![]() Building better habits is not an all-or-nothing process. Interestingly, the researchers also found that “missing one opportunity to perform the behavior did not materially affect the habit formation process.” In other words, it doesn’t matter if you mess up every now and then. In other words, if you want to set your expectations appropriately, the truth is that it will probably take you anywhere from two months to eight months to build a new behavior into your life - not 21 days. In Lally’s study, it took anywhere from 18 days to 254 days for people to form a new habit. And how long it takes a new habit to form can vary widely depending on the behavior, the person, and the circumstances. On average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic - 66 days to be exact. Some people chose simple habits like “drinking a bottle of water with lunch.” Others chose more difficult tasks like “running for 15 minutes before dinner.” At the end of the 12 weeks, the researchers analyzed the data to determine how long it took each person to go from starting a new behavior to automatically doing it. Each person chose one new habit for the 12 weeks and reported each day on whether or not they did the behavior and how automatic the behavior felt. ![]() The study examined the habits of 96 people over a 12-week period. ![]() In a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Lally and her research team decided to figure out just how long it actually takes to form a habit. Phillippa Lally is a health psychology researcher at University College London. How Long it Really Takes to Build a New Habit So what’s the real answer? How long does it take to form a habit? How long does it take a break a bad habit? Is there any science to back this up? And what does all of this mean for you and me? Furthermore, he made sure to say that this was the minimum amount of time needed to adapt to a new change. And who wouldn’t like the idea of changing your life in just three weeks?īut the problem is that Maxwell Maltz was simply observing what was going on around him and wasn’t making a statement of fact. The time frame is short enough to be inspiring, but long enough to be believable. It makes sense why the “21 Days” Myth would spread. Dangerous lesson: If enough people say something enough times, then everyone else starts to believe it. It’s remarkable how often these timelines are quoted as statistical facts. And as more people recited Maltz’s story - like a very long game of “Telephone” - people began to forget that he said “a minimum of about 21 days” and shortened it to, “It takes 21 days to form a new habit.”Īnd that’s how society started spreading the common myth that it takes 21 days to form a new habit (or 30 days or some other magic number). You see, in the decades that followed, Maltz’s work influenced nearly every major “self-help” professional from Zig Ziglar to Brian Tracy to Tony Robbins. The book went on to become an blockbuster hit, selling more than 30 million copies. In 1960, Maltz published that quote and his other thoughts on behavior change in a book called Psycho-Cybernetics ( audiobook). Maltz wrote about these experiences and said, “These, and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.” ![]() These experiences prompted Maltz to think about his own adjustment period to changes and new behaviors, and he noticed that it also took himself about 21 days to form a new habit. ![]() Similarly, when a patient had an arm or a leg amputated, Maxwell Maltz noticed that the patient would sense a phantom limb for about 21 days before adjusting to the new situation. Maltz would perform an operation - like a nose job, for example - he found that it would take the patient about 21 days to get used to seeing their new face. Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon in the 1950s when he began noticing a strange pattern among his patients. ![]()
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