I’ve been using habit stacking for years, and I find it extremely successful in ensuring consistency whilst I work on adding a new, positive habit to my daily, weekly or even monthly routine. Today, I’m sharing some definitions of the terms habit, a quick introduction to habit stacking, plus explaining why habit stacking is so helpful, and, of course, providing a few examples of the technique in action within my own life.
When I Googled ‘habit definition’ and checked the items related to the noun (as oppose to the traditional item of religious clothing worn by nuns!), I came across a number of different examples and thought it would be pertinent to share some of them here:
Cambridge Dictionary: something that you do often and regularly, sometimes without knowing you are doing it
Oxford Languages Dictionary: a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up
Merriam-Webster Dictionary: an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary
Collins Dictionary: established custom, usual practice, etc
So, the above explain what a habit is, but what’s habit stacking?
There have been a whole host of non-fiction books on the art of habit stacking but the idea was originally coined by James Clear in his best selling book Atomic Habits. In brief, it’s the practice of attaching a new action that you want to become a regular habit, to one or more habits which are already deeply ingrained in your current daily life. The idea is that the old and well-established habit will provide a cue for performing the new action which you want to add to your current number of habits. So, for example, if you wanted to start flossing your teeth each evening, you could attach this action to your nightly routine of brushing your teeth, maybe by getting the floss out when you pick up your toothpaste and brush from wherever they reside in your bathroom, and then flossing your teeth prior to brushing them. Over time, you would start to automatically get your floss out at the same time as your other teeth cleaning tools and the habit of flossing would (hopefully) be instilled.
The habit you choose to stack your new action with would depend on such things as how often you want to engage in the action (daily, weekly, monthly etc.), when you want to do it (morning, evening, night time etc), where you want to perform it (in bed, in the car, on the sofa whilst watching TV, in the kitchen whilst waiting for the kettle to boil etc.) and, of course, when and where would be most appropriate. You should also consider if there’s time available before or after the established habit in your routine as this will of course, increase the likelihood of success in habit formation.
How I’m currently using habit stacking
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before on here, but back in September 2024, I headed for the coast with my DSLR camera and long range lens and walked along the beach at low tide to the rock pools to take lots of photos of wading birds. To cut a long story short, I got some lovely bird photos but heading back along the sand, I slipped over, presumably on a large smooth stone and fell forward. As I had my camera, I wrapped my arm around it and twisted, landing on my flattened right wrist. My wrist has now been very painful for months and I recently sought advice from an MSK (Musculoskeletal) specialist. The clinician gave me some physio exercises and advised me to do them each day so I’ve been deciding when to fit them in and how I can be sure I do them regularly. As this is something that needs to become a habit that I do daily, I’ve used habit stacking to increase the likelihood of this being achieved.
I decided that I would like to do the given exercises morning and evening and I’ve also thought about how many reps I want to do each time. For the morning repetitions, I decided to stack the exercises with my The Five Minute Journal writing habit. So now, I fill in the day time prompts in my journal and then I remove my book from the arm of the sofa and do my exercises. Finishing my writing reminds me that it’s time to do my physio session for my wrist and so far, I’ve consistently remembered to do them. The second set of exercises is performed straight after filling in my journal evening prompts. This routine is proving to be more difficult to establish as I’m tired and ready for bed! However, as I perform the first set consistently in the morning after journalling in the same book, I’m hoping that it will be enough of a prompt eventually. The other thought I’ve had is that doing them once a day is better than not doing them at all so I’d be happy if I just developed the morning habit.
The second new action that I’ve just started to implement is completing a double page journalling spread as a summary of what happened each month throughout the year. This project, which I hope to do for the whole of 2025, but, if I enjoy it, continue with beyond this year, involves collecting appropriate resources throughout the month for my pages and working on the spread in a single session at the beginning of the next month. I only started the journal in January so it’s definitely not a habit yet, but I don’t want to get behind with creating the spreads or collecting ideas and bits and pieces for them.
I chose to do this monthly journalling project as I was trying to keep up with journalling about all kinds of experiences such as purchases, days out, holidays, nights out etc and it was becoming very overwhelming and half of my spreads were staying barely completed or barely started as their creation was far too time consuming. Doing two pages each month will be much more manageable, and, if there’s anything I want to do a little more documenting on, I can still do this whilst only creating between 2 and 4 pages a month. This is my reason why I want to instill this particular habit and you can probably see how it would help me to document my life but at the same time, not go overboard with the journalling and accompanying spreads.
So, with that all said, how am I going to make collecting resources and doing the actual journalling a habit? Here’s my initial ideas for habit formation:
- closely follow the YouTube channel and Patreon pages of KelseyLeigh @ MyAbidingJournal who introduced me to the idea of monthly summary journalling pages.
- make notes of effective ways she’s found of collecting materials and memories
- schedule times for collection of resources and ideas
- schedule a time each month for creating and finishing my pages
For this, I needed to attach the new actions to existing habits, one which occurs weekly and one which already occurs monthly. I decided that the collection of resources and ideas to include would take place on a Sunday evening when I set up next week in my bullet journal. This typically happens around 7pm although if something prevents me doing it at this time, I always schedule time early Monday morning to fill in my double page spread. As this process could potentially take up to an hour – half an hour for filling in my weekly and half an hour to gather supplies and record ideas, I would need to time block the event to be sure it gets done. However, because filling out my planner is essential for me to know what’s happening that week, I believe that stacking my journalling prep session would be a good fit.
With regard to me creating my journal spread, I have stacked this with my habit of filling in the evaluation of my monthly goals. Realistically, the process for both can take me up to 3 hours and again I would need to make use of time blocking and section off a big enough section of time to ensure everything got finished. Obviously, this requires a big commitment but as it’s something I really want to establish as a habit, I’m hoping that the filled in pages with look so great that I’ll be so excited by the finished product that I’ll want to do it time and time again!
This brings me on to another question which you may have…
Does habit stacking always work?
In my opinion, habit stacking can be really useful in helping you to develop a routine for performing a desired action or routine but you still need to apply motivation and discipline if it is to work. Going back to my wrist exercises, if I didn’t believe that doing them was going to help me get better by improving my muscle strength, I might consider it a waste of time doing them. In that case, I would be unlikely to keep up with the habit, even if I did stack it with my morning and evening journalling work. Also, if I didn’t make time in my schedule to perform the exercises, I could still end up skipping them or only doing them on less busy days which wouldn’t help me to develop better strength and less pain in my wrist.
Final words…
In summary, habit stacking, the process of attaching a new action that you hope to make a habit to one or more of your long established habits, is a great way of ensuring consistency in developing new routines. However, you still need to have the motivation and disciple to perform the action, so it’s worth spending some time thinking about how this brand new intention and would be habit would make a difference to your life or your day. Personally, I think doing a little bit of reflective journalling on the subject can be a really useful way of establishing your why or reasons for.
I hope you’ve found today’s Monday Matters useful and it has helped you see how using habit stacking would fit into your life when creating new habits. Let me know in the comments one thing you are working on at the moment and which current habit you plan on attaching it to so you can successfully embed it into your routines, or if you’re struggling to develop a habit, why not reply to today’s blog post and hopefully either myself or one of my readers can offer some useful advice.
If you particularly enjoyed today’s topic, you might be interested in reading one of my previous posts on forming positive habits.
Keeping it creative 