Creating Habits Through Habit Stacking
Creating Habits can be easier than you think!
Creating new habits can be difficult. You decide you want to develop a new habit, let’s say you’d like to start meditating for five minutes every day. However, even though you know you want to do it and you know it would be good for you, you keep forgetting to do it. You try setting a phone alarm, but you swipe the alarm off as soon as it goes off without looking at what the alarm was for. You then turn to a meditation app that reminds you to meditate, but part of the goal was to get away from screens.
Then you have a lightbulb moment. You realize you go by a park bench every morning on your way to work. So one day you decide to sit down and meditate there before going to work. Those five minutes of quiet right before work felt so good you decide to do the same thing the next day on your way to work. After a few weeks, you realize you've fulfilled your goal of developing a habit of meditating. Every workday you walk by that bench and stop to meditate before continuing on to the office. A habit has been born, or "stacked", actually.
What is habit stacking?
Habit stacking is creating habits by taking a habit you already have (walking to work) and attaching a new habit to it (stopping on the walk to meditate for five minutes). While I made up the example above, one of my clients used a similar strategy to create his habit of meditation. After twenty years of inconsistent meditation, he is now on his fifteenth month of daily meditation. The secret? He started playing a guided meditation recording every night as he got into bed. Going to bed every night is definitely a habit. It took a little bit of intentionality at first, but attaching a new habit to an old habit clearly worked for him.
Why does habit stacking work so well? Well, creating habits out of thin air is tough. It involves creating safety nets to make sure you remember this new thing and your brain doesn’t switch back to autopilot. But stacking a new habit onto an old habit means there is far less for your brain to remember. It sees the bench, it sits on the bench. You head to bed, you turn on your meditation app. You’ve already created the environment for the habit to happen. With habit stacking, you are already in the environment and the time is chosen for you. There’s greater ease (and thus a greater likelihood) for the habit to occur.
How to Habit Stack
Identify the new habit you would like to put in place.
Examine your habits and patterns. Is there anything you do on a regular basis that you could tie together with this new habit? (examples of things you may already regularly do - make coffee in the morning, b your teeth at night, c home from work or school, g up in the morning, g to bed at night.)
Create reminders. You will most likely have to create reminders to start, but you won’t need them for very long if the habit stacking is working. Clients have used post-its or phone alarms, taped notes to the coffee maker, reminders in shoes. Get creative. You won’t need them for long, just long enough to tie the two behaviors together. Once the brain has stacked the habits together, you shouldn’t need the reminders anymore.
Celebrate your new habit! Celebrating your accomplishments is important. It builds a positive feedback loop in your brain.
I hope you find this helpful. If you have any thoughts or questions about it, please feel free to reach out. If you would like to schedule a FREE 90-minute coaching session, click on the link below.