Productivity rules the modern world. The majority of us are desperately looking for ways to “get more stuff done.” In fact, a recent survey found that “be productive” is the most popular self-growth goal among respondents in the U.S., U.K., and Australia—more than “be happy,” “have a healthy body,” “have more money,” or “love and be loved.” But the point, perhaps, is that productivity can help us get our work done more efficiently and ultimately carve out more time for the people and experiences that bring us joy.
If you’ve already worked your way through a library of productivity hacks or are frustrated that those New Year’s resolutions didn’t quite stick, why not make things a little easier for yourself? If you’re looking to develop a new habit—and keep it—you might want to try habit stacking. The technique trains your brain to associate a new habit with an old one, making it simple to complete both and more likely the new habit will become as ingrained as the old one.
If the viral TikTok videos are any indication, habit stacking is hot—and has helped posters successfully assimilate new habits like reading each morning or calling their grandma more often. Whether or not you’ve heard the term already, we’ve got you covered with what habit stacking is, why and how it works, what it looks like IRL, and how you can use the strategy yourself.
“Habit stacking is a technique for building new habits by ‘stacking’ them on top of existing ones,” says Dr. Courtney Conley, a licensed therapist and the founder of Expanding Horizons Counseling and Wellness. “If you already brush your teeth before bed, you could stack a new habit of reading for 30 minutes before bedtime. By attaching the new habit to an existing one, you create a cue or trigger for the new habit, making it more likely to stick.”
As Michael Uram, a licensed marriage and family therapist and CEO of Uram Family Therapy explains, the approach’s popularity has been building for a while. In the 2018 book Atomic Habits, author James Clear adapted and combined two previously well-established theories—“implementation intention” and “behavior shaping”—to present a straightforward technique that anybody can use to create new, lasting habits.
The theory is pretty simple: You work with your brain, not against it, when trying something new. “The powerful idea takes advantage of our brain’s natural ability to chunk information into sequences that then become one in our memory, just like how we remember area codes as one object instead of three numbers,” Uram says. “This increases our chances of completing all the steps of a task because they all feel like they fit together.” So when your brain recognizes two habits as one complete task, it feels natural to do them consecutively.
If it’s not your first rodeo and you’ve tried to adopt new habits before now, you’ll know that it’s rarely easy to make them stick. However, according to a scientific theory called synaptic pruning, the secret to your success lies in sheer repetition.