What is habit stacking and how routine can change your life?

As humans, we naturally resist change and avoid the unknown. Even if it’s potentially good for us! This means that, once we’ve formed a habit, it can be extremely difficult and time-consuming to break or change the habit or routine.

Habit stacking is a relatively new idea, invented to help people create lasting behavioural change. It centres around overcoming this resistance to change, by grouping small activities together to create a routine you link to a habit you already perform every single day. This makes it easier to implement and stick to them. For example, let’s say (or let’s hope at least!) you brush your teeth each morning after breakfast. If you’re habit stacking, and looking to improve your health and wellbeing, you might decide to take your daily vitamins immediately after brushing your teeth each morning, to prevent you forgetting. Then, maybe you want to drink 1 L of water to hydrate your body. Then you might perform a five-minute stretching routine. The process can go on forever, but the aim is that each habit should remind you of the following one, so you’re creating a pattern or routine whereby you find it easy and straight-forward to simply “do” each thing you’d otherwise struggle to implement.

This idea relies on automation and routine, both of which are very popular with your brain. Your brain loves routine, because it allows it to perform actions and processes on autopilot, without requiring much energy or effort or thought. It’s basically a fast-track way to get stuff done. So by stacking little habits to create a routine, you enter autopilot mode, which basically helps you override any resistance to the actions you’re performing. It almost removes any choice you have in the matter, allowing you to get stuff done without the fuss.

By stacking habits, you significantly improve your chances of remembering and sticking to them, by linking them together in a logical, patterned manner. You’re creating shortcuts for your brain, by associating stacks of habits with each other, making behaviour change easier and less overwhelming. Double win!

How do you begin habit stacking?

Before you resist the idea of creating a new routine, it doesn’t have to be a huge or sudden departure from your regular day-to-day activities. In fact, it’s likely to be more effective if it isn’t…

Here’s what we mean… Almost everyone has some semblance of a morning routine, for example. Whether that looks like waking up, grabbing your workout gear and hitting the gym, or whether you’re more of a “snooze for as many times as possible before rolling out of bed, hitting the shower and brushing your teeth”, these are still routines. When you start introducing habit stacking into your life, you want to build on the existing routines you’ve established over time. For example, after you finish your teeth-brushing portion of your routine, you might want to add drinking 1 L of water as a natural follow-on, and maybe you follow that up with taking your morning supplements.

The idea is to devise a routine or plan which is in a logical sequence, so you can easily carry out one task, followed by another, until all your desired habits are ticked off. Each habit is designed to act as a “trigger” or a reminder of the next “step” or habit in your routine, and before long the new habits you’re stacking will become automatic, requiring less effort from you and your brain to carry out daily, and overcoming any resistance you may otherwise have held towards changing things in your daily life. So remember, start small and work your way up when you’re looking to start habit stacking – less is more, at least at the beginning!

Why is routine so helpful? The science behind habit-stacking…

If you want to know how habit stacking works from a scientific perspective, it comes down to the different regions of your brain you’re using to perform these small day-to-day habits and tasks. Initially, when you begin creating a routine or making a change in your life, you’re using the prefrontal cortex region of your brain. This area is responsible for information processing, and requires a significant amount of energy whenever it’s in use.

But if you repeat the same habit-stack for 4-6 weeks, it no longer presents the same surprise or challenge to your brain. Instead, the same actions or processes move to a different part of your brain, the basal ganglia, responsible for automatic, habitual behaviours. And this area of the brain requires a lot less effort or energy. Basically, you’re able to switch into autopilot, making the patterns you’ve established feel natural and simple, and in doing so you give yourself the best chance of creating lasting behavioural change.

And while we often associate the word “routine” with the mundane, boring, standard or repetitive aspects of life, routine can actually be an incredibly powerful tool, helping you change your life and accomplish your goals with less effort required in the process.

Routine not only makes important tasks require less effort, but it also helps you stay consistent, and improves productivity. Think about it – if you have a well-structured routine, and you’re saving your brain effort and energy each day you carry out this routine, you have plenty more mental capacity to dedicate towards your work, your hobbies, or whatever fills you up. You’ll experience less resistance to change and effort, reduced procrastination, and feel far more focused and efficient when your routine is well-established.

We know it takes at least 18 days of consistency to create a new habit, and around 66 days for a habit to become automatic, so be patient and consistent, and observe as your brain patterns change, and your healthy and productive habits finally stick!