How the practice of habit stacking can help us stay well

By Murray Mackenzie

We often treat health like a separate to-do list, “ I need to remember to meditate,” “I should do some yoga”. The stress of remembering to attend to health adds to our cognitive load. When our mental RAM is full,  we can hit a wall of mental exhaustion before the day has even truly started.

One way of cognitively offloading is to practice habit stacking.  Instead of using precious will power to start a new habit,  we can piggyback it onto a neural pathway that's already carved out.  This is an example of a meta habit and can be represented like this:

 After X current habit → I will do Y new wellness habit.

Often,  procrastination occurs when we can't overcome the “ startup cost”  of a new task.  Habit stacking eliminates the When? and the How? -  the two biggest hurdles that  trigger procrastination.

Buy anchoring a new habit to an existing one, you lower the barrier to entry. You aren't “ starting”  a daunting new chore,  you're simply finishing a sequence that's already in motion.

Three simple examples:

1. The morning brew stack:  while the kettle boils (Anchor) → 3 minutes of box breathing (New)

2. The commute stack:  when you put your keys in the door (Anchor) → Name one “win”  from the day (New)

3. The transition stack:  when you close your laptop (Anchor) → Stretch your neck and shoulders for 30 seconds (New)

Wellness works better as a rhythm rather than a series of conscious decisions.  when you offload the “ choice”  to your subconscious,  you save your energy for what  truly matters.