Breaking Bad Habits and Forming Good Ones: How to Leverage Habit Stacking for a More Productive You

Leverage Habit Stacking for a More Productive You

In many ways, most people are defined by their habits. While we tend to focus a lot on bad habits and how to break them, the reality is that forming good habits can be just beneficial in the long-run as breaking bad habits. Fortunately, there is a highly effective method that you can use to form good habits in a way that is simple and extraordinarily beneficial; it’s called habit stacking, and it may be the key to a more productive you. 

What is Habit Stacking? 

Habit stacking is a method of forming beneficial habits that involves weaving new, hand-chosen habits into the habits that are already a part of your day-to-day life. Whether we stop to think about it or not, much of our lives our guided by our routines and habits. For example, if you’re like most people then you have a morning routine that will typically follow the same essential pattern. For example, perhaps your morning routine is to wake up, use the bathroom, brush your teeth, take a shower, eat breakfast, and drive to work. If so, then this routine is likely something that you follow every morning, and chances are there are plenty of other habits and rituals built into your daily routine that you might not ever even think about. 

With all of that said, the key to habit stacking is to “stack” a new, positive habit on top of an existing one. For example, if you would like to start exercising more you can stack the habit of doing twenty pushups on top of the habit of taking a shower in the morning, committing to those twenty pushups before you step in the shower each day. Before long, the habit of doing twenty pushups will intertwine with your habit of taking a shower in the morning and doing twenty pushups before your morning shower will become an accepted part of your routine. By tying this new habit to an already existing one, though, you can rapidly accelerate the rate at which you are able to turn a difficult commitment into an effortless habit.  

Of course, this is just one example of how habit stacking can be leveraged to form beneficial new habits more quickly by tying them to pre-existing habits, and the sky really is the limit when it comes to the types of new habits that you can form and how you can go about stacking them on top of the habits you already have. 

Get Started Using Habit Stacking to Begin Building a Better You  

By definition, habits are things that come effortlessly to us, meaning that forming good habits is one of the best ways to become a more productive and successful person in a way that doesn’t even feel like a sacrifice. If you would like to start hand-selecting and adopting the habits that will help guide you toward your ideal life, habit stacking is certainly a method that you should consider trying out for yourself. 

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