How Long Does it Take to Form A New Habit?

we've covered a little bit about how habits work the basic habit loop of trigger routine reward but how often does a habit need to be repeated for it to become automatic and mindless how often do we need to do a particular behavior before it starts to become ingrained in us it's an interesting question and you often hear people throw things out like it takes 21 days to build a habit or it takes 30 days to build a new habit and one of the places that this came from is from a man named Maxwell Maltz molt's was a plastic surgeon in the 1950s and 60s and he noticed something interesting when he was working with patients who lost an arm for example or who needed some type of facial reconstruction he found that it took them about 21 days to get used to their new body maybe they felt a phantom limb for a little while or they would get a nose job and look in the mirror and think they looked like a different person but eventually after about 21 days or three weeks they would start to get used to what they were seeing they would you know become a little more repetitive and comfortable with it and Maltz started to write about this these discoveries and what he said was it takes about 21 days for someone to get used to a new change for it to become ingrained in their brain and you know become normal and he wrote about this in a book called psycho cybernetics which went on to become a multi million copy bestseller this huge hit and like a long game of telephone people started repeating this in different areas and groups and eventually it became this cultural myth of it takes 21 days to build a new habit well thankfully there's been some research done on this to figure out how long it actually takes to build a new habit and it's been done by Philippa Lally a researcher and scientists at the University of College London and her colleagues and what they found is that while 21 days could work but it really depends on the habit in this situation which probably isn't a surprise to you right behavior is very contextual and so what Lally and her colleagues found was that for a simple habit like drinking a glass of water at lunch it might only take 18 or 20 days to build that habit and make it routine repeatable but for a more complex habit like going for a three-mile run after work each day that might take 8 months for it to become ingrained on average they found that about 66 days is the time it takes for a new habit you built but for me I like to keep the expectation in mind of okay this is gonna be a journey that I'm on for months before it starts to feel mindless and automatic before it starts to feel routine inconsistent and what's interesting about lolis research is that they discover that every habit whether it's something easy to do or something more difficult follows a very similar trajectory a very similar pattern and it starts to with each frequency with each repetition it starts to move closer to what they term the automaticity line or will I what I like to call the habit line and eventually it gets to some point where it's about as automatic as it's going to become it crosses this threshold where the behavior is as mindless as it's going to be and once you reach that point it really just becomes about continuing the process that you're already doing you don't have to think about it that much you allocate fewer resources to that behavior in your brain you literally shift the way that you think about the behavior and start to automate it now there's one interesting takeaway that we have from this in addition to the fact that it takes about 66 days to build a new habit or takes a couple months to build a new habit the researchers also found that if you miss on any given day it doesn't actually hurt the long-term outcome so you know slumping up once for example does not change whether or not the habit becomes automatic and engrained and this idea is incredibly important because it helps us abandon this concept of the all-or-nothing mindset the idea that I have to be perfect and stick to my habit for 38 days in a row in order for it to become ingrained in me that's actually not true it's not what the researchers found and so as we progress throughout the rest of this course I want you to keep this in mind that habits need to be three things in order to be ingrained in our lives they need to be repeated they need to be resilient and they need to be reinforcing and so in order for us to achieve those three things repeated resilient and reinforcing we can keep in mind the research that was done by these scientists we just need to repeat things consistently and we'll move toward the habit line toward this line of automaticity we need to be resilient so if we miss once it doesn't matter over the long run we're still able to build an automatic behavior and it needs to be reinforcing or haven't seem to build upon each other build upon themselves to reinforce the identity and the the person that we want to become so that we continue to believe in the change that we're making and as we discuss the hidden forces that shape human behavior and the different types of influences that we often don't even notice that shape the habits and actions that we take I want you to think about how each one can be repeated resilient and reinforcing how it collects this power that builds the habits that we have on a daily basis so as we continue through the rest of the lessons keep that in mind I'll go ahead and see you in the next one

Channel: James Clear

Views: 46,749

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Id: f0K63eqDCQs

Length: 4min 56sec (296 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 07 2017