Starting a new habit or breaking an old one is hard. It’s the reason why supplements and hacks have such a giant market.

An effective ways to overcome this challenge is by reducing the amount of resistance to these good habits, or increase the amount of resistance that it takes to engage in a bad habit. This is simply a matter of taking the steps to set yourself up for success.

Here’s an all too common example: An individual wants to start a workout program. The average person who doesn’t take the time to really program it into their daily life will usually fail within a few weeks. The reason here is simple: it’s hard and foreign.

Let’s say that this individual plops down onto the couch and watches Netflix each day after they come home from work. This is the habit that is competing against working out. The level of resistance to watching Netflix is much lower than the level of resistance to partake in working out.

Netflix will win every time.

Now, let’s try and change a few things. Before we even address working out, we must address the issue of how easy it is for this person to succumb to sitting down and starting a show. Our bodies and brains are incredibly lazy and will usually fall for the path of least resistance, so we must make streaming a show as difficult as possible. The best way to do this is to probably just cancel the subscription to the streaming service, but I doubt that many people will actually want to do this.

The next step is to program inconvenience into this behavior. Go put the iPad or your remote into an obscure box in the attic. Delete the app from your device and log out. Disconnect all of the cables from your TV and hide them. Use a self control app. Just make it very tedious to engage in the behavior you want to stop.

Now, we can address the new habit or behavior. We must get rid of any source of resistance to this behavior. If your gym clothing is always dirty or scattered throughout the house, you’re less likely to actually change and workout. Make sure that everything has its place and ready to go. When you get home, go straight to wherever your clothing is and change. Better yet, in this day and age of working from home, just wear your gym clothing from the beginning of the day and be ready to workout whenever you need to. Have everything ready; your shoes, water bottle, gym bag if you use one, etc. In short, you must alter your environment to elicit any change.

It’s simple to implement this concept. If you have an issue with snacking on junk food, throw that shit away. Or, just buy them in really small quantities. Make it really hard to find junk food. If you have trouble with online shopping, take the credit card info off of your phone or computer, delete your shopping website accounts, and go do something else.

Make it easy to engage in your good habits and make it really hard to engage in the bad ones.