Making Habit Stacking Work For You
Habit stacking happens when a habit becomes attached to another. For example, you get home from work and take off your shoes every day. You then make a habit of always putting your walking shoes on directly after and walking around the block for exercise. You’ve stacked these habits together. Habit stacking is useful because it makes forming a new habit easier. Habits are formed when, after time and repetition, your brain associates a certain trigger with behavior and a reward. Forming a completely new habit takes more time and energy than using a current habit to stack onto.
To stack a new desired behavior onto an existing one, first, make sure the two actions make sense and are feasible working together. Let’s say you’d like to start a habit of meal planning for the week. You have a habit of eating your lunch at your desk every day. You could stack the meal planning with your lunch break habit. These two actions work well together because you’re already sitting at a desk; you have the time to research recipes and to write them down.
Habit stacking works best when you start small and think of the behaviors as one habit. This way, you are more likely to be able to carry out the tasks without feeling overwhelmed. If they are viewed as one habit, you won’t have to remind yourself to do more than one thing and you’ll be more likely to succeed.
Another tip for stacking habits is to hook the habits to a trigger. This will help solidify the habits in your brain. Triggers can be any feeling or action really. Take your alarm clock for example. It rings in the morning to wake you up for work. Its ring triggers you to get up, make coffee, take a shower, etc. The actions you take after the alarm clock rings can be whatever you choose to make a habit of. If you want to start meditating for example, that action would stack well into your morning routine.
Habit stacking is an efficient way to start up a new good habit. When you start small, build onto a habit that exists already and view them as one action, hooking a new habit onto an existing one is faster and easier than starting a new habit altogether.
Write It Down - Why It’s Important To Put Your Plan For New Habits Into Writing
When attempting to change your current habits or start a new habit, writing down your intentions is an integral part of the process. Writing down your goals can be done in several ways. Use whatever method makes you most comfortable, whether it’s journaling, making a list, sticky notes, or by using a vision board, it’s up to you. When you are more comfortable, you are more likely to follow through. However you decide to record your goals for yourself, make sure your writings are placed somewhere that can be easily seen by you. Writing down and rereading your desired habits will help ensure success in achieving your goals in a couple of ways.
When you write your goals down, it helps you remember to focus on them frequently, especially when you read over them regularly. When you are able to put them out as a reminder, that will help you stay focused too. Try a vision board that hangs in your bedroom, sticky notes on the fridge or a note in your car that you will easily see and reread it. Even if you're not consciously rereading them, simply seeing them written down will remind your brain of what you’ve written.
Writing down your plans for a new habit also helps encode the idea in your brain. Encoding is a brain process that allows an idea to be stored and recalled by long-term memory. If you’ve written your ideas down, your brain has a better chance of storing them in your long-term memory, giving you a better chance of long-term success and the ability to follow through.
Personal accountability is another reason why putting your plans into writing is important. When you write your goals down on paper, it’s almost like a promise to yourself. You are more likely to adhere to your plans when you’ve put them in writing. You are also more likely to feel motivated and committed to making the changes you’ve set for yourself.
When your goals are clearly written and defined, it becomes easier to eliminate distractions. Distractions from your goal are best dealt with when planned for. Writing down your anticipated distractions and pitfalls with a plan to fight them, will help you stay on track also.
Although it takes a little extra time, writing down your goals has many benefits. It is an important part of goal setting and habit formation that will help you stay focused and give you a leg up achieving what you want.
Accountability Is The Key For Long Term Success
Accountability is the act of taking responsibility for your own actions and results; results are the consequences of the actions. Being accountable for your own actions and the consequences that come along with them will ultimately empower you to make decisions that will produce the results you want. Simply put, when you are personally accountable, you are honest with yourself, therefore increasing your ability for succeed with your goals long-term. Staying accountable will help you focus, stay motivated and help keep you from slipping. There are some tricks that will help you achieve accountability for your new habits and will help them stick long-term.
Start with smaller, mini-goals. Breaking down your goal into smaller, achievable steps will help you feel less overwhelmed, therefore produce more success. Celebrating these small successes along the way will give you more confidence and motivation. Hold yourself accountable during the process and you will find yourself more productive and ready to conquer your goal.
Accountability is made easier with a partner. An accountability partner is someone you’ve opened up to about your desired new habit or goal and is willing to help you through the process. Ideally, your partner should be committed and willing to give you unbiased feedback. Also, when you are responsible to answer someone else for your actions, you are more likely to stay on track to avoid having to tell your partner you didn’t hold up your end of the deal.
Self-examination is the study of your own behavior and actions. This skill is very important when it comes to long-term success with the new habit you want to form. Regularly reread what you’ve written about your goals. Think about what’s working and not working for you and be willing to adjust your behaviors accordingly. Although your goal will remain the same, your plans on how to achieve it may change depending on your experiences during the process. Think about what your stumbling blocks have been and make plans to overcome future pitfalls by thinking of solutions and how to put them to use.
Forming a new habit is not necessarily a short process. You must be willing to hold yourself accountable, be patient and flexible along the way. If you’re committed and follow through with your plans, you will achieve long-term success in forming your new habit.
Turn Your Habits Into Routines To Make Them Stick For Good
A habit is a behavior that is done every day until it becomes nearly automatic and you’re able to do it without really thinking about it. A routine is a string of several actions that are always done in the same order. If you can build your good habits into a routine, you will essentially have a string of good habits or a “good routine.” These carefully planned out routines will be beneficial because you’ve specifically tailored them to yield positive results in your life.
Think about the routines you already have, for example, your morning routine. Most people’s morning routines consist of waking up to an alarm clock, showering, drinking coffee, getting ready for work and so on. You’ve put all of these actions together to form a routine that is done the same way each day. Routines are pre-planned out, so you don’t have to make a new plan every day. This helps you get all of the actions done without thinking about what to do next.
To turn your habits into a routine, first, you should think about which habits you want to put together. Next, you will need a plan of action. It always helps to write down your plans so that you can refer back to them later and to assist in comprehension. Your plan should consist of the order in which the actions make the most sense and what time of day you will do the routine. Your routine will be several habits that you already have, put together in a certain order and done that way every day until it essentially becomes a lifestyle.
Forming your “good routine” will take some time, so don’t give up too early. It’s said that a new habit takes 3 weeks to form. After a habit is formed, if you continue to perform the behavior for 90 more days, it is said to have become a lifestyle. This is called the 21/90 rule - 21 initial days to form the habit and another 90 to make it stick so well that it becomes your lifestyle. Our routines make us who we are or our lifestyle. So, set yourself up with planned out routines that make a positive impact on your life. You will be able to accomplish your goals and live a more positive, productive, and happier life.
Check-In Regularly To Catch Any Good Habit Slips
Checking in with yourself regularly as you try to form new, good habits will help you catch slip-ups along the way. It’s important to try to catch your slips early because the more you slip up or let time go by without following through, the less likely you are to succeed in making the behavior a habit.
Everyone has an off day here and there, or maybe a day that you lost focus of your goals. It’s important though, to pick up focus and momentum on the very next day. Try hard not to let more than one day go by without skipping the habit you want to form. The more days that go by without the behavior, the longer it will take you to achieve the behavior as a habit.
Checking in is a form of accountability that is helpful, even necessary. It will take self-reflection and the ability, to be honest with yourself. Weekly self-check-ins will help you stay focused. You will need to think about the ways that you are working toward your goal and whether what you are doing is working for you or not. You will also need to think about some of the slip-ups you’ve made and determine why you weren’t able to follow through with your goal in that situation and how to change that the next time. Making a plan to change what you are doing if you discover it’s not working for you will cut down the number of slip-ups you have in the future. Writing this down in an accountability journal will help organize your thoughts and give you a reference for the next time you check-in with yourself.
Another form of checking could be with a partner. An accountability partner is someone who has agreed to help you stay committed to achieving your goal. A lot of times this is a reciprocal relationship and you will be helping your partner achieve their goals in the same way. When you know that you have someone that you have, to be honest with about your slip-ups, you actually become less likely to slip up. Checking in with your partner every few days or even once a day will ensure you stay focused on your goal of turning your desired behavior into a habit.
Checking in with yourself or with someone else will keep you accountable and help set you up for success. The ability to be flexible when you notice something you are doing isn’t working to further your goal is a crucial part of forming your habit. This will enable you to cut down on the number of slip-ups and get you to your goal faster.
It’s Okay Not To Be Perfect All The Time
Establishing good habits requires commitment, motivation, and hard work. The desire to better your life by examining which behaviors are yielding positive results and which aren’t is a daunting process. We all have days when we just don’t feel up to the task. That’s ok! It’s completely normal to not be perfect. In fact, perfection is less important than progress. As long as you’re moving forward, being flexible, and forgiving yourself, you are closer to establishing good habits that stick.
Slip-ups are to be expected when you are trying to establish a new habit. Moving forward from the slip-ups is progress toward your goal. If you get discouraged easily and give up, you are no longer moving forward, you are no closer to your goal. So, your attitude and persistence really end up determining your amount of progress. It’s a journey, not a race.
Flexibility is key in advancing toward your goal of good habits. When a slip-up happens, you will need to examine why it happened and make a plan of what you will do in the future. It may be that your former plan isn’t working, don’t be afraid to switch it up and be flexible. Your main objective should be to make a plan so that you can avoid the slip-up next time. So, your plan should be fluid, depending on what’s working and working for you.
Last but not least, forgive yourself for your missteps and move on! Beating yourself up does absolutely no good. In fact, your focus is to be on changing your life for the positive. So, allowing yourself to get down because of a few slip-ups is actually counterintuitive. Instead, use your slip-up as motivation to do better tomorrow.
Establishing new habits takes time and slip-ups are complete to be expected. Perfection is overrated, it’s your attitude, perseverance, and willingness to progress that really matters. Remember that your goal should not be perfection. Rather, becoming self-aware and gaining the ability to use critical thinking when examining your habits should be. Put yourself in the driver's seat when it comes to your health and goals for your life. Take ownership and be willing to change your goals and plans along the way to tailor to your specific needs. Eventually, you will find yourself in a better place in your life than when you started.
Expect Stumbling Blocks And Learn To Overcome Them
There is really no part of life where challenges don't exist. We are constantly overcoming demanding situations. And although the size of the challenge may change, we should come to expect that things are not always easy. Challenges are a part of life! It’s no different when you are working toward building new, positive habits. There will be setbacks and stumbling blocks to face. The trick will be to learn how to overcome them and keep moving forward.
One of the first things you can do when you encounter a situation where establishing your new habit may be challenged is to evaluate the situation. Ask yourself a series of questions so that you understand the “why” of the stumbling block. Questions like "What is the challenge?” Why has it become a challenge as it relates to the habit I’m trying to form? What time of day did it happen? All of these questions will yield answers that will help you understand your setbacks and get you back on the right track. Journaling or writing down your questions and answers will help you analyze the information you come up with so that you can make a plan to move forward.
After you have gathered your information about how and why you slipped up, you can design ways to overcome those stumbling blocks and even foresee some that may happen in the future. For example, maybe you have a goal to get healthier. You’ve been eating right and exercising at least 5 days a week. In the first few weeks, you lost several pounds, which motivated you to stay focused. But, for the last two weeks, you haven't lost any more weight. You start to feel stagnant and feel tempted to give up because you’re no longer seeing results. This is a stumbling block that can be avoided if it’s planned for. Weight loss plateaus are common, so if you expected it ahead of time, you would be able to focus more on the long-term goal- resisting the temptation to give up too soon. Thinking about the situations you may be in ahead of time and accounting for them is really the key to learning how to overcome your stumbling blocks.
Lastly, make a resolve to never give up. The truth is that stumbling blocks are a part of life, no matter who you are. It’s how we deal with the challenges that define us. If you don’t give up on attempting to better yourself by forming good habits, you will become a person who lives life to the fullest.
Keep From Slipping Back Into Bad Habits By Setting Cutoffs
So, you’ve been working really hard on keeping up some of the good habit goals you’ve set for yourself. You’ve been self-aware, questioned yourself, planned for pitfalls, tracked your progress and so on. You’ve done everything right. You probably feel like you’d never go back to your old ways or bad habits because you’ve come so far. To an extent that’s true, we are more likely to stick with a new habit if it’s been used for longer than 4 months. Unfortunately, our old habits are still ingrained in us too. Slipping back to your old behaviors could happen before you even realize it. There are a few things you can do to help prevent this from happening.
One way is to use micro-goals or cut-offs. Micro goals can be used to help keep you from falling back into your old habits. An example of this is; your goal was to get healthy and lose a certain number of pounds. You’ve worked hard and achieved your goal, so now your goal is to maintain it. Sometimes there’s a slip-up or two per week with healthy food choices, and as we know, weight can fluctuate slightly week to week. So, a micro goal you could use to keep you from falling all the way back to where you were before you started could be something to the effect of, “If I get up to this weight, I will start working out at the gym for 20 minutes longer per workout.” You essentially give yourself a cut-off to keep you on track so that you don’t slip back into a bad habit.
Being aware of your mindset is an important way to keep from slipping also. Notice subtle behaviors you may be doing that indicate you are falling off track. Such as, having just one drink here and there, instead of not drinking at all if that was your goal. Or, starting to buy certain foods again that you swore off in an effort to lose weight. Keep a close eye out for permission-giving thoughts like, “It’s just this one time” or “I’ll get back to it next week, I’m tired, I need a break.” These thinking patterns are gateway thoughts that lead back to old or bad habits. Be mindful of enablers. People who don’t help you stay on track; rather they almost pressure you to slip backward again.
All of these things can help stop you from slipping back into your old ways. Don’t give up; keep striving for the betterment of your life through good habits.
