Habit Stacking: Build Habits That Stick Without Willpower or Discipline

Stephanie Innes is a behavior design researcher and writer who specializes in habit formation for people who have never been able to make habits stick. Her work focuses on the gap between what the self-help industry promises and what actually works for people with busy schedules, limited willpower, and perfectly normal resistance to change.

After spending a decade working in corporate learning and development at companies including Microsoft and Google, where she designed behavior change programs for thousands of employees, she realized that most habit advice was written for a narrow audience: people who already had a baseline of discipline, a stable routine, and the luxury of focusing on self-improvement. The people who struggled — the ones who had tried and failed repeatedly — were being sold methods that were never designed for them in the first place.

Stephanie left the corporate world in 2021 to research and write about behavior design for the rest of us. Her work draws on cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics, but she translates it into practical, no-shame systems that respect how real people actually live. She has been featured in *Psychology Today*, *The Atlantic*, and *Harvard Business Review*, and her newsletter, *The Small Batch*, reaches more than forty thousand readers each month.

She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner and two rescue dogs. When she is not writing or researching, she can be found testing habit stacks of her own — currently a four-habit morning chain built around the simple anchor of making a pot of coffee. It has held for seven hundred days. She still can't believe it worked.