In 1960, Dr. Maxwell Maltz published his bestseller book “Psycho-Cybernetics” in which he defines happiness as a habit and claims that “it usually requires a minimum of about 21 days” to form a new habit. The 21 day idea caught on, because 3 weeks is neither too short (that it’s unbelievable), nor too long (that it’s discouraging).
However, Dr. Maltz was simply making an observation as a plastic surgeon. He was not declaring a statement of fact that is based on research. Also, the phrase “it usually requires a minimum of about 21 days” was propagated without the words “usually”, “minimum” and “about”.
So how long does it really take to create a new habit?
Published in the October 2010 issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology, the research article “How habits are formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world” (Phillippa Lally, et al.) attempted to answer that question. The study examined the habits of 96 people over a period of 12 week, and the data was then analyzed to determine how long it took each person to go from starting a new behavior to automatically doing it. The answer? Not 21 days.
Accordin
24 Comments
cryptoz
Oh, that kind of habit. The good kind. It can take much less than 1 day to form a bad habit. I wonder how that asymmetry really is – were ancient humans less exposed to addictive substances and had no need to evolve a way to stop that? I have no idea what I'm talking about so, I'll end the comment here.
pbhjpbhj
>"If you’re trying a new diet, attempting to quit smoking or changing any daily routine, don’t expect new habits to be created in a week, or two or even three. Research suggests that the process requires 66 days (on average) and up to 8 months."
Something about the title suggested it was going to be much less than 21 days; maybe it's the domain name biasing my reading of the title.
PaulRobinson
It took me a few days to become a smoker, and a few weeks to get to the point of not wanting to smoke again (some decades later).
It took me a week or so to start having a healthier breakfast and it become part of my routine, and I've been trying to have healthier lunches for years now (and still regularly fail, normally because at lunchtimes I'm tired, stressed and yearning for comfort foods like sandwiches and snack bars).
I think anyone who believed exactly 21 days was the magic number for all habits, for all people, was grossly naive.
But what I do find is that after 21 days it's no longer novel, it's just what you do, if somebody asks you what you do about X, you no longer say "I'm trying this new thing around X, and…", you tell them your new habit. Identifying that habit as part of who you are is key to it being sticky. For some people, and for some habits, that might be true after a week, or it might take a year, but it's an important step, and if you want that habit to stick you should get to it as fast as you can.
blueyes
B.J. Fogg makes this point in his book Tiny Habits. And his point *is* that you can form a habit in much less than 21 days, let alone 66.
This whole question revolves around the effort/reward ratio of a behavior. When people talk about ~21 days, they're talking about doing a hard thing until it's second nature and seems easy.
But there are other ways to make something seem easy, and there is another component in the ratio: reward. That is, even if effort stays the same, you can wire a habit by making the behavior more rewarding. (This is why people are able to get addicted to a substance after one dose — because they can't forget the state they entered … and it was so easy to get there.)
So the takeaway here is the you can wire habits by decreasing the amount of effort to do something that you think is good for you — eg if you want to hydrate more, place a glass near the sink so you drink water when you get out of bed in the morning — *and* by increasing the reward. The whole trick is getting the ratio right.
Cliche Silicon Valley example. I did an ice plunge, and it gave me a day long plunger's high. I didn't need to plunge for 21 days to get the habit. I started doing it 3 times a week after that, because I knew what I had to do to feel good.
This actually gets to something Huberman calls "duration-path-outcome". Getting clarity on what you have to do (path); how long it will take (duration); and what the payoff is (outcome), can do wonders for motivation. Confusion kills action (and for that matter, all deals, since habits are just deals we make with ourselves). If you can get clarity, reduce the effort, and increase the amount of reward and your confidence in it, I think you can get to new habits really quickly.
Fwiw, I wrote a little bit about forming habits here: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presenc…
LtdJorge
It took me 3 days to fully drop sugar from coffee, at 17 I think. Never liked sweets and pastry, though, but dropping every sugar drink took me more, a couple weeks, specially Nestea.
Edit: took me 1 day to drop the remaining sugar, and plants in general.
egypturnash
It only takes a couple of days for a habit to stop, too. It's real easy to go from "I am a person who does this thing every day" to "I last did it half a week ago and I dunno".
(Addictions are a different story of course.)
ChrisMarshallNY
I've always heard 90 days.
However, as the article says, it really depends on what habit we are trying to establish.
gchamonlive
If I'm counting the days to form a habit, I'm not really interested in forming that habit. That's just a means to an end for me. Maybe I'm waking up earlier to have more time for myself, or I'm developing a reading habit so I can finally finish reading Hegel.
In all these cases the habit is secondary. It's all discipline and pain.
But I think there is a better relationship to be had with habits. One that isn't unfairly tied to productivity. One that I can just enjoy the struggle until I form that routine, or I build up the familiarity or the skill to do something. That kind of attention changes something fundamental about my relationship with what I'm trying to internalize and make a part of myself. It's to learn to be constantly learning and improving without making it a burden or a chore.
sublinear
Trying to define any underlying logic would be to misunderstand what a habit is.
Willingham
For me, a habit is pretty well implanted into my life after 3 months, but only after 3 years do I feel insured that it will stick for life.
agumonkey
Maybe a placebo, but having this 21 days target did help me start habits in .. about 3 weeks.
mjparrott
N=96, only followed for 84 days … has his been replicated? How do they make claims beyond 84 days?
tombert
I lost about 60lbs last year because I was officially "obese" and I wanted to be a bit healthier.
While the exact time that I formed the healthier "habit" is harder to quantify, I definitely felt like the first three weeks were the hardest. It did feel, almost overnight, by the beginning of week four it was relatively easy to keep my calorie intake lower.
layer8
Regardless of that specific question, I found the book a great read.
It also has a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Cybernetics
yawnxyz
it takes maybe 21 minutes to form a tiktok habit
jmyeet
I envy the neurotypicals who can just form habits, 21 days or otherwise.
People are neurotypical rarely if ever understand what those with ADHD go through. The best description I've heard is that people with ADHD don't have habits: we have trauma.
The meaning of that is that neurotypicals have the capacity to simply go into a rom and do something. It almost passively happens. ADHD people do not. Even getting up in the morning involves 50 questions being mentally asked and answered. Do I need to take something to the bathroom? Did I run the dishwasher? Did I leave the heating on? Do I need to do laundry today? And I'm 5 seconds into my day.
A brain that seeks novelty quickly gets bored with reptition. The only way you form habits is by the trauma of the consequences of not having that habit.
_JoRo
What has been most reliable for me has been instead of going from bad habit A to good habit Z, I just replace A with the easiest alternative that is less bad than A.
Obviously, this means going from A to Z can take years instead of weeks. Though, from my own personal experience and from what I see of others, trying to go too quickly from A to Z just results in whiplash and irractic behavior–where I have seen it work is when there is an existential crisis demanding that the behavior change.
m463
I suspect there're other factors to forming habits.
Forming a running habit is probably harder than say heroin.
I also recall from the "atomic habits" book, that you can chain habits together.
The idea was that if you already have a habit of getting out of bed in the morning, you could hydrate. Just say "as soon as I get out of bed, drink a glass of water" and it is easier to form the habit.
yuweiloopy2
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laylomo2
As a person who has learned a few dozen keyboard layouts, the timelines described here check out with my experience. 21 days is kind of the baseline to get to a barely acceptable typing speed, and then there’s a slow long slog as you get more and more comfortable day by day. Depending on how much you practice, it could take between 2-8 months to _really_ get comfortable with a layout.
noam_k
I happen to be taking a Team Lead course, and forming habits came up yesterday. 21 days weren't mentioned explicitly, the time frame was "a few weeks". We were given 6 criteria when forming a habit:
1. Tangible – you need to pick a tangible action that is observable. If you're trying to fix a part of your behavior you can't pick "I'll pay more attention" as a habit to correct yourself, instead you should write a note or say some phrase.
2. Up to me – don't form a habit that requires outside factors. If you want to start jogging, don't ask your neighbor to jog with you. Each time he's not available, you'll have an excuse not to jog.
3. Swallow the frog – don't push it off. This isn't a well defined criteria, the idea is to minimize excuses (like #2).
4. Daily – a habit needs to be formed by taking action every day.
5. Trigger – your action needs a trigger. This can be an internal (feeling hungry), external (a timer on your phone), or contextual (every morning, every time you walk into a conference room).
6. New – it's very hard to form a habit if you've already tried and failed. Pick an action that you haven't already tried.
There was also an important note that changing behavior often requires multiple steps. The instructor gave the example of using dental floss. It's hard to go from nothing to flossing every day, so break it into:
1. Every time you go into the bath room in the evening, pick up the dental floss, and put it down.
2. After picking up the floss becomes a habit, cut a piece of floss, and throw it out.
3. After cutting the floss becomes a habit, floss a few teeth.
And so on.
markus_zhang
IMO, getting a habit might need a "click", a resolution.
I tried many times to get into exercise, but only got into a regular schedule (daily) recently. I don't even know what happened but there is definitely a click. The number of days is not so important. Something inside just told me to do it. Same with fasting. Somehow I got into 72-hour water fast with zero preparation and "habit" a few months ago and have been doing it once or twice a month.
How to get the click is more interesting. I wish I could generate those clicks for things I want to do but not dying to do.
Chipen
Trying to overcome human nature will make the process long, but aligning with it will make it fast. Good habits and bad habits are only relative—more often than not, bad habits align with human nature, while good habits are the opposite.
joelsstafford
In the book The Invisible Game by Zoltan Andrejkovics it says 100 repetitions in esports.