Habit Stacking Will Trick Your Mind Into Adopting a New Habit | Well+Good

The everyday habits that you do almost automatically—like making coffee or sending a particular email—become that way through a particular kind of brain chemistry. The different parts of your brain that have to fire for those actions to happen start to work together very quickly and efficiently, says Dr. Foynes. Tacking a new practice onto this already-strong, habitual neural network may fast-track your brain’s adoption of it.

Specific is always better for a habit stack so that your brain can both spot the old habit easily and know exactly how to act on the new one in response.

Stack too involved an action on top of an existing habit and it’s bound to come tumbling down, no matter how stable the original habit. That's why Dr. Foynes suggests starting with a version of the new action that is very brief (no more than two to five minutes) in order to better guarantee it’ll stick, and then building from there.

Though brevity can inherently make a new task more doable, it’s also worth considering other elements of general attainability before you go stacking away. Look for the habits that are most ingrained and most consistently doable to ensure that anything you stack on top will be doable, too.

“It’s likely easier to stack together habits that have something to do with each other—like doing pushups with meditating, if they both make you feel more calm and empowered when you start your day—as opposed to stacking unrelated things, like making coffee and reading a book,” says Krastev. The more similar the items in your stack, the more likely you are to move seamlessly from one to the next until the whole thing is routine.