What does it mean that environmental removal?

Remove cues and triggers for unwanted behaviors from your environment.

Example: A marketing manager spends three hours every evening scrolling news sites despite resolving each morning to stop. She has identified the function (escape from the unstructured anxiety of evenings alone) and designed a replacement behavior (calling a friend or working on a puzzle). But the replacement never fires because the old behavior fires first. She comes home, drops her bag on the couch, sits down, and reaches for the laptop already open on the coffee table — browser loaded with her six most-visited news sites. The cue-to-behavior chain completes before she remembers her plan. She closes the laptop and moves it to a shelf in the bedroom closet. She changes her browser homepage to a blank page. She cancels the news aggregator app on her phone. She places a puzzle box on the coffee table where the laptop used to sit. The next evening, she comes home, drops her bag, sits down, and her hand reaches for — the puzzle box. The replacement behavior fires for the first time because the environmental cue for the old behavior no longer exists.

Try this: Conduct a cue audit for one unwanted behavior you are trying to extinguish. Over the next three days, every time the behavior occurs or you feel the urge to perform it, immediately note three things: the physical location you are in, the objects you can see or touch that are associated with the behavior, and the device or tool that enables the behavior. After three days, review your notes and identify the three most frequent environmental cues. For each cue, design a specific removal or modification: relocate the object, change the digital setting, or alter the physical arrangement. Implement all three changes on the same day and observe over the following week whether the urge frequency decreases. Record both urge count and behavior count daily — you should see urge count drop first, followed by behavior count.