How to Use Geo-Fencing to Resist Temptation

This smart behavioral design strategy gives you the power to stay the course when willpower alone fails

Last spring my brother told me he had a problem. He and his wife had innocently bought a package of Legos for their 8-year-old boy and, as toys often do, it came with an app. Thinking that Legos was a company that had their kid’s brain development in mind — and after much begging — they finally relented, downloaded the app, and let their boy start playing.

What happened next can only be described as the all-encompassing, trance-like state that video games are particularly good at creating. (I remember it well from when I was a kid — that bottomless must-get-to-the-next-level feeling.) No matter what tool they used in their vast parenting tool kit, whenever he played this game, it always ended in a major upset. As my brother described it to me, he could just tell that it was hijacking his boy’s brain and dysregulating his emotions in ways that weren’t good for him.

No matter how you feel about video games (and there’s?evidence?that they can be beneficial), to any parent out there, you know that if you’re going to open that door, it has to come with boundaries.

But it’s not just video games. And it’s not just kids. For us, it might be Ben & Jerry’s, Instagram, Netflix, shopping, or a smorgasbord of other things that are instantly gratifying and hard to stop once you start. Short-term rewards are everywhere and when swimming in a sea of dopamine triggers, good boundaries make a big difference.

The problem is we usually set up boundaries all wrong.

All or Nothing…Usually Means All

The most common trap I see when setting up boundaries — whether it’s for ourselves or for our kids — is that we often assume we have to make a binary choice: it’s either all or nothing. Psychologists refer to this as “black or white thinking” and it’s one of the most common thinking traps we fall into. The problem is if you say “never,” what you’re really doing is inviting your brain to obsess about it. Through a series of careful experiments, the late Harvard psychologist Dr. Dan Wegner?showed?that thought suppression doesn’t work. In fact, when we say “never,” we might be unintentionally setting ourselves up for failure.

For example, let’s just say you’re trying to eat less Ben & Jerry’s and you decide a good first step is to expunge any thought of Ben & Jerry’s from your mind — if you catch yourself thinking about it, you’ll snuff it out. Great plan. Except what happens instead is that even though your conscious brain dutifully follows your request to not think about the temptation, your subconscious brain goes into “scanner mode” (think of one of those green radars on a Navy ship circling around looking for other ships in the vicinity and you’ll have the right idea). In other words, your subconscious brain keeps scanning your “mental environment” and asking itself, “Am I thinking about Ben & Jerry’s? How about now? And…um…now?” In the process of scanning for whether or not it’s thinking about Ben and Jerry’s, it, well, keeps thinking about Ben and Jerry’s. Your brain keeps dutifully trying to locate the Ben and Jerry’s battleships — which, ironically, makes you think about Ben and Jerry’s?even more.

This unfortunate feature of our brains is aptly called the?ironic rebound effect. The harder you try to resist the thought, the bigger the thought becomes. And the bigger the thought becomes, the more likely you are to throw your hands up in the air and say, “Forget it! Gimme the Ben & Jerry’s!”

So how do you get around this?

Geo-fencing

As my brother and his wife wrestled with what to do, they came up with a plan: their eight-year-old could play the game, just not in the house. What that meant for my nephew is that he didn’t have a reason to rebel, hate on mom and dad, or otherwise mope about his loss. In fact, he didn’t lose at all. His access just became limited to certain locations — namely outside the house.

In digital marketing, there’s a common tool called “geo-fencing.” What this means is that you can draw an invisible line around a certain area — say, a conference center — and market your product only to people inside that invisible line. So if your company sells comic books and you know a big Comic-Con gathering is happening in your city on a particular weekend, you can target your ads more effectively by only showing them to people who are physically at that conference center on that weekend. You might find that annoying or creepy (or both) but stay with me because if you’ve ever wanted to break a bad habit, it’s worth applying the same logic to creating “invisible boundaries” where certain behaviors are allowed and other behaviors are not.

Behavioral Geo-fencing

What my brother and his wife did with their 8-year-old was create a?behavioral geo-fence:?it’s okay to play this video game, but only in certain locations. Being the wise parents they are, they thought about where he spends most of his time and drew an invisible line around that place (home). While it’s harder to enforce boundaries outside the home, they could just as easily have drawn an invisible line around his school, his friend’s house, or other locations where they knew he might be lured in. In other words, behavioral geo-fencing is infinitely flexible and should be tailored to your unique behavior patterns and possible danger zones. When thinking about where to try out your first behavioral geo-fence, ask yourself, “Where am I most likely to do the behavior I’d like to do less of?” Or, “Where am I during most of my day?”

It also doesn’t have to be the entire house. Maybe you like watching TV in bed but it’s become a little too much and you’d like to get more sleep. Great. You can draw an invisible geo-fence around your bed and say, “No screens while in bed.” (If more sleep is your goal, you may also want to remove the TV from the bedroom. I know — so draconian.) Or maybe you have a thing with smoking in the car. Great. Draw a behavioral geo-fence around your car and say that the rule is, “No smoking in the car.”

My personal favorite is?combining?geo-fences. Just think about the top two or three places where you spend the most time (work/home/car/etc.) or are most likely to do your target behavior. Let’s say you want to cut back on soda. Perfect. With behavioral geo-fencing, you don’t say, “never again,” but instead could tell yourself that you can have it, but just not at home, not at work, and not in the car. That leaves restaurants and few other places — but noticeably, places where you spend much less time (and therefore, are less likely to do the behavior). Another nice boundary with soda is to make a “where I purchase” boundary. So in this case, think of the location(s) you’re most likely to purchase soda — maybe it’s gas stations. Great. Gas stations are now a soda “no buy zone.”

At times, you may find yourself trying to fudge the boundaries, discovering little ways to cheat, and/or making exceptions. No problem. That’s just human nature. But don’t give up — it’s not because the tool doesn’t work. It’s likely that you just need to tweak your setup. For example, if not eating after 8 PM is your goal, it may be that you went too far, too fast, and a slower room-by-room strategy is the key for you (e.g., week 1: no eating in the kitchen after 8 PM, week 2: no eating in the kitchen + bedroom after 8 PM, week 3: no eating in the kitchen + bedroom + family room after 8 PM, week 4: no eating in the entire house after 8 PM.) Or it might be that the boundary isn’t clear enough. Thinking back to the soda, you may think to yourself, “Hmmm…what about the gas station in the parking lot of the grocery store — I think that’s…technically?owned?by the grocery store…ummm, yes — gimme that soda!” Again, this requires tweaking, clarifying, and recommitting. Maybe gas stations aren’t enough and it needs to include gas stations + grocery stores. But then you think, “Hmmm…Walgreens…isn’t that?technically?a pharmacy?” No problem. Tweak again. Maybe at that point, you need to change it to, “I only drink soda at restaurants,” which finally clarifies that all other locations have a geo-fence around them. For you, this might be the perfect solution because you don’t eat at restaurants more than a couple of times per month. But for someone else who eats out a few times per week, it may be that restaurants themselves are the best place to draw their invisible geo-fence. The point is that behavioral geo-fencing should always be highly personalized.

As you can see, it’s important to approach this tool flexibly — to try different things out until you settle into a behavioral geo-fence that works for you. This often takes tweaking…and a little patience. But if you can persist through the inevitable setbacks, you’ll be shocked at how well it works.

The beauty of behavioral geo-fencing is that it avoids the trap of the ironic rebound effect (obsessing even more about the forbidden thing). When your brain still knows it can have it — but that it just has to work a little harder to get it — it will settle down, stop obsessing, and let you go on with your day. But?the real surprise is that you’ll dramatically slow or even stop behaviors that have bedeviled you for years. Brains hate being told no, but what they hate even more is spending energy. Once you put a little friction between you and your bad habit, you’ll find your brain simply can’t be bothered and your bad habit will slowly start to evaporate. Which brings me back to my nephew.

I talked with my brother a while back just to check in on how it’s going. “Like a dream,” he said. Not only did my nephew?not?resist the new behavioral geo-fence, my brother will occasionally go to the library with him just to play this one game. So to my nephew, it’s become even better — his favorite video game + his favorite person, all wrapped up in the same sweet life treat. A treat he gets to enjoy…every so often.

Life treats — whether it’s a Netflix series, a tub of ice cream, or a video game throw down with dad — aren’t bad. They often give life its sparkle. The good news is that with behavioral geo-fencing, we stop the problem of overindulging while still being able to enjoy them…every so often.

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Also published on the?Brain by Design blog?and?in?Better Humans?on December 1, 2022.