Recent research shows that shifts in sleep, exercise, and diet can add nearly ten years to your life. The best part? Even tiny adjustments can make a big impact, and you can use habit stacking to do it.
(Photo: Canva)
Published October 8, 2026 10:08AM
How we reported this story: Marisa McMillan is a health journalist and former columnist for Outside‘s health history column, Fit Through Time. She’s incorporated habit stacking into her own life and spoke with psychologist Craig Kain, PhD, about how we can use the method to live a longer, healthier life.
Longevity has been the health buzzword for a minute now. Many of us are chasing it in some form or another. Maybe it’s by working out as much as our schedule allows, prioritizing sleep, or leaning into the biohacking world. Wherever we land, it can be hard to keep up. I know it is for me, especially with an infant daughter. But a study from the University of Sydney, published in the journal eClinicalMedicine in 2026, found that living a long life doesn’t have to be that hard.
The study followed nearly 60,000 adults over eight years and found that improvements in sleep, movement, and nutrition were associated with up to 9.35 additional years of life and 9.45 additional years of healthspan. (Healthspan refers to years of life where you’re in good health; lifespan just refers to how long you live but doesn’t account for life quality.) This meant getting between seven and eight hours of sleep each night, doing at least 40 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) each day, and eating a healthy diet. But the most interesting finding was the life adjustments needed to add one year to your life. Just five more minutes of sleep, two more minutes of MVPA, and improved diet quality—like eating one-half cup more veggies—each day were associated with an extra year of life.
That sounds easy enough, right? I thought so at first. But the hard part is keeping up with it. Sure, I could get more sleep tonight, but what about tomorrow when my daughter wakes up or gets sick? That’s where habit stacking comes in. Habit stacking is the practice of attaching a new behavior to one you already do consistently, using an existing routine as an anchor.
“Building habits has nothing to do with strength or willpower,” Craig Kain, PhD, told Outside. “It has everything to do with developing a method.” Kain is a psychologist based in Long Beach, California, and he’s incorporated habit stacking into his clinical work for years. Here’s how to add habit stacking into your life and use the method to live a longer, healthier life.
What Is Habit Stacking?
The term “habit stacking” was popularized by James Clear in his New York Times bestselling book Atomic Habits and originated from behavioral scientist BJ Fogg’s work.
The basic premise is that new behaviors are easier to sustain when they piggyback on something already automatic, rather than requiring you to build a routine from scratch.
Kain said that willpower, or lack thereof, creates a barrier to sustainable change, but habit stacking removes it from the equation entirely. That’s why framing habit building as a method is important. When people frame behavior change as a test of character, he said, failure becomes personal.
“If I succeed, I’m good, and if I fail, I’m bad. Sometimes we’re not even aware we are doing this to ourselves.” Habit stacking replaces that cycle with structure.
On a neurological level, Kain described existing habits as well-traveled highways in the brain. “Imagine the behavior you are trying to adopt as a new highway built right next to the old one,” he said. “Over time, the distance between the two disappears, and you end up with a superhighway.” Eventually, both behaviors run on autopilot.
Getting there, however, may take longer than most people realize. “Health-related habits typically take two to five months to be firmly in place,” he said. When trying to add new, small habits, he advises people to wait until one behavior feels genuinely effortless before adding another.
That patience also explains why the study’s longevity-related adjustments are so modest yet yield significant lifespan gains. Starting small increases your chances of success,” Kain said. “I may not be able to find an extra day a week to work out, but adding two extra minutes on the treadmill is manageable.” He added that people often dismiss small changes as not worth the effort, which is precisely what keeps them stuck. “And now we know that even two more minutes [based on this study] of movement is beneficial. Who doesn’t have two more minutes?”
A few honest caveats: the study was observational, so it identifies associations rather than proving direct cause and effect. The people examined also skew older, so the findings may not map perfectly onto a younger, more active population. And how quickly any habit takes hold varies considerably from person to person.
How to Use Habit Stacking to Improve Longevity
What do longevity-boosting habits look like in practice? If you are focused on adding years to your life or tacking on more years where you just feel good in your body, habit stacking may look something like this:
- Stack 1 (Nutrition): You already make coffee every morning. While it brews, slice some fruit or throw together half a serving of vegetables. It takes 90 seconds and happens every day.
- Stack 2 (Movement): You already walk your dog every evening. Pick up the pace for the first two minutes of the loop. Same route, same time, slightly more effort. Maybe you run or hike regularly. Add an extra two minutes to either activity each time.
- Stack 3 (Sleep): You already plug your phone in before bed. Start putting it across the room instead of on the nightstand. Less scrolling, slightly earlier wind-down, a few more minutes of sleep.
For me, I already enjoy taking my daughter outside in the fresh air. I strap her to my chest in a harness and walk around my neighborhood when I can. But lately I’ve been wanting to increase my daily step count. Switching her to a bassinet stroller lets her stay comfier longer, which means I can add a few more minutes to my walk. It’s not perfect, but every added minute counts.
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