71| 4 Steps to Habit Stacking To Make Self Care Habits Stick

What if the reason your good habits never stick has nothing to do with discipline, and everything to do with where you’re putting them? What if you could easily swap the bad habits without your brain fighting back? And what if the good habits you keep putting off could become completely automatic in 4 easy steps, not in months but in just a couple of weeks?

Transcript

What if the reason your good habits never stick has nothing to do with discipline, and everything to do with where you’re putting them? What if you could easily swap the bad habits without your brain fighting back? And what if the good habits you keep putting off could become completely automatic in 4 easy steps, not in months but in just a couple of weeks? This podcast is always 20 minutes or less so you don’t have to feel overwhelmed or overhaul everything in your life, but just make small, simple changes to create more calm and peace. To get to your better life, make small changes and begin to live it!

Hey friends, welcome back to our little podcast of change. I'm so glad you pressed play today. If you're new here, thank you for giving this podcast a chance, and if you've been listening for a while, you already know how much I appreciate you and your time. I want to start today with something you probably do every single morning without even thinking about it. You wake up, you make it to the bathroom and then without deciding to, you reach for your toothbrush. You brush your teeth, you look in the mirror, maybe you do a quick stretch and then you head to the kitchen for coffee. One thing flows into the next, almost automatically because you were just moving through a sequence of habits you built for yourself over time. That right there? That's habit stacking. And today we're going to talk about how you can use that same automatic, one-thing-leads-to-another principle to build better habits. Not through dramatic overhauls or exhausting willpower but through the powerful science of layering one small change onto another until the whole thing takes on a life of its own. We're going to talk about what stacking actually is, what the science says about why it works so beautifully, and how momentum builds inside of it, and exactly how you can start using it in your own real, busy, imperfect life today. 

So let's start with what we actually mean when we say stacking. At its simplest, habit stacking is the practice of linking a new behavior to something you already do consistently. You take an existing anchor in your day, something that happens no matter what, and you attach a new intention to it, before or after it. Think about it like this. If you already make coffee every morning without fail, and you want to start a new gratitude practice, you don't need to carve out a whole new slot in your time, in your day and find the willpower to fill it. You just decide that while the coffee brews, you think of three things you're grateful for. The coffee is the anchor. The gratitude is the stack. The coffee was already happening. Now the gratitude happens too, not because you remembered, not because you forced it, but because the sequence carried it there.

This is why stacking feels so much more sustainable than trying to build new habits from scratch. We're not fighting our existing routines, but working with them. And here's what’s great from a self-care perspective. It removes the performance pressure, you don't have to be motivated or feel ready. You just have to show up for the thing you already do, and the stack comes with it. Think about what do you do every single day without deciding to. Maybe it's making coffee, walking to your car, sitting down for lunch, brushing your teeth before bed. One of those can become that anchor you need.

Now let's talk about what's actually happening in your brain when you stack habits, because the science makes the whole thing feel a lot less like a self-help trick and a lot more like working with how your brain actually works. Your brain is always looking for ways to be more efficient. It doesn't want to burn full energy on every single thing you do, so over time it takes behaviors you repeat and moves them into a part of the brain called the basal ganglia, which handles automatic, habitual behavior. This is sometimes called the habit loop, a concept written by journalist Charles Duhigg in his research on how habits form. The loop has three parts, a cue which triggers the behavior, a routine which is the behavior itself, and a reward which is the feeling that follows and reinforces the loop. Once a behavior becomes automatic, the brain doesn’t have to think, it just runs it.

What stacking does is borrow from a loop that's already fully formed. When you attach a new behavior to an existing cue, you're essentially giving your new habit a shortcut past the first and hardest part of habit formation, which is getting the cue to trigger the behavior. The existing habit is already doing that job. Your coffee is already being made. Your teeth are already being brushed. So your new stack gets carried by a neurological current that's already flowing. Psychologist BJ Fogg discovered that the best predictor of whether a new habit would stick wasn't motivation or willpower or even accountability. It was whether the new habit was attached to a reliable existing behavior and whether it was small enough to do even on your worst day. He called his approach tiny habits, and the stacking piece was central to it. His research showed that when people consistently used existing behaviors as anchors for new ones, those new behaviors not only stuck but naturally expanded over time without any extra effort. The stack grew within itself.

And here's something else that the neuroscience tells us is that every time you complete a stacked behavior, your brain releases a small amount of dopamine. Not a huge rush, just a little signal that says good, we did the thing, that felt okay, let's do it again. And those small dopamine signals, repeated consistently over time, actually strengthen the neural pathway of the habit. You're literally rewiring your brain through small repetitions. Think about something you already do completely automatically. Buckling your seatbelt, locking the door when you leave, putting your phone on the charger at night. You don't need motivation for them, they just happen. That's what we're building toward with your new stacks. Not a life of discipline and effort, but a life where the good things just happen because you've wired them in. 

Now I want to talk about momentum, when you start stacking small changes, something happens after a while and that is that momentum builds. Not just within each habit, but across your whole day. Across your whole life. For example, let's say you start with one stack. Every morning when the coffee brews, you do some stretches at the kitchen counter. That's your small, simple stack. You do it for a few weeks and it starts to feel natural. And then you notice because you started your morning stretching, you're going into your day with a slightly different lens. You're a little more likely to feel better, to notice the good things as they happen, to want better things for your body. Which means you make slightly better choices. Which means your afternoon feels different from how it used to feel. Which means you go to bed in a different headspace. And the next morning your self care stretching practice feels a little easier because you actually have more to draw from. That's momentum of one small change creating a ripple that touches parts of your day you never expected it to reach. And as you add more stacks, those ripples start to overlap and reinforce each other. Maybe morning gratitude feeds the afternoon patience. The two-minute stretch before bed feeds the morning energy. The evening glass of water feeds the morning clarity. Your life starts to feel different not because any one thing changed dramatically, but because all those small good things are now running quietly in the background of your days.

Research shows that approximately forty-three percent of our daily behaviors are performed habitually, in the same context, in the same way, almost without conscious thought. Forty-three percent! Nearly half of what we do every day is already on autopilot. Which means when we intentionally stack positive behaviors into that automatic forty-three percent, we're not adding effort to our days. We're replacing neutral autopilot with intentional autopilot. We're using the cruise control of our brains that we already have and just pointing it somewhere better.

So let's get really practical now because this is where I want you to walk away with something you can actually use today. Building your own stack isn't complicated but it does require a little intention upfront, and then a whole lot of just doing the thing and trusting the process. The first step is identifying your anchors. What are the things in your day that happen no matter what? Morning coffee or tea. The commute to work. Sitting down for lunch. Washing your face at night. Walking to the mailbox. Write them down because seeing them on paper makes them feel more real and more useable. You probably have more of them than you realize.

The second step is choosing one small change or behavior you genuinely want to add to your life. And I want to emphasize the word small here, because this is where a lot of people, they accidentally undermine themselves. They pick something that sounds impressive rather than something that's actually sustainable. They stack twenty minutes of journaling onto a morning that's already rushed. They stack a full workout onto an evening that's already exhausting. And then when it doesn't stick, they think stacking doesn't work or that they're not disciplined enough. But it's not a discipline problem. It's a sizing problem. Make the stack smaller than you think it needs to be. Two minutes of journaling. Five deep breaths. One gentle stretch. One sentence written. One glass of water poured. The smaller it is, the harder it is to skip and the easier it is to keep.

The third step is to write the stack as a simple sentence. After I pour my morning coffee, I will write three things I'm grateful for. Before I start my car, I will take three slow breaths. Before I get into bed, I will put my phone across the room. The format matters. After this, I will do that. Or before this, I will do that. Specific sequences is what matters.

The fourth step is to start with just one stack for at least two weeks before you add another. I know that might feel too slow. I know some of you who are type A like me are already mentally building a whole slew of beautiful stacked habits and you want to start all of them tomorrow. But what tends to happen when we add too many stacks too fast is that we overwhelm the system. The anchors stop feeling reliable because there's too much attached to each one. The sequences get complicated and then they get skipped. And the trust we were building with ourselves starts to erode. One stack, done consistently for two weeks builds a foundation to help build the next one. Slow is sustainable and sustainable is what transforms your life.

So right now, think about one anchor in your day and one small thing you've been wanting to add to your life and write the sentence in your head or out loud. After I do this, I will do that. That's your stack to start. That simple sentence is the beginning of something that can genuinely change your life over time. When you stack consistently, something starts to shift that goes beyond behavior. It shifts identity and identity is where real, lasting change lives. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, says that every action you take is a vote for the type of person you want to become. One vote doesn't decide an election. But when you keep showing up, the votes add up and eventually the identity shifts. You stop being someone who is trying to be healthy and you start being someone who is healthy. You stop being someone who is trying to be calmer and you start being someone who is calm. You stop being someone who wants to write and you start being a writer. The stacks aren't just building habits, they're building you.

And here's what's so powerful about that identity shift from a self-care perspective. Once you see yourself differently, you start making choices that are consistent with that new self-image almost automatically. You don't have to debate whether to take the walk because you're someone who moves their body. You don't have to convince yourself to pause before reacting because you're someone who chooses peace. The decision was already made at the identity level. The behavior is just the natural expression of who you've become. Every time you complete a stack, every time you do the small thing you said you'd do, you're sending yourself a message. A message that says I can count on me. And so many of us have a complicated relationship with that message. We've told ourselves we'd start on Monday way too many times. We've made promises to ourselves that didn't hold. And so somewhere along the way we stopped fully believing in our own word. Stacking, with its small, reliable, almost impossible to skip commitments, is one of the most direct ways to rebuild that trust. You keep the promise because it's easy to keep and trust then grows. And slowly you become someone who knows, really knows, that they'll show up for themselves. That's not a small thing. That's everything, building self trust and self care changes how you speak to yourself, what you accept from others, how you choose boundaries and peace because you know you deserve it.

Now I want to be honest with you about the part that trips most people up. There going to be time at the beginning of any stacking practice where it feels invisible. You're doing the things you're showing up, but you can't yet see or feel a meaningful difference. Your mornings feel a little more intentional but you're not sure if that's real or just the novelty of something new. Your evenings might feel a little calmer but life is still life. And the voice in your head starts asking, is this actually working? It's working. The neural pathways are forming even when you can't feel them. The identity is shifting even before your behavior shows it clearly. The ripples are moving through your days even before they become visible in your life. We talked in episode 36 about the messy middle, that stretch between beginning and breakthrough where the growth is happening entirely underground. Stacking has its own version of that where the roots go down before the shoots come up. So don’t quit while you’re quietly growing. What helps in this phase is tracking, even if it's just a simple checkbox on a calendar. Seeing a streak of check marks makes the invisible visible. It gives you evidence that you're showing up even when you can't yet see the results. And when you miss a day, because you will and that is so completely okay and human, the rule is simple, try not to miss 2x in a row. One miss is life. Two misses is the beginning of an unraveling you don't want. Get back to the stack the next day or the next week whatever stack you’ve chosen, no guilt or drama, just grace that you’re human and this is life, this is ok.

And celebrate the identity shifts along the way, not just the outcomes. Don't wait for the big transformation to acknowledge what's happening. If you completed your stack today, say out loud, I'm becoming someone who keeps promises to myself. If you added a second stack this week, say I'm becoming someone who builds a life intentionally. Your brain is listening and it believes what it hears repeated.

So here's what I want you to take away today. You don't need a dramatic overhaul, we’re always about little by little here. You don't need a perfect morning routine or a complete lifestyle reinvention or a brand new version of yourself starting January first. You need an anchor and a stack. One small, specific, doable behavior attached to something you already do every day. That's the whole beginning. And from that one small beginning, momentum builds, identity shifts and self trust grows. And one day you'll notice that your life feels genuinely different, not because you forced it to change, but because you quietly, consistently, one small stack at a time, built it into something better. You don't have to do everything today. You just have to do one small thing. Then tomorrow, another. And then one day you'll wake up and realize you've built something incredible, one stack at a time.

Please follow or subscribe so you don’t miss our future conversations. And leave a comment, let me know what you got from this, what more do you want to hear about and if you loved this, then please leave a 5 star review. I will read your comments and reply either way but it does help get this out to more people who might need to hear it. So if this episode resonated, then share this episode with someone in your life who's been telling themselves they don't have time for change or that the changes they want to make are too big to start so share this in a loving way to say, hey, I thought of you when I heard this and I know you can do this. And maybe today pressing play and listening in your car on your way to doing weekly groceries can be the beginning of your first stacking habit. Thank you for being here, for listening, and for showing up for yourself as you make small changes to create a better life, a life of more peace and intention, little by little and peace by peace.