How long does it take to form a habit?

You might have heard that it takes 10,000 hours to master a behaviour. This came into public knowledge from Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book “Outliers”. The theory has since been debunked, but he does make a good point when he says ““Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” 

There are loads of courses, videos, and books promising perfect abs in 30 days, learning spanish in 4 weeks, or making a million dollars in 2 months. It all sounds very nice, and honestly I don’t doubt that some people have achieved these things. The reality though is it’s not the time, it’s the process. I could easily let 30 days pass by, even doing a few sit ups each, and finish the month with a very similar dad bod to the one I already have. I could also commit to a rigid regime of abdominal exercises, caloric deficit, and a lot of cardio and get ripped. However, I would be surprised if I could maintain that and not go back to my usual behaviour once I had achieved my goal.

A study by Lally et al. (2009)* had participants engage in a new healthy eating, drinking or exercise behaviour in the same context for 12 weeks, so for example they ate an apple after lunch everyday or did a 15 minute run before dinner. The study found that those who practiced the new behaviour more often earlier in the study found they were automatically doing the task more quickly than those who became more consistent later and that on average it took 66 days to reach a point where the behaviour was consistent. However, the exercise group took one and a half times as long to reach this level and overall the this times varied between 18 and 254 days. 

Although this is just one study with a small number of participants, it highlights the fact that there is no magic number of days where we will achieve our goal. There are many factors including motivation, accessibility, support, and planning that can change how easily we cultivate new behaviours. So the question isn’t how long does it take to form a habit,  instead it’s what are you doing to form a habit? It’s repetition and consistency. Just like the habits you already have, they exist because you repeat the same things and you continue to them. That goes for forming healthy habits as well as maintaining the bad habits you already have.

So focus on how often and how well you are implementing a new behaviours rather than how long you’ve been doing it. Like the age old adage “Practice makes perfect”,but the best thing is you don’t have to be perfect.

*Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2009). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674

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