Is your internal clock out of sync?

On our minds

Envision your brain as an atlas. The neural pathways that receive the most reinforcement — the actions you take every day, multiple times — look like twelve-lane expressways. The neural pathways for the things you do with some regularity look like highways. The pathways to the things you do occasionally look like country roads. Those mega-city expressways? They're your habits. And intertwined with those habits—the rebar and concrete columns that support the expressway—is your relationship with space and time. Your habits are shaped and upheld by your personal clock (are you a morning person or a night owl?) and by the multisensory stimuli and physical architecture of the places where you live your life.

Habits are the patterns that organize our days, but circadian rhythms are the patterns that organize our bodies. Your circadian rhythm determines when you feel sleepy or alert. It influences things like digestion and even memory. Circadian rhythms have a genetic component but can be shaped by environmental factors such as light, temperature, travel, medications, and stress. What happens when your circadian rhythm gets "off?" Maybe you've worked the night shift for the past six months, or you've crossed time zones and experienced jet-lag repeatedly in the past few weeks. Sleep specialists have a number of tips to help you reset your circadian rhythm — such as being in sunlight first thing in the morning, changing your meal time, using caffeine strategically or not at all. You can override some degree of genetic coding and environmental factors by forming new habits, and one way to do that is to alter your space in ways that encourage you to do the thing. As you make changes in your environment, you're doing neurological "roadwork." You're building an "off-ramp" on that expressway and widening those country roads to handle extra traffic. Construction is inconvenient at first, but ultimately, it pays off in efficiency.

This connection between habits and space is described as "Nudge Theory" by two researchers from the University of Chicago and Harvard, who co-wrote a book about making targeted changes in our environment to encourage desired habits. Nudges make the "best" choice the easiest one. A nudge can be as simple as leaving the fruit bowl on the counter and moving the cookie jar into a cupboard, so that when you want a snack, you reach for the healthy food that happens to be in your line of sight, or laying out your exercise clothes before bed, to remind you to hit the gym first thing in the morning.

Nudges are used by retail, public health, planning, business, and other sectors, as well. This type of large-scale nudging may encourage people to take stairs rather than elevators through strategic design, or prompt restroom users to wash their hands by automatically dispensing a towel when the toilet flushes. But nudging can raise ethical questions, such as who gets to decide what habits are "good?" And if nudging isn't grounded in actual research and an understanding of cultural values, it can fail spectacularly. (A poor understanding of pre-existing habits and values likely played a role in the downfall of St. Louis's infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, which included communal kitchens and other spaces at the expense of more functional personal kitchens, in an attempt to encourage community gathering.)

Researcher Charles Duhigg identified the "neurological habit loop," which breaks actions into three components: cue, routine, and reward. The cue starts the automatic behavior; the routine is the behavior itself; and the reward is what our brain gets from the behavior. Because these components are all intertwined, it's much easier to alter a habit or establish a new habit by working from the position of an already established habit —basically, building your nudge on the scaffold of the current habit. For example, do you drink coffee every morning but regularly forget to take vitamins? Put your vitamins next to the coffee pot.

To understand how to build new habits on current habits, you have to know your current habits, as well as which of your habits are working for you, and which aren't. We've talked about "self-quant" before and even encouraged readers to create a DIY survey to reveal which types of work environments cultivate their creativity and productivity. Rather than framing your 2026 goals in terms of fixing "bad" habits, try observing yourself to understand your habits, how they are shaped by your environment, and where they intersect with the habits and preferences of others.

If you wake with the sun, maybe early morning is the perfect time to schedule remote meetings with a coworker across the ocean, who hits their peak in late afternoon. Organize your schedule according to your circadian rhythms while keeping others' rhythms in mind as well. Part of workplace design is the physical environment, but of course, our personal interactions, technological support systems, and temporal choices shape the experience, and in the end, our productivity. At the start of this new year, resolve to know yourself so you can design the space, and hold the time, that best serves yourself and others.

From the archives

PLASTARC kicked off previous years with thoughts on third spaces, active workspaces, our daily commute, and transforming real estate design with AI. In less-recent Januarys, we worked with clients on applying social science to office design and enhancing worker engagement. In January of 2021, we were talking about the lasting impacts of COVID on the workplace and how to be well at work. And before that, when we were all wishing each other a "happy 2017," we were writing about activity-based working and work-life integration.

Need a playlist to keep you motivated as you track your habits and place new ones "next" to old ones? The Center for Advanced Hindsight has you covered. If you're looking for more about building habits, Gretchen Rubin talks about how there isn't necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach on her Good Life Project podcast. Good luck with the 2026 renovations!