I do a lot of things on a regular basis that people might classify as “good habits.” I go for a walk every morning. I hit the gym nearly every day. I prep my meals on the weekends so I always have something healthy to eat for lunch.
But I didn’t arrive at these behaviors solely through habit stacking or some other clever hack. Because the truth is, most “habits” are really skills that take work and time to develop—not simple set-it-and-forget-it hacks.
Most “habits” aren’t that simple
Psychologists define “habits” as things we do automatically in a specific situation. “For example, the act of hair twirling may eventually occur without the individual’s conscious awareness,” reads the definition from the American Psychological Association.
But when we talk about building a habit, we usually mean something that we do on a regular basis. Maybe it happens automatically—that may be the goal—but it isn’t a reflexive reaction to our environment. For example, people commonly say they want to build “habits” like:
- Going to the gym
- Eating more vegetables
- Reading books
- Flossing
- Getting to bed on time
None of these are simple, reflexive, or unconscious behaviors. A few are relatively simple—you could probably use classic habit hacks like stacking to make sure you floss after you brush. But most habits take a lot more work to develop.
What we really want is behavior change
Psychologists have a different term for things like eating healthy, getting more sleep, and reading a book instead of doomscrolling social media. They call it behavior change, and there are countless studies and theoretical models exploring how people actually end up changing their behaviors.
What they’ve found is that adopting a new behavior (what we’ve been calling a “habit”) requires us to invest time and effort, and we go through several mindset shifts as we evolve from a person who doesn’t do the thing, to a person who does the thing all the time. See if you can spot yourself in one of these:
- Precontemplation: You are not interested in doing the thing (let’s say: going to the gym).
- Contemplation: You’re thinking about starting to do the thing on a regular basis. You might have started reading articles about what it would be like to visit a gym for the first time.
- Preparation: You’re taking steps toward doing the thing. This is where you visit your neighborhood gym for a tour, or buy a pair of running shoes. Maybe you try a workout or two, but you’re not committed yet.
- Action: You’re doing the thing. Note that this is not the first stage, nor the last. At this point, you still have a lot of questions, you may feel uncomfortable in your new routine, and if something goes wrong, you may give up.
- Maintenance: This is you once you’ve finally built the “habit.” Like maintaining a car or a relationship, keeping up a habit takes work. Things will turn up that disrupt the habit; you might take a vacation, or get injured, or get discouraged in your progress. While you’re in this stage, you need to learn to anticipate and deal with those potential problems in order for the behavior change to stick.
It takes work, time, and mindset changes to move from each stage to the next. And the process isn’t always linear: maybe you move to a new city and miss a few weeks’ worth of workouts, and then you have to find a new gym. That knocks you back a few steps on the chart, but it doesn’t have to push your off of it altogether.
Every “habit” has its own learning process
A lot goes into even the behaviors that seem straightforward. For example, if you want to eat more fruit, you could set out a fruit bowl. But that’s not the beginning or the end of it. You need to know what fruits you like. You need to buy them regularly. You need to know how to shop for them, avoiding the berries that are about to turn moldy and the bananas that are so underripe they’ll still be green for days. (It would also help to know that the berries will last longer if you store them in the fridge, and that you can buy green and yellow bananas in the same shopping trip so you have a week’s worth of perfectly ripe fruits.)
Or to take another example: You might think of “go for a run every morning” as a simple habit. But there are a lot of things that go into becoming the sort of person who actually finds it simple to go for a run every morning.
The best book I’ve ever read on becoming a runner is not one that centers around hacks like stacking your running habit with walking your dog. It’s The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer, which at first sounds like it will offer a training program. But of the book’s 300 pages, the training plan only takes up half a page (the bottom half of page 2, to be exact).
The rest of the book is what teaches you to be a runner. Before the introductory chapter is over, you’ve heard anecdotes from people who hated running and found it satisfying to train for a marathon, because it’s important to know that that dichotomy of thought is perfectly normal and does not need to stop you.
Other chapters explain why you want to buy sweat-wicking clothes, how to prevent bloody nipples, how fast to run, what to tell yourself when you get tired and want to quit, how to recognize common injuries, how to track your weekly mileage, why you should increase your carbohydrate intake and what foods will help you do that, how to set appropriate goals, what to pack in your bag on race day, and how to get through the pre-race taper without losing your mind.
These are all essential skills for any runner, and none of them come automatically, nor can they be done automatically at first. You have to learn them. You have to practice them. You have to figure out how they apply to you, personally—which mental tricks keep you motivated, which shoes are right for your feet, and so on. Even though I read this book toward the beginning of my time as a runner (I see penciled notes dating from 2003), it took me years to fully master the basics as they apply to me personally. And I’m still learning things about how to be a better runner.
It’s okay to work for (and enjoy) your habits
The classic habit hacks tend to assume that habits are boring and we have to trick ourselves into doing them. Maybe that’s true for flossing, but anything we truly want to do, we do because we enjoy it, or at least appreciate the benefits that come with it.
It’s okay to enjoy things! Even, and especially, things that are good for us. If you treat “eating healthy” as something that you hate and will always hate, it will always be a chore. On the other hand, if you learn how to make delicious recipes (and maybe even get into cooking as a hobby in itself) you’ll keep doing it and you’ll like it.
When we love a thing, we stick with it. When we feel something is drudgery, we look for excuses to get out of it. In fact, Donald Edmonson, a scientist who researches behavior change, has pointed out that we make long-term changes by taking ourselves off of autopilot.
Habit hacks still have their place
It’s not that habit stacking and other tricks like it are bad. They’re just too weak to power a long-term, meaningful change in your life all by themselves.
Each of them can backfire if and when they fail, so think that through. If you temptation-bundle your favorite TV show with your treadmill time, one day you might just sit down on the couch and watch it anyway. If you meditate every day so you can get a streak on your calendar, you might just say “fuck it” and quit meditating entirely after losing a 364-day streak. If the only thing powering your habit is tricking yourself into it, you’ll never really reach that crucial maintenance stage. Little hacks can’t power big changes.
But habit hacks do work well for simple, low-stakes items, or for smaller pieces of a larger goal. It can be helpful to think of them as reminders rather than motivation. Stacking is great for building a bedtime routine (or a morning routine, or a pre-gym routine), but that is only part of the larger behavior-change habit you’re really aiming for (“go to bed on time”). When you’re building your habits, you have to think big before you think small.
