Want to make good habits stick? Try this beautifully simple technique

Every morning, Laura Henshaw, the Melbourne-based co-founder of health and fitness app Kic, wakes up and brushes her teeth, just like most of us. While she used to follow this by scrolling on social media, she has replaced this with a short guided meditation or journaling. “It’s really simple, but it’s actually made a really, really big difference to my day,” she says.

What Henshaw is doing is called “habit stacking”, a deceptively simple but powerful technique that can help make incremental and lasting changes to our daily routines. Laura Henshaw, co-founder of health and fitness app Kic. What is habit stacking? The idea of habit stacking was popularised by American writer James Clear, whose 2018 book Atomic Habits became a New York Times bestseller.



Loading The idea is simple: add a new habit onto an existing habit to make it stick. Clear lays out the formula for habit stacking as follows: Before/after (habit), I will (habit). For example, you might say: After my morning cup of coffee, I will wipe down the kitchen bench.

Tooth brushing is a popular one to build upon because most of us do it twice a day. So you might choose to do squats after you brush your teeth, or meditate, as Henshaw does..