Strategies for making your habits stick: Habit stacking
We all have things we do as part of our daily routine. Think for a second about the things you do from the time your alarm clock goes off, I bet there is a routine naturally built in.
For me, it looks like this almost everyday:
Make the bed
Go to the bathroom to do all the bathroom things
Get my clothes on (selected the night before)
Put shoes on
Put collars and leashes on the dogs and head out for a walk
Feed the dogs
I’m sure that as you think through it, you’ll find that you have certain parts of you day that fall into almost a thoughtless routine. This is where the strategy of habit stacking comes in:
Habit stacking is strategically incorporating a new habit into a part of your day when are already doing an existing habit. This works great especially in the case where
You want to do something everyday
You keep forgetting to do a certain habit
The new habit fits naturally in conjunction with something you are already doing.
For example: you want to be more cognisant of your budget and you already check your email every morning when you wake up. You would simply stack the habit of checking your bank balance before you check your email. Another strategy would be to have your bank send you a daily bank balance email so you can check your balance whilst checking your email
Another example: You want to work on your dog’s obedience training, you could stack some basic commands like sit, place, down, come, etc into the 5 minutes before you feed your dog. He or she will be even more enthusiastic when the reward is dinner.
The best way to get started with this strategy is to spend a few days thinking through the habits you already do naturally, once you have a good awareness of the way you naturally do your existing habits you can think strategically about where to place the new habit you want to incorporate.
