Habit Hack – An easy way to start or improve a habit

Hey, welcome to the Daniel Clough Podcast. I'm Daniel Clough, and on this podcast I cover the power of building foundational health habits in your life. I also share strategies that can help you build your own foundational health habits so that you can become the best version of yourself. In today's episode, I share a strategy that will help you more easily establish a new habit or take an existing one to the next level. It's really easy to implement and it's something I use regularly to improve my own habit game. In fact, I share a recent example of how I used it to improve my foundational health habit of drinking 3 liters of water per day. I hope you find it useful and enjoy the episode. If you've ever tried to either start a new habit or improve an existing one, you'll know that it can be super hard. So I want to share a technique that can make it much, much easier on both fronts, and it's called habit stacking. Habit stacking works like this: you find something that you are able to do consistently and then you stack the new thing you want to do with it. And I think the best way of explaining it is to move away from the theory and jump straight into a real-life example that's worked brilliantly for me recently. Now, one of my foundational health habits is to drink 3 litres of water per day. Now, I hit that goal most days, but the big problem is I will often leave it towards the end of the day. Now, you might ask, as long as I'm able to hit my goal, what does it matter when I drink my water? Well, when I leave a lot of my water consumption towards the end of the day, it makes me feel uncomfortable and bloated. But more importantly, it means I'm up several times in the night having to take a pee, which really does get in the way of a good night's sleep. So to try and do a better job of drinking my 3 litres of water earlier in the day, I've been trying to drink 1 litre of water within 30 minutes of waking up. And that's because I know that when I do that, it gives me early momentum, and then I usually find it pretty easy to hit my 3 litres by the late afternoon. But like with anything, it's one thing to have a good intention, it's another thing entirely to actually do it consistently. And I was finding it hard to consistently drink that first litre of water within 30 minutes of waking up, even though I knew it would be good for me. I would either forget, or I would be tempted to put it off because there's just enough discomfort in it that I would find ways to avoid it. And I'd say that I was successful at it about 50% of the time. And then I had a brainwave one morning. It happened whilst I was making my coffee. There's one thing that I definitely don't find uncomfortable or try to avoid. In fact, I look forward to it each morning, and that's having my coffee. And in that moment, I thought, why don't I have a rule for myself that I'm not allowed to have a coffee until I've drunk 1 liter of water? In fact, that's a new rule for me starting now. I knew I had about 5 minutes until my coffee was ready, and the only way I was going to be allowed to drink it was if I first drank a litre of water. And that's exactly what I did. I filled my water bottle and I drunk a litre just in time for my coffee to come to the boil. And by the way, that day I happened to easily finish my 3 litres of water by 5 PM. And that's simply the new rule I have for myself now. I'm not allowed a coffee until I've drunk 1 litre of water. In fact, sometimes I now wake up and I think, I know I should drink a litre of water and just get it out of the way, but I kind of don't feel like it. And to force myself, I just go and put some coffee on. And that starts the clock, and I now have a finite amount of time before my coffee is ready. It literally forces me to grab a water bottle and just get it done. Because I know if I don't, I'll just have a cup of freshly made coffee that I'm not able to drink. And for the last 10 days or so, I've had no issues at all in drinking a litre of water in the first 30 minutes of waking up. I haven't skipped it once. So let's back up for a minute. Remember I said that habit stacking works when you find something that you're already able to do consistently and then you stack the new thing you want to do with it. So in this example, making and drinking my coffee first thing in the morning was the thing that I did consistently and with ease. It was a very reliable routine for me. And the new thing I did was drinking 1 liter of water very early in the day. And by stacking them together, I've been able to go from struggling to drink a liter of water in the first 30 minutes of the day to now consistently being able to do it. And you'll notice that the habit I stacked on top of, i.e., drinking coffee, was something that I look forward to. In fact, I think this is when it works best— when you take a habit that you find both easy and pleasurable, and then you put something that's new and very manageable before it. I think that's really important. What you don't want to do is put something that's unpleasurable and long-winded before something that already works. If you do that, you might even put the existing habit in jeopardy. And also by having the existing habit be something that you look forward to, it then acts as an incentive and a reward to do the new thing. So in summary, number 1, identify the easiest version of the new habit that you want to do. Remember, you can always dial it up later once you've won the battle of establishing it as a habit. Number 2, identify a habit or behavior that you already find easy and are already consistent with. And preferably this is also something that you find pleasurable. That way it can act as an incentive and a reward. And then number 3, put the new habit in front of the existing habit. And I can guarantee if you do this, you'll find improving your habits or creating new ones much, much easier. Give it a try and see how it works for you.