You’re on the Tube. The train lurches. Your hand is already on the pole before you’ve “decided” to grab it.

Nobody would call that a decision. But here’s the thing: the exact same neural machinery is running when you pick up your phone instead of your book. When you open the fridge instead of your laptop. When you check your email instead of starting that thing you’ve been putting off for three days. Your brain prepared the action before you were aware of choosing it, and the one with the most environmental support just sort of happened.

And because I’m constantly complaining about how no one uses neuroscience properly, I want to explain why. Unlike those other things, if you understand how the brain actually selects actions, the whole business of building better habits and being more disciplined starts looking very different. More like something akin to engineering than willpower.

¶What everyone already knows (sort of)

By now, most people have encountered choice architecture. Thaler and Sunstein, and the broader nudge movement, showed that how options are arranged changes what people pick. Put the salad before the chips in the cafeteria and people eat more salad. Make organ donation opt-out instead of opt-in and donation rates skyrocket. Put your phone in another room and you’ll check it less. You’ve probably heard this. Everyone’s heard this in one form or another. It launched a thousand TED talks and roughly as many corporate consultancies, not to mention some government institutions.

The trouble is that nudging has turned out to be remarkably fragile. Effects don’t replicate well. Even the ones that do rarely produce lasting change. And when a nudge fails, the framework isn’t really very clear about why, because the mechanism underneath is left unspecified. You’re sort of just rearranging inputs to a black box. When the outputs don’t change, you don’t really know what to adjust. Just “try a different nudge.” And when that one doesn’t work either, you’re back to the old standby: try harder, be more disciplined, just decide better. It’s the problem with all behavioural economy.

So let’s open the box.

¶Affordances

In the 1970s, the psychologist James Gibson noticed something important about how animals interact with environments. The environment doesn’t just contain objects. It contains invitations to act. A handle invites pulling. A flat surface invites setting things down. A chair invites sitting. A path invites walking. Gibson called these affordances—opportunities for action that exist in the relationship between an animal and its environment.¹

This is a subtle but critical shift. An affordance isn’t a property of the object (a chair isn’t inherently “for sitting” if you’re a cat) and it isn’t a property of the person (you can’t sit on something that isn’t there). It’s relational—it lives in the fit between what the environment offers and what you can do. Which immediately tells you something more useful than “the environment matters.” It tells you what about the environment matters: the action invitations it’s broadcasting at you.

But the really interesting bit came later. In the early 2000s, the neuroscientist Paul Cisek took Gibson’s idea and went looking for the neural machinery underneath it. What he reckons is that your brain doesn’t choose actions the way most people imagine.²

I think, for the most part, most people assume that we first perceive the world, we then think about it, then we decide, then we act. Or, else, we act instinctively—whatever the most learned and automatic response is to what we’ve been presented.

Cisek didn’t quite find either of these things. He found is that your premotor and parietal cortex—the bits that plan and execute movement—actually specify multiple action plans at the same time. Every relevant affordance in your environment is activating a potential action right now, in parallel. These plans then compete, and the one that wins is the one with the most support from four sources:

1. Salience. How obvious is the option? How prominent, how close to hand? The pole on the Tube wins partly because it’s right there. Your phone wins partly because it’s on the desk, glowing.
2. Practice. How well-worn is the neural pathway? You’ve grabbed pole-shaped objects thousands of times. You’ve checked your phone tens of thousands of times. Well-rehearsed action sequences fire faster, because the pathway is stronger. Simple as that.
3. Goals. What are you currently trying to do? Your prefrontal cortex biases the competition from above, giving an edge to actions that serve your current aims. But if your goals are vague or absent, this bias is weak, and the competition defaults to whatever’s most salient and practised.
4. Urgency. How much time pressure are you under? When urgency spikes, the competition collapses. The field narrows to the one or two strongest candidates and everything else gets suppressed. This is why you revert to old habits under stress—only the most salient and practised actions survive.³

Go back to the Tube. The pole is salient (right there), practised (thousands of times), goal-relevant (don’t eat shit), and urgent (the lurching is unpleasant). You’re not exactly doing the most practiced thing, but you’re also not really deliberating here. It’s a competition that was won before you even registered it.

Or, you know, I’m sitting at my desk and my phone is sitting to my right. It’s salient (visible, keeps lighting up with notification), it’s practised (I’ve checked it ten thousand times), and my goals are vague enough that the top-down bias isn’t doing much work. The book across the room? Low salience, less practised, competing against a much stronger candidate. It never had a chance. And I’ll interpret the result as a failure of willpower, because it felt like I chose the phone. But I didn’t choose the phone. The phone won the competition. These aren’t really the same thing.

Incidentally, I have, since starting this segment, checked my phone twice. I don’t remember deciding to either time. Knowing the mechanism does not, it turns out, exempt you from it.

¶What to do about it

This is another example of brain science being useful. If some chunk of behaviour is the output of a competition between action plans, and the competition is biased by salience, practice, goals, and urgency, then you have four points of intervention. None of them require willpower, because you’re not trying to override the competition. You’re rigging it.

I find this unreasonably satisfying. Years of being told to try harder, be more disciplined, develop better habits—and the actual neuroscience says: nup, just move the furniture. Much more my speed.

Change what’s salient. This is what “phone in another room” is actually doing—removing a competitor from the race entirely. If the affordance isn’t present, the action plan doesn’t get specified. It can’t win a competition it isn’t in. But it goes beyond phones. Look at what your environment is currently inviting you to do. What’s visible, what’s within reach, what’s the first thing you see when you sit down? Start by arranging the competitors.

Build practice. The most rehearsed action plan is going to win by default, because the pathway is faster and stronger. This is why habits are hard to break with willpower—you’re trying to override a well-worn pathway with a conscious intention, and the pathway fires first. But it’s also why building new habits works. Every repetition makes the new action plan a little more competitive. You’re not changing who you are. You’re changing which pathway fires fastest.

Pre-load your goals. If you walk into the kitchen without knowing what you’re there for, the most salient affordance wins—probably the fridge. If you walk in having already decided—“I’m making coffee, then back to the desk”—the goal biases the competition before the environment gets its vote.⁴

Manage urgency. Under time pressure, the competition collapses to the strongest candidates. If you haven’t practised the right action enough, it won’t survive. This is why knowing the right thing to do and doing it under pressure are completely different skills. The action plan has to be rehearsed enough to survive when the field narrows. But it’s also why managing your arousal—sleep, rest, removing unnecessary time pressure—is more important than people think. You’re keeping the competition open long enough for weaker but better candidates to have a shot.⁵

Same machine, four levers.

¶Outro

Choice architecture tells you to rearrange the options. Affordance competition tells you why that works—and, more importantly, what to do when it doesn’t. The environment is specifying action plans in your motor cortex before you’ve consciously registered a “choice.” The feeling of choosing is mostly the feeling of one plan winning.

You can’t willpower your way past a stronger competitor. But you can change who’s competing.