Two weeks into running three times a week and it currently feels effortless, so I am extremely tempted to add the gym, journalling and an earlier bedtime this week. My history is that I add several, keep them for a month, then lose all of them at once including the one that was working. Is stacking while motivated genuinely a mistake, or did I just do it badly?
Adding to the bedtime point with the boring detail. I moved lights out earlier by fifteen minutes a week for a month rather than an hour overnight, and the reason it worked was that it did not require me to feel sleepy on command. Once that was in place the morning habits stopped needing motivation because I was not starting each day at a deficit. Everything else got easier without me working on it.
My own tally over about two years, since you asked for evidence rather than advice.
Attempt one: added three at once in January. Kept zero past March.
Attempt two: added three again in September because I had decided the January failure was about the wrong three. Kept zero.
Attempt three: added one. Kept it.
Attempt four: added one more, eight weeks later. Kept both.
Same person, same motivation, wildly different outcomes based only on the number.
Partial disagreement. Two works if one of them is close to free. Running plus journalling for three minutes after the run is basically one habit with a tail, because the cue is already there and the cost is trivial. Running plus gym plus journalling plus an earlier bedtime is four separate negotiations with four separate cues. The number that matters is not how many habits, it is how many new decision points you are creating in a day.
Agreed, with the caveat that a habit with a tail only stays free while the parent habit is stable. Attach journalling to running now and you have made the running load-bearing for two things at week three.
Counting decision points rather than habits reframes my list. Gym and journalling are two new decisions, an earlier bedtime is a third, and the running was one. No wonder four collapsed together.
One more thing about the lose them all at once pattern. Write down, now, what happens when you miss. Mine is: miss one, nothing happens, no comment. Miss two in a row, the next one is the smallest possible version and it happens the same day. That rule is the thing that stops one missed run from taking the whole set with it, and it has to exist before the bad week, not during it.
If you must add one, add the one that makes the others cheaper. That is the bedtime, every time.
@chainwax_chloe · last mo. · 3 replies
You did it badly and it is also a mistake, which is an annoying answer. The specific failure mode is that stacked habits share one pool of willpower and one identity, so when one falls over it takes the others with it because you have decided you are the sort of person who has fallen off.
What I do now is sequential with generous spacing. One habit, six to eight weeks, and I do not add the next until the current one has survived a bad week without a decision. It feels slow, and last year it produced four habits that are all still running, which is four more than any of my ambitious years.
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@budget_bruno · last mo.
That test is also the only one that transfers between habits. Days elapsed tells you nothing if all the days were easy.
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@flaxseed_fran · last mo.
Survived a bad week without a decision is a much better test than any number of days.
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