In this article, we will debunk two of the biggest misconceptions people have about building habits.
1. How long does it takes actually form or break a habit
You've probably heard at one point or another that it takes 21 days, and it's simply just not true. This misconception actually stems from a guy named Maxwell Maltz. Maltz was a plastic surgeon back in the 60s. He noticed that when he worked with people who got a new nose or added some sort of facial reconstruction, these people would feel uncomfortable when looking in the mirror. Maltz found that it took them about 21 days to get used to what they saw before they were more comfortable with the new faces, and what's funny is that he took this simple observation with little to no science backing it up. He stated that it takes 21 days to form or break a habit in his book psycho-cybernetics, a self-help book that became a best-seller and eventually sold millions of copies. Over time, people assumed that these 21 days to build a habit were true, so how long does it really take to form or break a habit. Well, the recent study conducted at the College of London by Professor Philippa Whaley found that it really depends they looked at a group of
People and tracked how long it took for them to reach a point of maximum automaticity for a variety of different habits; now, for those of you that don't know what automaticity is, it's basically how little thought you need to put into a task, for example, if I told you to tie your shoe you wouldn't have to think about it tough chances are you've tied your shoes enough times that it's already reached a point of maximum automaticity a routine is considered to be a fully embedded habit when it reaches the highest point of automaticity and here's a graph from the study that depicts tis the study found that every single routine out there has what's called the automaticity line. A point where if you've repeated the routine enough times, it becomes as automatic as it's going to get at the point your routine is now a habit, and this study found that it can take anywhere from two weeks to nine months with an average of 66 days to reach this line and it all depends on
How complicated and hard the routine is, for example, the routine of taking her supplements in the morning might only take three weeks before it reaches the line of automaticity before it becomes a fully embedded habit that you don't even have to think about on the other hand a routine of going to the gym and working out might take six months before it hits this line so for all of you out there who think oh I only need to stick to this routine for 21 days or oh I need to complete a 90-day challenge you're gravely mistaken you to have to understand that it's going to be a long, long journey a journey that could potentially take almost a year to complete depending on what sort of habits you're trying to build now this might seem scary for a lot of you how am I gonna stick to these habits without missing a day for an entire year and this brings us the common misconception .
2. If you relapse
If you give in and smoke a cigarette or have a drink or you miss a day of meditation that it's all over, a lot of us have what I like to call the all-or-nothing mindset, we think Oh, once the streak is broken, all of my hard work is gone and because it's gone, I should just relapse over and over again right I might as well enjoy myself, and this is far from the truth a significant number of people in the same study missed a day or two when building their assigned new habits maybe they were too tired or maybe they just forgot the researchers took this opportunity to look at its effects on the automaticity line, and to their surprise, they found that missing a single day does not have a clear effect on your progress the amount of progress loss was almost non-existent however they found that if you continue to relapse if you continue to miss days of going to the gym or doing your daily meditation, then you started losing a lot of progress and the amount of
Progress loss was exponential, so missing two days was significantly worse than missing just one day, and missing a week was way worse than missing two days, so what does this mean for us? This means that we need a shift our mindset; we shouldn't focus on a numerical streak we should not count the number of days it's been since our last relapse the mindset that we should have is that we're gonna try our best to stick to this habit for as many months as it takes until it reaches this line of automaticity because chances are you're going to laughs at one point or another in fact studies have shown that 90% of all people trying to overcome their addictions or build new habits relapse at least once throughout their journey what's important is that you force yourself to go back to building yourgood
Habits the following day, you must resist the urges to binge because that's when you actually start losing progress. As long as you can do this, you will eventually reach the automaticity line. You may have postponed it by a day or two, but as long as you get back up and try again, don't worry about the streak. You will eventually reach that line, and once you hit that line, it becomes automatic, so now that you know how habits work and you also know how long it really takes to form a habit now it's time for us to select a habit together there are dozens of good habits out there that are all beneficial so we're gonna cover a bunch of them and then we're gonna pick one and focus on that one for the rest of the course because remember our strategy is to adopt good new habits so that they can eventually replace your current addiction.
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