A few years ago, I was determined to start a meditation practice. I set a recurring morning reminder. I downloaded an app. But each time my calendar alert pinged at the designated time, I found myself silencing the alarm and resolving to do it later. I just couldn’t commit.
Beginning an exercise routine was a different experience. I likewise set myself up for success — booking appointments with my trainer, programming my coffee machine, and laying out my workout clothes the night before. The difference, however, was that breaking a sweat delivered immediate results in the form of mood-boosting endorphins. Once I started, I was hooked. Exercising became effortless (at least getting myself to the gym was effortless). With meditation, I knew there were benefits, but I couldn’t feel them right away. It just wasn’t clicking into my established routine.
Then, I discovered “habit stacking,” a strategy for building new habits in your life. Everything changed. Instead of swimming against the current, this approach is like grabbing your board and riding the wave. Whether trying to start a positive habit or eliminate one that drains your health, energy, or productivity, I highly recommend trying habit stacking. Here’s why.
Leveraging existing neural connections
Coined by Atomic Habits author James Clear, habit stacking means identifying a current habit you already do each day and then stacking a new behavior on top. As Clear explains, the newborn brain is like a blank canvas, filled with neurons that are ripe for connecting. As we age, a process called “synaptic pruning” occurs, whereby we build strong connections between certain neurons (which is how habits form) and prune away the rest — strengthening the existing connections, but also, losing a lot of those neurons. According to research, adults have about 41% fewer neurons than newborns. As it turns out, the saying “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is backed by neuroscience.
Habit stacking, however, leverages those existing connections and builds new behaviors into them. Rather than reinventing the wheel, you’re merely adding a new spoke to it.
The key is mapping out your current habits and identifying where you can seamlessly incorporate new ones.
Habit stacking in practice
Habit stacking begins with a cue. Like workflows, they’re driven by triggers. For example, when your alarm goes off, you get up and brush your teeth. The alarm is the cue. In this case, you could add “meditate for one minute” as soon as you finish brushing your teeth.
The more I read about habit stacking, the more it reminded me of the kind of workflows I already have in my workday. In short, workflows are a series of interconnected steps that lead to a given result. Be it a workflow for creating a marketing campaign or replying to customer service tickets, it all begins with a trigger.
For example, imagine you’re an HR specialist responsible for ensuring the company’s team leads submit performance reviews every three months. The trigger would be your calendar alert on the first days of March, June, September, and December. This would put in motion the subsequent workflow steps: send a reminder email to each team lead including a review form template; send a second reminder email; the team leads complete and submit the forms, etc.
Mapping out my workflows helps me to stay productive and keep my momentum because the process does some of the cognitive lifting for me. I’m never deciding whether to start or what to do next — I simply follow the mapped-out sequence. In the same vein, habit stacking works because it does the cognitive work for you. You’re not deliberating whether or not to [insert healthy habit]. The trigger goes off and you begin. But unlike workflows, habit stacking is divorced from dates and times; the trigger is a habit, not an alert.
It’s worth taking some time to map out your current habits, identify the triggers, and decide which new habits you can factor in where. As Clear notes, once you have mastered the basic structure (alarm > brush teeth > meditate), you can create larger stacks by chaining small habits together.
Discouraging negative habits
You can also use habit stacking to discourage negative habits. For example, if you tend to scroll social media as soon as you take your seat on the train during your commute, you can capitalize on this trigger/habit sequence to insert another behavior into the mix, like listening to a meditation app. As neuroscientist Andrew Huberman explains, this creates a sequence that links the bad habit to a good one.
“This temporal mismatch helps dismantle the neural circuits associated with the bad behavior and aids in recognizing when you’re moving towards that bad habit again.”
So when I sit on the train, I might be more conscious of my urge to take out my phone and scroll. I can still take out my phone, but instead of scrolling, I put in my earbuds, fire up a meditation app, close my eyes, and use that time to clear my mind.
Final thoughts
Being a creature of routine can be very positive. Routines take the mental gymnastics out of everyday decisions, decrease unnecessary cognitive fatigue, and leave us with more energy for tackling the big stuff — projects and tasks that energize and engage us. But as we age and routines crystallize, adding new behaviors to the mix can be surprisingly challenging.
Habit stacking is an efficient way to build new habits by tapping into our existing neural networks — without summoning all of our willpower.
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