Habit formation is extremely beneficial for our health and wellness. Healthy habits allow us to achieve our goals while thinking very little as they become second nature.
However, forming new behaviors and good habits takes a little time and effort. A 2009 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology concluded that it takes 18 to 254 days for someone to form a new habit, with 66 days needed for the habit to become automatic.
While it won’t happen overnight, it’s important to remember that you can build new habits successfully if you stay determined and consistent. Plus, some people are better at building new habits than others.
So, the habit formation process will likely vary from person to person. If you want to form a new habit, give yourself time, and don’t get disheartened if success doesn’t happen immediately.
What Are Habits?
Before you work on building a new habit, you first need to understand what habits are. Habits are regularly repeated behaviors that require little thought.
New habits are often formed with the help of contextual cues. An example would be putting on your trainers (contextual cue) and then going to the gym (healthy habit).
Without realizing it, our daily lives are filled with habits, from eating breakfast to brushing our teeth. These are habits that are essential to our daily life and become automatic.
Many daily habits are helpful and allow us to live happy, healthy lives. While some habits formed can be bad for us and lead to problems.
Bad habits include smoking, drinking too much, and eating takeaways too often. While drinking water and exercising regularly are healthy habits that can significantly improve our lives.
Habits can have a positive or negative effect on your life. And, habit change is tough once it has become part of your routine.
Benefits of Forming Habits
Building habits and new behaviors into your day that is good for you is extremely beneficial. And the good news is that by making health habitual, this behavior will continue even after motivation has left you. The benefits of building good habits include:
Free Up Brain Power
Developing automatic behaviors (habits) frees the brain to concentrate on different things. After a while, habits become automated actions that don’t require a lot of conscious thought.
Habit formation makes usual daily activities a lot simpler. They allow your life to become more streamlined and less stressful. An example would be getting into the habit of preparing your lunch for the next day.
This removes the need for you to rush around in the morning and helps you to stick to a healthy eating routine instead of buying something unhealthy in a shop.
Improve Mental Health and Physical Health
Forming a new habit can help you gradually build your health and well-being. Habits like eating more vegetables and exercising regularly will give you a new appearance and increase energy levels.
These can also have powerful influences on your mental health, giving you the resilience to face what life throws at you.
Increase Your Chance of Attaining Goals
If you have a goal in your sight, spending time on habit formation is well worth it. For example, if you want to lose weight, building a new habit of going to the gym three times a week and removing sugar from your diet will help you succeed.
If you want to become an early riser and get out of bed one hour earlier each day, developing the habit of a healthy sleep routine is helpful. While habit formation does take time, the rewards are worth it in the long run.
You’ll never stay sufficiently motivated, so putting effort into forming a new automatic behavior will guide you through the tough times.
How Long Does it Take to Form a Habit?
According to research, habit formation got better over a three-month period, especially for those that stayed consistent with beneficial behaviors.
This helps to explain why some people can form a new habit more easily than others. Factors for success include individual differences, personal circumstances, and environmental components.
The time allotted to building a new habit can also have an effect. Here are a few things to consider if you want to work out how long it’ll take you to form a habit:
Personality Type
Research shows that personality traits can affect habit formation. For example, some people find it easier than others because they learn faster.
Another person might find habit formation easier because they are highly conscientious and know that healthy habits will help them in other areas of their life.
Type of New Behavior
Some new habits are easier to form than others. The more complex a habit is, the harder it is to stay motivated, so it turns into a habit.
For example, reading a page of a book daily is an easier habit to build than jogging for 30 minutes daily.
One main reason for this is that reading while sitting on a comfy sofa is nicer than going out into the cold and forcing your legs to jog around the block.
Your Current Habits and Lifestyle
Your current habits and lifestyle will affect how easy it is for you to form a new habit. If you currently do zero exercise and eat take-out every day, forming a new habit of going to the gym and eating healthily may take longer than someone who already does a little exercise.
Who Said it Takes 21 Days to Form a Habit?
The general understanding of habit formation is that it takes 21 days to make one stick. Research shows that this theory can be traced back to a book by Dr. Maxwell Maltz in 1960.
The book was called Psycho-Cybernetics, referencing Maltz’s observation of himself and his patients.
The observation was how it commonly took 21 days to dissolve an old mental image and get a new one to stick.
Over 30 million copies of this book were sold, and this ‘‘observation’’ became an accepted fact in many people’s minds over time.
Examples of Healthy Habits
Self-improvement needs the formation of healthy habits. A good habit supports your goals and your mental and physical health. Examples of positive habits worth building include:
More Exercise
Regular exercisehas many benefits for mental and physical well-being. Turning it into a habit can help you lose weight, improve your mood, lower stress levels, sleep better, and feel more confident about yourself.
Eating a Nutritious Diet
A healthy diet helps with weight loss and will balance out energy levels. Aim to cook meals from scratch incorporating fresh fruits, vegetables, lean protein, and whole grains.
Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness meditation guides you to focus on the now and how to let go of negative thoughts and worries.
Research shows that regular practice helps to reduce stress, boost memory, increase focus and strengthen relationships. Practicing for a few weeks will turn this into a beneficial habit.
Practicing Gratitude
Gratitude is taking the time to appreciate and be thankful for all the good things in your world.
This can even be small things like your health, a family member, or a good friend. Some people choose to write in a gratitude journal so they can reflect during tough times.
Building Meaningful Relationships
Another good habit to develop is working on the relationships around you. This includes making time for friends, family, and social activities.
Having a strong social support system is beneficial to your mental health. Good friends can help you stay motivated and positive through life’s ups and downs.
Creating a Healthy Bedtime Routine
A regular bedtime routine lets your brain know when it’s time to sleep, helps you relax, and helps you fall asleep faster.
Your mind and body will be refreshed each day after getting enough sleep. Spending a few minutes in the evening meditating and listening to soothing music are great habits to build.
How to Build New Habits into Your Life
The stability phase is where a habit is established and at its strongest. Moving forward, the behavior will carry on with minimal conscious effort.
To form a new habit, you need to develop strategies and persist. While it won’t be easy, it’s well worth it when a new behavior is triggered automatically. Follow these steps to build habits that stick:
Set a Realistic Goal
Research has shown that non-specific goals like ‘‘I’ll exercise regularly’’ often don’t work. You’ll benefit from pinning down exactly what you want to do and how often you do it.
An example would be ‘‘I’ll walk for 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week, and do weights in the gym 2 days a week.’’ Now you have a detailed, bite-sized plan to know what you’re doing each day.
Create a Cue-Based Plan
Now you have a goal; it’s time to create a cue that’ll help you to follow through. Research has proven that you’re more likely to achieve your goals if you’re cued to do them.
So, you have your plan to ‘‘walk for 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week.’’ This is great, but it’d be even better if you add in a cue like ‘‘after eating lunch, I’ll walk for 30 minutes, 5 days a week.’’
This cue-based plan reduces the chances of you forgetting to follow through with the new habit. You have the end of your lunch as your cue, which signals it’s time to go for a walk.
Break Big Habits Down
If you’re starting from zero exercises, maybe walking 5 days a week will be too much and overwhelm you before you’ve begun.
A way to overcome this is to start small and gradually build up. You could start walking for 30 minutes a day after lunch, 2 days a week.
Then after a few weeks, add one more day and walk for 30 minutes, 3 days a week. Along the way, your fitness and motivation will increase, which makes it easier to achieve your original goal of walking 5 days a week.
Never Miss Twice
Even top athletes fall off the wagon occasionally. But, if this happens, they jump back on the wagon as quickly as possible.
Missing your habit routine for one day doesn’t mean you’ve failed. There’ll be no impact on your long-term success as long as you bounce back and get back on track.
Aim for consistency, not perfection. If you can’t make your walk one day, let it go and get back into your walking routine the next day.
Stay Focused and Patient
Staying patient when building a new habit can be tough. This is especially true if you have setbacks or don’t see the expected progress.
Try to stick to a pace you can sustain. If you’re trying to increase your bicep curl weight in the gym, starting with a little lower weight and building up slowly is okay. This added patience will allow you to get there safely.
To help you stay focused, try visualization, where you imagine yourself achieving your goals and feel how it feels. Another strategy is positive reinforcement, giving yourself a small reward after reaching each milestone.
Seek Social Support
Enlist support from family, friends, and those on a similar journey. Having the support of someone going through the same thing can be hugely beneficial.
If your goal is to turn exercise into a habit, join a walking group or fitness class. Getting the work done with others can be hugely motivating and help you feel like you’re not alone.
Other people’s good habits will rub off on you. So, if you want to start running regularly, hanging out in a running group can make a world of difference.
Tips for Breaking Bad Habits
Changing a specific behavior takes time. Often, the hardest part is staying committed, especially when you fall off the wagon.
The way forward is to establish concrete routines and realistic goals. Trying to change everything immediately can often be too much, too soon. Follow these tips to break a habit:
Set Clear Intentions
To successfully break a habit, you must set clear intentions for the behavior you want to change. If your bad habit is leaving clothes all over the bedroom floor, set a goal of tidying your room twice a week for 30 minutes.
Replace the Bad Habit with a Good One
If your bad habit is snacking on crisps and chocolate in the evening, try swapping these for vegetable sticks dipped in hummus and berries in low-fat yogurt. Instead of reaching for a beer, try replacing it with a low-calorie, non-alcoholic beer.
Avoid People or Activities Linked to Your Habit
We often associate certain behaviors with certain people or places. If you abuse alcohol, avoid going to the pub and hanging around people who do this. Sometimes, breaking a habit means leaving parts of your old life behind.
Give Yourself Time
It’s important to remember that change doesn’t happen immediately. Bad habits are often ingrained in our way of life, and it takes time to train yourself to do something differently.
Know that there will be obstacles and setbacks, but that’s ok. Stay persistent, and you’ll eventually be free of the bad behavior.
Don’t Be Afraid to Seek Professional Help
If you’ve tried everything you can to break unwanted behavior without success, consider talking to your GP. They can refer you to a therapist who can pinpoint possible causes and help you develop new responses.
Habits develop for several reasons. Sometimes they can be in response to past trauma or deep distress that is hard to deal with on your own.
A therapist will help guide you toward change in a way that works for you.
How Long Does it Take to Change a Bad Habit?
There is no definitive time frame for how long it takes to break a habit. It can vary greatly depending on the personal circumstances of an individual.
The factors that affect how long it takes to break a bad habit include:
- Your motivation level
- How long you’ve had the habit
- Whether the behavior is fully integrated into your life
- The rewards you get from it eg, physical, emotional, or social
- Does another behavior reinforce the habit
For example, people who smoke socially may have started this habit so they could make friends at work. The reward here is extra social connection.
So, if the person wanted to break this habit, they’d have a hard time if they found another way to connect with people.
Evidence-based research from 2009 concluded that anywhere between 18 - 254 days was a realistic timeframe for habit-breaking.
This study looked at 96 adults who wanted to change their bad behavior. One participant succeeded in 18 days, but the others needed a longer time to adjust.
Conclusion
A general rule of thumb is that it takes the average person around three months to form a habit. But, be aware the amount of time can vary depending on the individual.
However long it takes you, it’s still worth the effort to build good habits. Stay focused, committed, and consistent, and you can achieve anything.
As time goes on, you can keep stacking up the good habits and breaking ones that don’t serve you, to live a long, healthy, and happy life.
Want to form a habit of sleeping better and longer? Try the BetterSleep app for guided meditations, soothing music, and calming bedtime stories.
