5 Step Process For Intentionally Building New Health Habits

^{Author: Shaela Daugherty, Founder & CEO}

What do you first think of when you think of habits? Is it good thoughts or does it leave a bad taste in your mouth?

Maybe when you think about daily practices or daily habits, it feels overwhelming, especially if you are already crazy busy. The truth is we all are, but the difference is how you go about building your new habits. Every person builds habits at a varying paces, for some it's easier because they have less going on in life, for others it's harder because they have whole slew of external factors weighing in. It doesn’t matter the speed at which you form and practice a new habit, what matters is that consistency far out weighs intensity. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It really can’t be all or nothing. That doesn’t work. That’s probably why you are here. You need something different, and you need something that works.

So let’s go in to what can work for you. If you haven't read the post on building habits and understanding them (this is your foundation), do that here first: 3 Ways to Establish Health & Fitness Habits

Once you understand habits and understand the daily practices you need to help achieve your goal, then it’s about how you incorporate those habits. This is called habit stacking. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits is the go-to resource for this. While he views habits through the lens of the world (all the power is within you), through the lens of the gospel you can still filter out what is helpful in your christian walk. 

Habit Stacking is taking a current habit you are already doing and “pair” it with a new habit. 

To give you a little background on this – you probable have tons of habits you do daily, if you aren’t sure what you do daily then start tracking yourself for at least 3 days and ask: what are the things you consciously and unconsciously do every day? Because you do those every day, your brain already has a pathway built for them. So instead of creating a new neural pathway in your daily life, you are going to pair a new habit with an old one so it pairs to the neural pathway and it’s easier to sustain.

Here’s the gist: Name one current habit you already do, let’s go with take a shower. Hopefully,  you are showering daily, unless you’re a new mom, then you might be showering every other day, but let's use this example. Let’s say one of your new habits you need is to drink more water. Here’s how this could work (assuming you shower in the morning):

You turn on the water for your shower, as the shower is warming up, you grab an 8oz glass of water and drink it while the water warms up. Then you shower. You have just paired a new habit, with an old habit.

So let’s break it down further, here's a formula you can use (based on James Clear Atomic Habits): 

After/Before your current habit you will new habit

For example:

Example 1: After I pour my first cup of coffee, I will do 10 air squats

Example 2: After I take my work shoes off, I will put on my workout shoes

Example 3: While I brush my teeth, I will close my eyes and pray

You can pair any existing habit with a new one! It’s that simple! As James Clear says, “By linking your new habits to a cycle that is already built into your brain, you make it more likely that you'll stick to the new behavior”

Once you have mastered stacking a few basic habits to already built habits, then you can begin building more habits and truly stacking them and chaining them together.

For example, let’s take the shower example:

Before I hop in the shower I will drink 8 oz of water, after I get out of the shower I will take 1 minutes to pray.

Here are a few examples of some peoples typical daily habits that you can use to pair:

• Get out of bed
• Take a shower
• Make coffee
• Pour coffee
• Eat lunch
• End your work day
• Read your Bible
• Get into the Car
• Finish dinner

First figure out what your daily practices (as mentioned above) THEN start incorporating 2 of the new habits you want to develop.

You can continually stack habits, but here’s the thing, the goal is to be doing these practices 80% of the time in order for them to really become a habit. But by pairing them with an already existing habit, the chances increase that you will do it. So first nail down 1-2 habits at a time (at different times of day), then once you are doing that habit about 80% of the time for about 2-3 weeks, then you can build in a new habit. 

To recap, here's the process:

1. Figure out your goals and break them down into manageable bite sized habits that you can do daily (like reading 10 minutes/day, drinking 60oz of water/day, exercising 10 minutes/day see post here if you are unsure what those could be)
2. Write down what daily healthy habits you already have going for you (like the list above)
3. Then pair 1-2 of the new practices with your existing habits: Use the “after/before this habit, I will new habit.” It needs to be very specific in order for you to really start utilizing it. 
4. Keep going at those 1-2 new habits for 2-3 weeks, when you are doing it 80% of the time (5 days out of the week), add on 1-2 new practices
5. Rinse and repeat

Make a list of daily habits you already do every single day. Send me your list!

_Resources: 

_{https://jamesclear.com/habit-stacking} 

_{https://jamesclear.com/habits-scorecard}

 _{There’s way more science you can read about this through BJ Fogg who created an entire program called the Tiny Habits program in order to help people implement this very thing}