Ep. 32 - How Long to Develop New Habits?

How long does it take to develop a new habit in life?  Join Rob as he discusses time frames for new habits and the mentality required to implement them in your life. 

This question comes to mind after reading a cookbook this morning by Maria Emmerich in the section titled "My Top 11 Tips for (...) Success" when she wrote:

"Existing habits are hard to break, and creating new habits can be uncomfortable.  But make the choice to make today Day 1 of 16.  You can do anything for 16 days."

So, the author here believes 16 days can be the benchmark for new habit development.

Furthermore, she writes:

"Remember, practice does not make perfect; it makes permanent."

This reminds me of why I've historically said about change and consistency.

That consistency of quality time matters more than simply the amount or quantity of time.

Because I was reading a cookbook, this got me thinking about another cookbook that I referenced when trying to implement new eating habits, and Dr. David Perlmutter outlined a 14-day meal plan to facilitate change in his book the Grain Brain Whole Life Plan.

So, how long does it take to form a new habit

• 16 days
• 14 days

Additional studies / resources show:

• 21 Day Habit Timeline: How to Form a Habit in 21 Days (Day by Day!) (Medium)
  • According to Phillippa Lally; a health psychology researcher at University College London, a new habit usually takes a little more than 2 months — 66 days to be exact — and as much as 254 days until it’s fully formed.
  • Article Talked about:
    • Willpower
    • Psychology / Thought Patterns
    • Accountability Partner
    • Size of Habit / Goals / Feasibility (SMART goals)
    • Expecations
• How Long Does It Take for a New Behavior to Become Automatic? (Healthline)
  • According to a 2009 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, it takes 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit.  The study also concluded that, on average, it takes 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic.
  • Article talked about:
    • 21 days to new habit myth
    • Psychology of habits
    • How to change habits
• 7 Steps To Developing A New Habit (Brian Tracy)
  • According to the experts, it takes about 21 days to break or form a habit pattern of medium complexity. Habits which are more complex or difficult to incorporate with your lifestyle may take longer.
  • Article talked about:
    • How to Develop a Habit (7 Steps)
      • Make a Decision
      • Never Allow an Exception to your New Habit
      • Tell Others You are Practicing a New Behavior
      • Visualize Your New Habit
      • Create an Affirmation
      • Resolve to Persist
        • Reward Yourself
• 18 Tricks to Make New Habits Stick (Lifehack) 
  • With a small amount of initial discipline, you can create a new habit that requires little effort to maint

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:06

How long does it take the development of a new habit in life? Today. Today the old truck is starting a little slowly. It is a cold morning on this Monday, November 2nd, 2020. And yeah, this morning we are going to talk about how long it takes to develop new habits. So this question comes to mind after reading a cookbook this morning during my priority work, which was focused on health. And in the cookbook by Maria Emmerich, in the section, uh there was a section where she wrote about her top 11 tips for success. And in that section, she wrote, existing habits are hard to break. And creating new habits can be uncomfortable. But make the choice to make today day one of 16. You can do anything for 16 days. And I failed to mention earlier, but this is episode number 32 of the All Around Growth Podcast. And thank you for tuning in. I am your host, Rob Kaiser, and that is exactly what we're going to talk about this morning is how long it takes to develop new habits. Furthermore, she wrote, remember, practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent. Although oftentimes our habits are habits, oftentimes our habits and patterns are something that can and do change in the short term. If we are consistent about maintaining those in the long run, we eventually embrace this thing called all-around growth and continue to experience a lifestyle that is geared towards health, positivity, and just beneficial things. So because I was reading a cookbook this morning, this got me thinking about another book that had a meal plan in it. And I used this book as well to change my eating patterns and my eating habits. And that book was called Grain Brain Whole Life Plan. I've talked about this before by Dr. David Perlmutter. And he put together a 14-day plan. So while I was reading this morning, I got to thinking just how long does it take to form a new habit? So we've, you know, we've got Maria Emmerich saying 16 days, and Dr. David Perlmutter talking about an eating plan that's 14 days. So I decided to look up a few resources which I've linked to in the show notes, and I will talk about those right now. So in a medium article, well, what what did I bring up in the first place? I think I just in my search engine of choice looked up creating new habits or some generic term search phrase like that. And I found a few articles I've linked to four of them and will utilize those to create my talking points for this morning's show. Now, in a medium article titled 21 Day Habit Timeline, How to Form a Habit in 21 Days, day to day, the key point that stood out in that article, or the key comment, if you will, was as follows. According to Philip Alala Lolly, a health psychology researcher at University College London, a new habit usually takes a little more than two months, 66 days to be exact, and as much as 254 days until it is fully formed. Now, it's a little bit misleading because the article was titled The 21-day habit timeline, but immediately he's talking about and referencing 66 to 254 days. Now the article went on to write about willpower, psychology, thought patterns, an accountability partner, the size of the habit and goals and the feasibility of the habit change, and even sounded like he was going to talk about implementing SMART goals, uh, which would be strategic, measurable, the something, something time bound. And I think that that's a good acronym. You'll have to look it up and correct me. Publicly chastise me for my inability to remember what that means, but that's a great way to approach goals, is a smart goal because they're measurable, time sensitive, and that they're things that can be broken down. Now, he also talked about expectations and keeping them realistic when we are engaging in behaviors to facilitate and encourage new habit development. Now, the next article that I pulled up and made some bullet points from was a Healthline article titled, How long does it take for a new behavior to become automatic? And the key quote in this article reads as follows. Okay, that's very much in line with that previous article from Medium. And the article in Healthline also talked about the myth of 21 days to a new habit, the psychology of habits, and how to change your habits. Okay, so we've got a 21-day myth being busted here, this Healthline article. Now, a third article was an article by Brian Tracy titled Seven Steps to Developing a New Habit. And he writes, according to the experts, it takes about 21 days to break or form a habit pattern of medium complexity. Habits which are more complex or difficult to incorporate with your lifestyle may take longer. And I read that as habits that we have been engaging in for months, years, even decades, those are going to be the hardest ones to break. We've built a lifestyle around the thing which we are trying to change. Expect it to take some time and be easy on yourself when you're not making the progress that you need to make and that you want to make. Because that's really what it's all about. We oftentimes get upset with ourselves for not making the progress that we want to make, but the reality is oftentimes we are making the progress that we need to make. Now, what else did that article talk about? The article talked about how to develop a habit in seven steps. And those steps were make a decision, never allow an exception to your new habit. Three, tell others you are practicing a new behavior. Four, visualize your new habit, five, create an affirmation, six, resolve to persist, and seven, reward yourself. Now, I could expand on that, but I am running short on time, so we are going to jump to the fourth article that I referenced called 18 Tricks to Make Your New Habits Stick. And this is an article in Lifehack or on the Life Hack website, and the key point that I read in that article was as follows. With a small amount of initial discipline, you can create a new habit that requires little effort to maintain. Here are some tips for creating new habits and making them stick. Okay, there's 18 of them, so I'm gonna rattle through them right now. Commit to 30 days. Make it daily. Start simple. Remind yourself. Stay consistent. Get a buddy, an accountability partner. Replace lost needs. Be imperfect. Use a but. Remove temptation. Associate with role models. Run it as an experiment. Swish. Write it down. Know the benefits. Know the pain. And do it for yourself. Now, all of these articles that I just listed are going to be listed in the show notes or linked to in the show notes. Okay, so you can check those out for yourself if there was anything that I just spoke about that resonated with you. Everything's available in the show notes along with my talking points as well. Now the key takeaways from these four articles are as follows, and these are my personal points of interest for what it takes to create a new habit and how long it takes to create a new habit. Alright, so the time frame that people have discussed was anywhere from 14 to 16 days, 21 days, ranging to 66 days to as many as 254 days. Alright, so we got two to three weeks up to 254 days. Now 254 days is 70% of one year. We've basically got two to three weeks up to two-thirds and more of a year. So guys, again, when you're trying to create new habits, take it easy on yourself. Be consistent. That's the most important thing because we are looking at making change that to have the most effective change can take up to two-thirds of a year. So you want to make major lifestyle change, you might as well bank on a whole year. Yeah, a whole year. Give yourself some breaks, give yourself some room for error, and commit to it and stick to it. That one year is going to become the foundation for the rest of your life. Now, new habits are just, they're more than habits. It's a lifestyle change. And as far as I can tell, much of the lifestyle change that's outlined in those articles revolves around an understanding of psychology and an understanding of ourselves. Okay, this is a little bit different than simply changing what type of bread you're eating on your peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We're making a little bit greater of a change from white to wheat, if you will. It's a major, major lifestyle change, and it's important that we understand that and then treat it accordingly. Okay, more key takeaways are having an accountability partner and then associating ourselves with role models. So why is this important? Well, in a nutshell, we become who we surround ourselves with. All right, if you surround yourselves with garbage people, you're gonna become a garbage person. Right? Garbage in, garbage out. That's how it works. You want to you want to become a person who lifts people up, who motivates people, a person who's a role model. If that's the person that you want to be, if that's not the person that you think you already are, or you think you can make some improvements on that course, on that path that you're on, then find other people who motivate you, who inspire you, surround yourselves with them, and if possible, where and when possible, do so in person. Consistency. This is another key takeaway that was mentioned in almost every single article. When we do new things, sometimes it's hard, and sometimes we're not always on point and consistent with them. But again, give yourself a break. New habits take time, new habits are hard, and be consistent with it. If you forget one day, don't beat yourself up over over it. Get to it the next day, or just get to it later that day. That's also okay. Just remember, wash, rinse, repeat. Consistency, consistency, consistency. An additional key takeaway was write it down. And the importance of journaling. Now, I listened to another podcast the other day with Matthew McConaughey, and on the uh Joe Rogan experience, Matthew McConaughey has been journaling for something like 36 years, and he's got them all written down and documented very well. It's impressive, you know? And I believe he I don't know, I believe he just wrote a book. Not sure. It was a good interview. Um lots of good points, especially about journaling. Now, I've been writing and doing things for far more than half of my life, but the one thing that I haven't been consistent about is that journaling element. I've done it in a bunch of different ways, online, with notebooks, a lot of them in boxes, stored in different places. Some of them gotten rid of and trashed entirely. I don't recommend that. But I do recommend journaling. And if you want to hear more about journaling, I've certainly talked about that in past episodes. In a nutshell, the journal that I use and recommend is called the Best Self Journal. Check it out. A couple of the last points that he talked about was know the pain, and what that means to me is that we don't understand hardship anymore in the Western world that we live in. The society that we live in, we don't understand hardship. We don't really know what that means because we've had everything so easy. And I'm not saying that you need to go out and create hardship for yourself and your life, but understand that we really don't have a very clear or comprehensive picture of what it means to experience hardship like a lot of other people in the world. And it's important to keep that in mind so that we can put things in perspective. And also do it for yourself. Because remember, you are the most important person in your life.