Habit stacking: a great tool to adopt new habits

For habits that stay

Having a new resolution is like buying a plant and sticking to the resolution is like keeping the plant alive and healthy. I believe if you can be a good plant parent, you can handle a lot of things in life.

It is because you start following a routine, you start caring and you start acting sensibly. So, next time you see someone watering their lush green garden, look at them with respect in your eyes 😃.

Everyone thinks of adopting a new and beneficial habit after an overwhelming realisation phase. Someone thinks of leaving junk food while suffering from food poisoning, someone thinks of walking 10,000 steps daily after staring at their obese stomach in the mirror, someone else thinks of adding something interesting to their copy repository every evening while struggling to finalise a blog title.

What happens next?

The excitement of achieving the goal makes us start with pretty high energy levels. It lasts for two and a half days for me to be precise. It can be three or four or five days for some people. But on the sixth day, we find ourselves falling back to the earlier routine of not having the new habit anywhere in our day.

I was struggling to fit a 10-minute morning yoga schedule into my day. I used to do yoga for 30-minutes on some days and used to miss doing it completely on other days. I was not even close to doing it daily. During this time, I was reading the book ‘Atomic Habits’ (Chapter 5 : The best way to start a new habit), where I discovered the concept of ‘habit stacking’.

Habit stacking is a tool that helps us adopt new habits that become an inevitable part of our lifestyle. You need to observe yourself for a few days (a week would be good amount of time) and note down all your habits that are already a part of your set routine. Which means everything that you do regularly without a nudge. It can be as trivial as brushing your teeth, folding your blanket, etc.

Once you have made a list of all your habits, try fitting a new habit you want to adopt in between any two consecutive already set habits.

Let us suppose you want to do yoga every morning. In your list of habits, you notice that you wake up and instantly brush your teeth followed by making your bed. You can decide that you will do yoga right after brushing your teeth and you won’t make your bed unless you do yoga.

What did you do here? You gave your mind very specific cues. Brushing your teeth and making your bed are two prominent cues for your mind to remind you of doing yoga.

Try stacking a habit you have always wanted to adopt for a longer period of time using this extremely helpful tool because good habit is a magical connection to a great life.