Building new habits can feel like a constant battle against forgetfulness and resistance.

It feels like climbing a vertical wall.

But what if there were ways to leverage your existing routines and make creating positive changes effortless?

In Atomic Habits James Clear describes the fundamental principle of building lasting habits: reducing resistance to the change.

One way he suggests is to stack new habits you wish to inculcate into routine with existing habits.
In this article, I'll show you practical ways of how to use this, as well as my variation of the method- habit coupling.

Habit Stacking: How it reduces friction

Your day is a series of interconnected events.

Brushing your teeth might be followed by making coffee, which then leads to checking your email.

This proximity between habits provides an opportunity for coupling. You can use coupling to integrate small, hard to imbibe habit into your existing routine.

How it works:

1. Identify an existing habit: Choose a strong, ingrained habit you do consistently, like brushing your teeth. This becomes your anchor.

2. Pair it with a new habit: Introduce the desired behavior you want to cultivate, like flossing, right after it.

3. Repeat, reinforce: As you consistently perform the coupled habits together, the cue (brushing teeth) triggers the new behavior (flossing) almost automatically.

Example: Every morning after brushing (anchor) your teeth, you floss (new desired habit). Then add link it with another habit, say drinking coffee (anchor). Following coffee, you do five push ups (new desired habit). As you build these up, they will turn into a routine, and you can use the new habit as anchors for further habits!

The reason routines are so powerful is because they take away the single biggest resistance to forming new habits- willpower.

After they are ingrained, they also need almost no willpower to execute.

Willpower is a scarce resource. Not having to use it is the path of least resistance to forming any habit, because running out of willpower credits is why most habits don't stick.

Habit Coupling and how I use it

I use a variation of stacking called habit coupling.

This is when I couple a habit I want to form with an activity I routinely perform.

For example, I love watching sports. But I hate strength training. Or I used to.

For months I tried every method I could to make it stick, because I knew it was healthy for me. But it used to fall off every 3-4 months.

Why?

Because I was using will power as an essential ingredient to drive the habit.

Then I thought:

When I am watching sports, I am doing it almost entirely passively. What if, I stacked my workout with it?
I already had weights at home (thanks lockdowns), so I tried.

Eight months later at the time of writing, and we're still going strong.

Workouts are now my license to watching my favorite teams play!

The Benefits of Coupling and Stacking

Both techniques offer a range of advantages:

Reduced friction to habit formation

Existing habits act as natural prompts, minimizing the mental effort needed to initiate a new behavior.

Increased success rates

By attaching new habits to established routines, you boost the chances of sticking with them in the long run.

No need to be drive by motivation or willpower

The familiar cues trigger automatic responses, making the process of forming habits smoother and more efficient.

You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems

The key to forming a habit is to start small, celebrate your progress, and experiment to find what works best for you.

Systems work best, because the reduce the friction required and create a path of low resistance path. Habit stacking or coupling is just one such system.

By strategically coupling and stacking your habits, you can unlock the power of your existing routines and pave the way for lasting positive change.