I do a lot of things on a regular basis that people might classify as “good habits.” I go for a walk every morning. I hit the gym nearly every day. I prep my meals on the weekends so I always have something healthy to eat for lunch. But I didn’t arrive at these behaviors solely through habit stacking or some other clever hack. Because the truth is, most “habits” are really skills that take work and time to develop—not simple set-it-and-forget-it hacks.
But when we talk about building a habit, we usually mean something that we do on a regular basis. Maybe it happens automatically—that may be the goal—but it isn’t a reflexive reaction to our environment. For example, people commonly say they want to build “habits” like:
Eating more vegetables
Flossing teeth
None of these are simple, reflexive, or unconscious behaviors. A few are relatively simple—you could probably use classic habit hacks like stacking to make sure you floss after you brush. But most habits take a lot more work to develop.
What we really want is behavior change
What they’ve found is that adopting a new behavior (what we’ve been calling a “habit”) requires us to invest time and effort, and we go through several mindset shifts as we evolve from a person who doesn’t do the thing, to a person who does the thing all the time. See if you can spot yourself in one of these:
Contemplation: You’re thinking about starting to do the thing on a regular basis. You might have started reading articles about what it would be like to visit a gym for the first time.
Action: You’re doing the thing. Note that this is not the first stage, nor the last. At this point, you still have a lot of questions, you may feel uncomfortable in your new routine, and if something goes wrong, you may give up.
It takes work, time, and mindset changes to move from each stage to the next. And the process isn’t always linear: Maybe you move to a new city and miss a few weeks’ worth of workouts, and then you have to find a new gym. That knocks you back a few steps on the chart, but it doesn’t have to push you off of it altogether.
Or to take another example: You might think of “go for a run every morning” as a simple habit. But there are a lot of things that go into becoming the sort of person who actually finds it simple to go for a run every morning.
The rest of the book is what teaches you to be a runner. Before the introductory chapter is over, you’ve heard anecdotes from people who hated running and found it satisfying to train for a marathon, because it’s important to know that that dichotomy of thought is perfectly normal and does not need to stop you.
These are all essential skills for any runner, and none of them come automatically, nor can they be done automatically at first. You have to learn them. You have to practice them. You have to figure out how they apply to you, personally—which mental tricks keep you motivated, which shoes are right for your feet, and so on. Even though I read this book toward the beginning of my time as a runner (I see penciled notes dating from 2003), it took me years to fully master the basics as they apply to me personally. And I’m still learning things about how to be a better runner.
It’s okay to work for (and enjoy) your habits
It’s okay to enjoy things! Even, and especially, things that are good for us. If you treat “eating healthy” as something that you hate and will always hate, it will always be a chore. On the other hand, if you learn how to make delicious recipes (and maybe even get into cooking as a hobby in itself) you’ll keep doing it and you’ll like it.
Habit hacks still have their place
It’s not that habit stacking and other tricks like it are bad. They’re just too weak to power a long-term, meaningful change in your life all by themselves.
But habit hacks do work well for simple, low-stakes items, or for smaller pieces of a larger goal. It can be helpful to think of them as reminders rather than motivation. Stacking is great for building a bedtime routine (or a morning routine, or a pre-gym routine), but that is only part of the larger behavior-change habit you’re really aiming for (“go to bed on time”). When you’re building your habits, you have to think big before you think small.
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