene habits.
Office
OUT: Remove snacks that encourage mindless eating.
IN: Set a timer every hour and keep weights or resistance bands within sight to prompt quick exercise breaks.
IN: Consider adding a standing desk or treadmill to encourage movement.
Making these small changes to your environment in January sets you up for success to lead a healthier lifestyle all year!