Mar 25

Mar 25 Habit Stacking vs. Habit 'Piling'

Hi, I'm Liz Moser, a Mayo Clinic and National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach.

Habit stacking, developed by Stanford researcher BJ Fogg, is one of the most efficient ways to cultivate a new habit. Habit stacking is where you link a new action to an existing routine—either inserting the desired new habit before or after a current habit. You are anchoring it, in a sense, to the other action, decreasing your overall cognitive load. Habit stacking a mental shortcut.

For instance, take these three separate habits - write in your journal, reply to emails, and meditate. If these aren’t stacked somewhere in your day, you would have to write them down, check back to your list regularly so you wouldn’t forget what you need to do, and then try to fit them into your day.

A habit stack decreases the mental load because the first action is the domino that triggers the next habit. You wake up, write in a journal, meditate, then check emails. Bam! If you get to your journal, the other two actions happen almost seamlessly. Habit stacking creates automaticity.

I have a well-established morning habit stack. If you’re interested check out my vlog about my morning routine and how to create your own. From the moment my alarm goes off at 5 to the time I eat my breakfast at 6:30 while answering emails, to the time I take my first coaching call at 7 am. My morning is one healthy habit after the other - meditating, red light therapy, exercise, etc. Stacked like dominoes from 5 am to 7 am, and that's seven days a week, although no clients on the weekends.

My clients usually want to hear about my healthy routines; however, they hired me for their one main goal. When they achieve that, they may add several more habits by the time they move on from coaching. For the most part, they aren’t interested in a full-on habit stack with ten separated healthy habits. It's overkill for them.

They want a wellness coach who walks her talk with a healthy daily routine, but they aren’t wellness coaches, and they have their own priorities. When they complete their coaching they happily end up with several new healthy habits that they complete at a random time during the day. One of my clients calls this a habit pile. Ha! Yes, a habit pile!

This client coined the term habit pile in response to my query about how her nightly checklist/ habit stack was going. She answered:

‘Habit Stack? It’s more like a pile. Don’t get me wrong, I love my nightly checklist, and I refer back to it during the day to see where I can fit things in (meditation, reading her devotional, checking her Marco polos, etc..), but for now, I’m ok with my pile.’

As you maybe have gathered, a habit pile is a list of actions you want to complete daily. Perhaps they are on your nightly checklist just like my client. If interested, please check out my video about my nightly checklist and creating your own. You refer to your checklist and try to insert them into your day.

A habit pile may not be as efficient as a habit stack. It takes mental energy, yet it’s a perfectly ok place to be either on the road to habit stacking or not. Your lifestyle and ultimate goals are your concern. You are the expert on you. We are all comfortable with different levels of organization and efficiency. And indeed, performing the desired habit at different times each day is certainly better than not doing it at all.

It's counter-productive for my clients to stress out about creating a routine or habit stack if it's simply not going to work with their current phase in life or their personality. Doing the action is better than not doing it at all, and using your habit pile or to-do list as a reminder is simply fine.

As a coach, my job is to remind my clients how far they’ve come, be grateful for the healthy lifestyle changes they’ve made and watch for their tendency of ‘never enough’. When they’ve solidified their current habit and if they are ready to add another, we go ahead and start adding the next goal. Whether they decide to stack it with another current habit or add it to their habit pile to insert at some time in the day are both perfectly reasonable solutions.

I’m Liz Moser, a Mayo Clinic and National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and thank you for reading this blog about habit stacking vs. habit piling. If you have any questions about this blog, about health and wellness, or wellness coaching with me, please reach out via my website at lizmosercoaching.com