Cues, Habit Stacking and Environment Design: Make Habits Easy

Most advice about habits focuses on motivation: want it more, try harder, remind yourself why it matters. Habit research points somewhere else. Habits run on cues, the times, places, actions and objects that start a behavior before you have consciously decided anything.

That is good news, because cues are something you can design. You can choose them, attach new behaviors to them and arrange your surroundings so the right cue shows up at the right moment. This guide covers how cues work, how to choose good ones, how "habit stacking" fits in and how to set up your environment so a new habit is the easy option.

How cues drive habits

In a 2012 article in the British Journal of General Practice, psychologists Benjamin Gardner, Phillippa Lally and Jane Wardle explain that, within psychology, habits are defined as actions that are triggered automatically in response to contextual cues associated with their performance. Their examples: washing your hands after using the toilet, or putting on a seatbelt after getting into the car.

The same authors note that once starting an action is "transferred" to external cues, the behavior depends less on conscious attention or motivation. That is why habits can persist even after interest fades, and why they free up mental effort for other things.

Everyday diary research points the same way. In a 2002 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Wood, Quinn and Kashy had participants report on their experiences hourly. When people were engaged in habitual behavior, defined as behavior performed almost daily in stable contexts, they tended to think about things unrelated to what they were doing. They also reported less stress during habitual behavior than during nonhabitual behavior.

Choosing a good cue

Not every cue works equally well. Gardner and colleagues describe a usable cue as one that is salient enough in daily life to be encountered and noticed frequently and consistently. It can be an event, like getting to work, or a time of day, like after breakfast. They suggest that a cue within an existing daily routine provides a convenient and stable starting point, and their patient worksheet advises choosing a time and place you encounter every day of the week.

A quick checklist for any cue you are considering:

• Does it happen every time you want the habit to happen? A daily habit needs a daily cue.
• Is it specific? "After I pour my first coffee" is clearer than "in the morning."
• Will you notice it? A cue you sleepwalk through may still work, but one you have to remember to notice will not.
• Is that moment usually calm enough? If the slot is reliably chaotic, the new behavior will keep getting crowded out.

Habit stacking: using an old habit as the cue

"Habit stacking" is the name writer James Clear uses for linking a new habit to an existing one. On his website he gives the formula as "After/Before [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]." He credits the idea to BJ Fogg, founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, who uses the term "anchoring" for the same approach because the old habit acts as an anchor for the new one.

Clear adds two cautions worth keeping. Your cue should have the same frequency as the habit you want: stacking a daily habit onto something that only happens on Mondays will not work. And the time and place matter; if a slot is usually busy with something else, it is probably the wrong place to insert a new behavior.

Some hypothetical stacks:

• After I start the coffee maker, I will drink a glass of water.
• After I sit down at my desk, I will write my top three tasks for the day.
• After I plug in my phone at night, I will set out tomorrow's clothes.

Notice that each new behavior is small and each anchor is a habit that already happens without thinking.

Make the behavior easy to start

Fogg's behavior model, as described on his official site, says that behavior happens when motivation, ability and a prompt come together at the same time, and that when a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three is missing. A cue supplies the prompt. Environment design is mostly about ability: making the behavior easier to do at the moment the prompt arrives.

Practical ways to do that:

• Put the tools where the cue happens. A water glass next to the coffee maker. A notebook on the desk. Walking shoes by the door you leave through.
• Prepare in advance. Packing a gym bag the night before means the morning cue only has to trigger "pick up the bag."
• Reduce the number of steps. If a habit requires finding, setting up and cleaning up equipment, look for a version with fewer steps.
• Start with a small version. Gardner and colleagues advise aiming for small, manageable changes, partly because simpler actions become habitual more quickly.

Your surroundings can override your intentions

A pair of field experiments shows how strongly context can steer behavior. In a 2011 study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Neal, Wood and colleagues found that people with a strong habit of eating popcorn at the movies ate equal amounts of stale and fresh popcorn, and were minimally influenced by hunger or how much they liked the food. That habit-driven eating happened only in the context linked to past behavior, a cinema, and only when people could eat in their usual way. Eating with the nondominant hand disrupted it.

The lesson for building habits is to use this force rather than fight it. The places you spend time in already cue behaviors. If you want a new habit to happen somewhere, give that place a clear, visible cue and the tools you need. If an existing setting keeps pulling you toward something else, rearranging it is often more effective than resolving to resist. For the reverse problem, see our guide Breaking Unwanted Habits: Cues, Substitutes and Vigilance.

Use life changes as a fresh start

Big changes in circumstance, such as a move, a new job or a new school, disrupt the cues that old habits depend on. In a 2005 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Wood, Tam and Witt found that the exercising, newspaper-reading and TV-watching habits of students who transferred to a new university survived the transfer only when aspects of the performance context did not change. In some cases, the disruption placed behavior under intentional control, so participants acted on their current intentions.

That suggests a window of opportunity. When your routine is already scrambled, it can be a good time to deliberately choose new cues for the habits you want, before the new environment settles into patterns of its own.

Key takeaways

• Habits are actions triggered automatically by cues in a context, so designing cues matters more than summoning motivation.
• Choose cues you meet frequently and consistently, ideally inside an existing daily routine, with the same frequency as the habit.
• Habit stacking, or anchoring, uses a current habit as the cue: "After/Before [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]."
• Put tools where the cue happens and start with a small version so the behavior is easy at the moment of the prompt.
• Context can steer behavior strongly; life changes that disrupt old cues are a chance to set up new ones.

Sources

• Gardner, Lally and Wardle, Making health habitual: the psychology of 'habit-formation' and general practice, British Journal of General Practice (December 2012)
• Wood, Quinn and Kashy, Habits in everyday life: thought, emotion, and action, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (December 2002)
• Neal, Wood, Wu and Kurlander, The pull of the past: when do habits persist despite conflict with motives?, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (November 2011)
• Wood, Tam and Witt, Changing circumstances, disrupting habits, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (June 2005)
• James Clear, Habit Stacking: How to Build New Habits by Taking Advantage of Old Ones
• BJ Fogg, Fogg Behavior Model