How I microstack my habits to fit in my self-care

Remember Cheaper by the Dozen? It's sort of like that

Hey Secret Soothers! Get excited, the full Soother is moving over here to Substack soon. This Sunday, in fact! So you may notice a few changes around here and there but nothing much should be too disruptive. If it is, please email support@catherinedandrews.com and we’ll get you fixed up. I WILL still be writing Secret Soother posts to this paid list!

Anyhoodles, before we make that full shift I wanted to give you a little insight into some of my habit-stacking that I do to help fit in all the self-care in my life.

If you haven’t heard of it, habit stacking is basically "stacking" the new behavior you're trying to adopt onto a current behavior in order to help you remember to do it and/or perform it with less mental effort. For example, if you wanted to do more conscious breathing, you might decide to do two minutes of it right after brushing your teeth. Or if you brew coffee every morning, while you’re waiting for the pot to brew, you write down 5 things you’re grateful for.

I think it is James Clear (who wrote Atomic Habits, which I somehow still haven’t read; have you?) who popularized the concept of habit-stacking but it’s been around for a while. I found a 2014 book called Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less, for example.

But you know where habit stacking first entered my young, impressionable brain? It was during the time period of my youth when I was absolutely obsessed with and entranced by the Cheaper By the Dozen book series. It’s a semi-autobiographical book series about 12 children growing up raised by two efficiency experts.

I was always entranced by the concept of being able to get more done in less time, if only you applied rigorous study and intentional and clever design. I was googling the book while thinking about this piece and did you know that the woman in the couple the book is based on (written by one of their sons and one of their daughters), Lillian Gilbreth, really was an efficiency expert, after her husband (also an efficiency expert) died she was dealing with too much sexism in the engineering and labor management field and so turned her talents to home design and invented stuff like the PEDAL-OPERATED TRASH CAN? LIGHT SWITCHES THAT ARE ON THE WALL??? SHELVES INSIDE FRIDGES?!?!?! Like insane stuff we absolutely take for granted these days but that a woman invented that absolutely probably make billions of people’s lives better in efficient ways. It’s kind of interesting. Would read her biography. Her dissertation (btw this was in the early 1900s, when not a lot of women were allowed to get any education, let alone college or PhD) was The Psychology of Management: The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and Installing Methods of Least Waste.

ANYWAYS. Ever since I was a little kid my sweet little Virgo heavy nature has been kind of obsessed with efficiency. Some of the more problematic aspects of efficiency that have been exploited by capitalism aside, I still like it and try to use it in my life. If I can get more things done that make me feel better in a shorter amount of time, in small, easy and incremental ways that absolutely add up, why not?

So enter habit stacking, and in particular, related back to my post on micro morning routines, what I call micro habit stacking. I think technically probably all habit stacking is kind of micro by nature. But as I’m somebody who always encourages people to break down things into the tiniest doable pieces, I like the concept.

Here are a few very specific and real-life examples of how I micro habit stack to hopefully give you ideas of how you could adapt this in your life! And I’ll share a few practical ways you can start to do more micro habit stacking, too.