Habit Stacking: How to break a bad habit

This is something we’ve all googled at one point or another in our lives, but how many of us have actually been successful?

We’re all guilty of wanting to make a change but not being consistent in how we do it. The good news is, there are solutions!

Leon Taylor hosted a wonderful event with us this month where he taught us some effective techniques for breaking bad habits and building good ones. Leon taught us 3 techniques, taken from James Clear's Atomic Habits:

• Refine to daily action: I will ‘behaviour’ at ‘time’ in ‘location’
• Habit stack: After ‘current habit’ I will ‘new habit’
• Temptation Bundle: ‘Current habit’ I will ‘new habit’ then I will ‘reward habit’

Our personal favourite was Habit Stack.

Let’s take one of my bad habits as an example:

1. Acknowledge bad habit

   BAD HABIT: Skipping breakfast (the most important meal of the day)

2. Acknowledge new habit to replace bad habit

   NEW HABIT: Eat breakfast

3. Acknowledge a good current habit that you do consistently

   CURRENT HABIT: I brush my teeth every morning (you would hope so)

4. Write down this formula:

After/Before CURRENT HABIT I will NEW HABIT

5. Fill in the blanks with what you’ve written so far:

After/Before ‘I brush my teeth every morning’ I will ‘eat breakfast’

*Bonus content*

Here's a short clip of Leon live coaching one of our members, Dolly, to help them break the unhelpful habit of multi-tasking and make solo-tasking habitual:

What do you think of this method?