First step in change – Choice · Part 1 of the C.H.A.N.G.E. series, Behaviour Lab
Click play if you prefer to listen (realistic AI voice).
Most people I know, myself included, want to change something — how we behave, how we manage stress, how we work, how we show up. We want changes we know will make us happier … healthier.
But what is the first step in change? If you are like me, you might be sick and tired of chasing motivation strategies, goal-setting frameworks, and morning routines that don’t work. Motivation fades and it’s difficult to stick with frameworks that do not account for your real life circumstances. Starting with great excitement, maybe at the beginning of a new year, a new month, or even a new week, and planning to overhaul my entire life in one go never helped me change anything. It only led me into a loop of starting, failing, and feeling worthless.
If you’ve ever started a new week with a list of things you were finally going to fix sleep, diet, exercise, stress, screen time … all of it, you already know the story. Because you were working against your own brain. As I was, too.
This post is about the first step in change within the C.H.A.N.G.E. method: C, which stands for Choice. More specifically, choosing just one area of your life you’re going to focus on right now. It sounds almost too simple. But it’s not.
The problem with "I need to change everything"
Those of us who keep wanting to change unhelpful habits but are burned out from trying, share one thing in common: we are not short on awareness. We know what isn’t working. Often, we know it in exhausting detail. The problem, however, is the weight of too many things that all feel equally urgent. Too many demands and not enough mental bandwidth.
Every behaviour we want to adopt or stop requires cognitive effort. This, when we already have a full plate.
Psychologists call this decision fatigue. And the research behind it is sobering. For example, a widely cited study of Israeli parole judges found that prisoners were far more likely to receive a favourable ruling early in the day or after a break, when the judges’ decision-making resources were fresh. As the day wore on and decisions accumulated, the judges defaulted increasingly to the easier, lower-effort choice: denial.
The same mechanism applies to us when we face a long list of changes we “should” make. The mental cost of choosing and then following through will be too high to sustain. So, we revert to the automatic habits we want to stop.
Why your brain resists change in the first place
Habits, whether we consider them good or bad, exist because the brain is an efficiency machine. Repeated behaviours become automatic, moving from the prefrontal cortex (deliberate, effortful thinking) into the basal ganglia (automatic, low-energy routines). This is useful when you’re driving a familiar route. It’s less useful when you’re trying to stop reaching for your phone every time you feel uncomfortable.
Disrupting an existing habit requires sustained cognitive effort, which is metabolically expensive. The brain will resist spending that energy on one habit, and it will especially resist spending “unnecessary” energy on multiple fronts simultaneously. This is why trying to overhaul your sleep, food, movement, and stress response in the same week rarely works. This is a resource-allocation problem, not a lack-of-willpower problem.
If everything feels like it needs to change, that’s your signal to start smaller, not bigger.
The first step in change is rarely a full list of what you want to be different. More often, it’s choosing where to begin.
Research on behaviour change consistently supports what James Clear popularised in Atomic Habits, though the underlying science goes back decades. BJ Fogg’s work at Stanford on tiny habits, and Charles Duhigg’s research on habit loops, both converge on the same finding: small, specific behaviours, repeated in context, are how lasting change actually happens.
The first step in change should be a keystone habit
One of the most useful ideas in the behaviour change literature is the keystone habit. A single change that, once embedded, tends to create positive ripple effects in other areas of life almost automatically. Duhigg’s research found that people who started exercising regularly, for instance, often began eating better and sleeping more consistently, even without specifically trying to change those things.
This reframes what “choosing one thing” actually means. You’re choosing a lever. The one change that’s most likely to make the others easier later. You’re not abandoning the rest of your list. You’re giving it the focused attention it needs to actually take root. And it doesn’t even matter that much what that thing is.
How to choose your focus (when everything feels urgent)
This is where it gets personal, and where most frameworks fall short. “Just pick one” is good advice with no instructions. But it needs to be meaningful to you, under your control, and doable when your life is chaotic, not only when it’s calm. Here are a few questions worth answering before you chose:
- What's costing you the most right now?
Don’t pick what you think you should fix first, or what looks best to others. Which area of your life — sleep, energy, movement, relationships, work, nutrition — is draining you most? That drain is data. It shows where your biggest return likely is.
- What do you have even a small amount of control over?
Motivation research, particularly self-determination theory developed by Ryan and Deci, identifies autonomy as one of the core psychological needs for sustained behaviour change. If a potential focus area feels entirely outside your control (a difficult relationship, a job situation you can’t yet change), starting there is likely to be demoralising rather than empowering. Choose something where your actions can genuinely make a difference.
- What would it make everything slightly easier?
Think of this as the keystone question. If you slept better, would you start your day with more energy? If you moved your body a little more, would your stress response improve? If you reduced unnecessary screen time, would your mind feel less cluttered and have room for new ideas? There’s no single right answer, but you can find one area where even small changes would give you a little more of the resource you need to work on everything else. Just focus on the area that makes sense for you.
For example, when I wanted to eat healthier and had a great meal plan, it didn’t help that I was staying up until 2:00 AM, working or maybe just procrastinating to go to sleep, because that’s when I could not resist the temptation to eat sweet snacks (entire packets of them). It made more sense to focus on creating conditions to go to sleep earlier.
The difference between a focus area and a goal
One clarification worth making is that choosing a focus area is not the same as setting a goal. “I want to lose 10kg” is a goal. “I want to improve my relationship with food and my body” is a focus area. The workbook that accompanies this series will help you turn your focus area into a specific, repeatable action. But that comes later. For now, your only task is to pick one area of your life to focus on.
The reason this distinction matters is that focus areas are flexible in a way that goals often aren’t. Goals can fail, which triggers shame and abandonment. Focus areas simply evolve. They give you direction without locking you into a pass/fail binary.
A note for people who’ve tried this before
If you’ve been through cycles of change attempts (the January commitment, the post-holiday reset, the “this time it’s different” conversation with yourself) you might feel some resistance to even this first step. Something like: what’s the point of choosing, when I already know I won’t follow through?
That voice is worth acknowledging, not fighting. It is only evidence that previous approaches weren’t designed for how your life actually works. It doesn’t say anything about what you will do in the future. The aim of this method is to design a process that helps you find out what works for your actual life.
And that process starts with one choice, not a perfect plan for some ideal circumstances. Just: where do I want to begin?
If you want to put this into practice, the C.H.A.N.G.E. Workbook walks you through choosing your focus area and turning it into an experiment that you can test, tweak, and repeat until you find out what works. You can check it out HERE!
Next in the series: H (Heartfelt Why), where we look at why surface-level motivation tends to fade, and what the research says about the kind of “why” that actually sustains change over time.
References & further reading:
- Danziger et al. (2011), “Extraneous factors in judicial decisions,” PNAS.
- Duhigg, C. (2012), The Power of Habit.
- Fogg, B.J. (2019), Tiny Habits.
- Ryan, R.M. & Deci, E.L. (2000), “Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation,” American Psychologist.