Last week I wrote about winning streaks. They’ve been one of the best things to keep me on track with habits. The longer the streak goes, the more non-negotiable the habit becomes. There’s a lot of motivation not to break a long chain of wins.
Getting back on track after breaking a winning streak is tough sometimes. I broke a 37-day streak and found it hard to get back into the swing of it. Then I remembered a concept from the book Atomic Habits called habit stacking.
Since we already have habits, one way to build new ones is to stack them onto existing habits. For example, I walk my dog first thing every morning. Rather than leaving my daily workout to whenever I feel like it, I’ve stacked it with the walk. As soon as I get home, I knock out the workout.
When I broke the 37-day streak, it wasn’t a lack of motivation. I just totally forgot to do it. Stacking it with another habit makes it pretty hard to forget. After a while, it becomes automatic.
If you’re trying to build a new habit, give this a try. Your brain will start to wire things so that when you do one habit, you naturally flow into the next one.
— Bus