Anyone who's ever tried to start an exercise routine, quit smoking, or change a sleep/tardiness pattern knows how powerful a habit can be. Habits seem to be more than behaviours; they seem to be part of who we are.
Habits are essentially patterns of behaviour that become "worn in" to our brains. Someone who wakes up every morning does the same thing every morning; they have that pattern built into their brain in the form of well-used synaptic pathways. But how long does it take to form a habit?
In this article, we'll find out whether you really can turn a new behaviour into a habitual one by repeating it for 21 days—a number often cited as the key to forming a new habit. We'll see where the belief originates and whether there's any hard evidence to back it up.
Considering starting a new habit? Here are some new suggestions you can start:
1. Cooking at home: Have fun with it and add some humour with a new accessory, like this witty oven mitt (I've Got A Knife Oven Mitt).
2. Painting: Whether it's a virtual painting class or just going along with a Bob Ross video, painting will help you feel both occupied and accomplished, as well as serve as a means of expression. This Paint By Numbers Kit Lakeside Village is a good place to start.
3. Colouring: Want to get an artistic release without a ton of work? Colouring can be super relaxing. The Loud & Proud Colouring Book and The Drag Queen Colouring Book are great for doing exactly that—relaxing.
4. Tie-Dying: The art of tie-dye is all the rage now. You can make your own with this Tie-Dye Kit.
5. Gardening: Gardening can be super-soothing. Whether you have a huge plot of land or just a few potted plants, nurturing and growing your own flowers, herbs, fruits, or veggies is really rewarding. Bonus? Your place will smell heavenly! Frida Kahlo Ceramic Planter Pot: Fertile Minds and To Be or Not to Be William Shakespeare Ceramic Planter Pot: Fertile Minds is ideal to entertain your green thumb.
To understand what goes into forming or breaking a real habit and how long that might take, it's helpful to look at what goes on in the brain once pattern-enforcing synaptic pathways are "worn in."
The impulses firing across synapses, or spaces between certain cells that guide communication in the brain, govern everything we do (and think, for that matter). When we repeat any behaviour or pattern enough, the synaptic pathways associated with that pattern get used to being accessed.
As a result, it becomes easier for impulses to travel along those pathways, and the behaviour seems "natural." In other words, to the brain, wake-cigarette-donut, in that order, is practically instinctive. One action triggers the next.
So when someone tells you, as many self-help gurus might, that the habit formation process occurs in three weeks, it's natural to be skeptical. Why specifically three weeks? And how could you form a new instinctive behaviour in such a short period of time?
No one is entirely sure where the 21-day rule originated, but a book called "Psycho-Cybernetics" seems to have set forth the idea. It's a self-help book first published in the 1970s, and in it, you find out you can create or break a habit in just 21 days.
The problem is that the evidence supporting the theory is empirical, or based on experience, not clinical, or based on controlled experiments [source: Benefit].
The theory caught on, though, and others have backed it up since then. In 1983, for instance, a woman chronicled her journey to create positive habits—namely to start flossing and stop criticizing—in "Three Weeks to a Better Me," an article for Reader's Digest.
But does it really work for everyone, or are these just the experiences of a couple of individuals?
The reality is that it is easier to form a new habit than it is to break bad habits. If you repeat new behaviours often enough, those synaptic pathways are going to get worn in. The human brain is a very adaptive piece of machinery. But does that take 21 days? Who knows? Everyone's brain is different, and habit formation also relies on aspects of experience and personality.
Breaking a habit is a lot more complicated because, while parts of those worn-in pathways can weaken without use, they never go away [source: Rae-Dupree]. The slightest provocation can reactivate them [source: Delude]. If you've ever tried to quit smoking, you already know this. You can go a year without a cigarette and then give in one time, and bam, the habit comes right back.
The best you can do, then, is to form a new, parallel pattern, like exercising when you feel stressed, rather than indulge in the old pattern, which triggers "cigarette" in response to stress.
So what about these 21 days?
If you've ever tried to break any habit at all, you can get a good feel for the reality of the 21-day rule by examining the following statement made by the "Self Improvement Mentor":
Or in this statement made by the writers of the self-help book "The Secret," referring to a variation of the habit rule that says it takes 30 days:
Wow, really?
Changing a habit is never that simple. If it were, those struggling with food would have healthy habits, alcoholics would never relapse, and everyone would adhere to a healthy diet 100 percent of the time.
For most people, staying away from a bad habit is a lifetime effort, backed up by the fact that those well-worn synaptic pathways never go away. There's no apparent scientific reason why it would take three weeks to break an old habit or make a new one.
Depending on your unique physical and mental health, it could take a few weeks, five days, or nine months.
How to Make a New Habit and Break a Bad Habit
Building habits is not easy, but there are some steps you can take to increase your chances of success in the endeavour, including:
- Take small steps. Don't try to do everything at once. So instead of "I'm going to exercise every day," start with "I'm going to exercise twice a week."
- Only try to change one habit at a time. Instead of "I'm going to quit eating junk food, start exercising, and go to sleep at 10 p.m. instead of 2 a.m.," start with "I'm going to quit eating junk food."
- Write down the habit you want to change and be specific. Rather than writing "I will exercise," write, "I will start walking 30 minutes, twice a week, on Monday and Thursday, and I will wake up at 7 a.m., so I can walk before work on those days."
- Repeat the behaviour you're aiming for as often as you can. The more you repeat a behaviour, the more likely it is that it will become "instinctive."
via .howstuffworks.com
