S03E66 How Long Does It Take to Form A Habit? Making Routines Stick

Ever wondered how long it really takes to form a habit? Ever tried to kick off a new routine, only to have it fizzle out after a couple of weeks? Join us in this episode where we challenge popular misconceptions and delve into the science behind habit formation. From the myth of the 21-day rule to understanding the concept of limbic friction and activation energy, we're on a mission to understand what it really takes to develop a routine that sticks.

We'll also be unpacking the real science behind habit formation. Discover the role motivation and rewards play in the complex process of habit creation, and get tips on how to make activities intrinsically rewarding.

Plus, the weekly thankful is wall balls. Just kidding, I would never have wall balls as my weekly thankful. I really hate wall balls. Tune in and get inspired to kick start your own habit formation journey today!

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S03E66 How Long Does It Take to Form A Habit? Making Routines Stick

[00:00:00] Sam Rhee: When does something become regular enough that you call it a habit in your life? For example, at least three to four days a week, I go to the gym to work out at 6 a.m. I've done this for a couple of years now, and while I don't necessarily feel happy getting up to go to the gym, the mental effort it takes to force myself to get up and go to the gym now is less than the effort it took a couple years ago, when I first started going.

I can say with confidence that going to the gym is now routine. Some people might even call it a habit. But how long did it take for it to become a routine or a habit? 21 days? 66 days? 284 days?

I have other things I want to do regularly, like get this podcast finished in a timely fashion and not at the last minute every week, or to try to get more shoulder rehab work in every day. I also want to stick to healthier foods, especially on the weekends. How long do I have to do these things before they become routine or habits?

We have a lot of habits in our lives. In fact, it's estimated that 50 to 70 percent of our lives is just made up of regular routines. And it turns out there is a ton of research and internet chatter out there about how long it takes to make a habit stick. And I recently saw a Wall Street Journal article about the science of habit formation, which kicked this podcast off.

So let's do a quick mini dive into four things. One, what is a habit exactly? Two, what are the common misconceptions about forming habits? Three, what are some of the more correct science based realities about forming habits? And finally, how can we use this knowledge to help us create new and better habits for ourselves?

And then even maybe I might be able to habit my way out of stopping procrastinating on all these things on my to do list. Or at least some of these tips can give me some hope.

To open this topic, there is a fair amount of conflicting data out there. The deeper dive I took into learning about habit formation, the more confused I got. Everyone on the internet seems to be an expert on behavior and habits and they have their own opinions based on their take on the literature. So if you happen to find stuff out there that contradicts what I'm saying, that's totally fine.

None of this stuff is set in stone. My goal here is to try to keep it as simple and practical as possible, which means we're not going to go too far into the weeds about this. The first thing is, is that there's even debate about what is the definition of a habit.

Some researchers argue that many things we do every day are just really regular routines and not habits. So what do they classify the difference between a routine and a habit? Well, technically they say routines are behaviors that we do regularly or even frequently.

But they require mental intention and effort. In contrast, a habit is something that is so automatic that it almost takes effort to actually not do that activity. So right now, for example, I have a routine where I do Crossover Symmetry every day, which are these elastic bands used to strengthen your shoulders, especially after an injury.

And I've done this for probably about six weeks. But it does take me a certain amount of mental effort to force myself to do this. Another term for limbic friction is activation energy. This is the motivational force that I need to muster up so that I can get off my butt to do something.

And as a quick side note, Andrew Huberman has a great episode on his Huberman Lab podcast on habits formation. It's episode number 53. It is almost two hours though, so be prepared for a very deep dive about the neuroscience between behaviors and habits.

Anyway, for example, about activation energy, doing Crossover Symmetry for my shoulders is now a routine, but maybe it hasn't reached the habit level yet.

The mental energy to force myself to do this shoulder rehab is certainly less now than it was six weeks ago, but is definitely not ingrained in my daily life at this point, and I would love to drop doing shoulder rehab in a hot minute if I wasn't actually worried about my shoulder.

However, for many of our routines, at some point when we do it for so long, The automatic mode becomes so strong that it takes very little activation energy to do it. That's really what a habit is. For example, brushing my teeth in the morning is 100 percent a habit. It takes almost no mental energy to do it.

It would feel weird or even wrong if I didn't do it. That's the definition of a habit. So I would say that me going to the gym in the morning is more than just a regular routine, but it's probably not quite a habit.

There's still some limbic friction or activation energy that I need in forcing myself to go, especially on certain mornings. But if I don't go for more than a day or two to the gym, it really does bother me a lot.

So anyway, I won't get caught up anymore in the details of habit versus routine.

Practically speaking here, my goal is to start good routines, do them until the mental energy required becomes less, and then hopefully these routines will become very close to automatic for me. Whether at that point they're routines or habits, I don't really care about the semantics. I'll just mix up the terms habit and routine for this episode.

Okay, so now that we discussed habit and routines, let's talk about some common ideas about how to form habits. The first most common idea out there is that it takes 21 days of doing an activity for it to become a habit. And this concept actually came from a study by a plastic surgeon back in the 1960s.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz wrote a book called Psycho Cybernetics, which was one of the first self help books out there. And based on observing his plastic surgery patients after surgery, Dr. Maltz thought it took his patients at least 21 days for them to psychologically let go of their pre-surgical mental image of themselves and then to fully accept their new appearance after surgery. So first of all, this had nothing to do with forming a new habit. And second of all, there wasn't any real scientific data about this.

It was really just a surgeon noticing, when did people start feeling comfortable with a change about themselves? And then other people picked up this observation, and then they started applying it to other things, like habit formation.

So if this 21 day number is basically just made up, then what is the real number that it takes to create a habit? So based on the best study out there that everyone references, the answer out there is extremely unsatisfying, as most answers in life generally are. And that answer is, it depends.

This study in 2010 by Phillippa Lally and other researchers suggested it can be as short as 18 days, or as long as 254 days for an activity to become a habit.

And that's an incredibly huge range, which is not very helpful if you're like me trying to figure out how long you need to make a new habit for yourself. So this study took 96 volunteers and asked them to choose a new healthy eating, drinking, or exercise behavior that they wanted to make a habit.

So examples included drinking a glass of water after breakfast to running 15 minutes before dinner. And then these volunteers were asked to report how regularly did they do this new activity. And then they were given a 12 part questionnaire where they measured how automatic this activity became.

39 of the 96 volunteers were consistent enough with their new activity that they were actually evaluated for habit formation. And the average time that it took for these volunteers to report that the activity reached a certain amount of automatic behavior is what the researchers classified as a habit. And this took about 66 days on average. The fastest habit formers took 18 days and the slowest habit formers took 254 days.

So there were three takeaways that I got from this study. Number one, there is a lot of failure when it comes to trying to make a new habit. Only 39 out of the 96 volunteers stuck with this activity well enough to even be studied and make this chosen activity a habit. That means 57 or almost 60 percent of the volunteers gave up, dropped out, or didn't participate sufficiently to complete the study.

So even something simple like eating a piece of fruit for lunch every day is hard for people to do regularly, even when we know it's good for us, and even when these volunteers knew that people were studying what they were doing.

The other thing is it took some people 254 days to make this activity a habit. That's a really long time. Even the average of 66 days is a long time.

The other takeaway is that simpler and comfortable activities are always easier to make into habits than complex, uncomfortable activities, which is pretty obvious.

So the volunteers who chose drinking water after breakfast as their habit choice reached habit status much faster and easier than those who chose running 15 minutes a day after dinner.

The last takeaway, interestingly enough, is that being perfect in the activity did not increase the success of turning that activity into a habit. So based on the study results... If people miss an occasional day, that didn't actually translate into less successful habit formation or lengthen the time it took to make an activity, or lengthen the time it took to make an activity a habit.

So, alright, we know 21 days isn't true about making habits, and we have some real takeaways from a scientific study about how to make habits. How does any of this apply to what you and I are trying to do to make our lives better?

Well, here are a couple of takeaways that I took away that I thought was really helpful from the science of habit formation.

So the first thing is, let's give ourselves some grace. We know it's okay to fail. In fact, based on the data, failing to make a new habit stick, is way more common than succeeding. But I think the flip side to knowing it's okay to fail is that you shouldn't give up. You should try again.

For example, I've tried and failed at least three times in the past with yearly challenges to start drinking more water every day. But it was only until this year that it was much easier than before and I started drinking water more regularly. So my previous failures helped me finally to achieve success with this habit.

My next tip is that what your motivation is and how much motivation you have plays a big factor in habit success. So one reason there was probably such a higher failure rate in this study was that these volunteers were being pushed to do these new activities, not because they wanted to, but because these researchers wanted them to.

I got really motivated to do my own shoulder rehab once I started experiencing pain at night. Wanting to fix that pain gave me a lot of motivation to start working regularly on my shoulder rehab. And then when my shoulder started getting better, that was even more motivation to keep it up. Ask yourself, is this new habit being forced on you by others?

Or are you having negative emotions about this activity? Because having these issues probably means the chance of success is fairly low. Find how you can make associated emotions positive. Find good motivations for your habits.

And your chances of having that habit stick successfully will have increased exponentially.

The next tip is lowering the activation energy it takes to do something can be really helpful in sticking to something more regularly. Think of catalysts that make it easier to stick to your routine. So laying out your clothes the night before for the gym is a common trick that a lot of people do. Or keeping the Skittles and Hershey Kisses out of the house is a really popular way to stick to a healthier diet.

Another related tip is knowing what habits can lead to helping you with other habits. So Huberman calls these helper habits, linchpin habits. These are habits which make other habits easier to execute. For example, when I can get to sleep earlier and not stay up late, that linchpin habit of sleeping by a certain time makes waking up to go to 6am class a lot less painful, and I'm much less likely to hit the snooze button and cancel my class reservation.

We shouldn't always need superhuman energy just to get our routines done. Creating these synergies between our routines and smoothing our daily path, if possible, will make it easier for us to do the right things every day.

The next tip is you can use rewards to help motivate yourself for your daily routines, and that can be helpful sometimes. But be careful that these rewards don't become the end goal in doing an activity. So if you buy a latte for yourself as a reward for going to the gym in the morning, that might make you go, that might make you go more regularly to the gym.

But then what happens if you get sick of lattes? Do you still really want to go to the gym? What if you have to keep bundling in other rewards for yourself for going to the gym? When does that rabbit hole end? At some point, we need to find ways to make the activity itself intrinsically rewarding, where we want to do these things for themselves. Otherwise, these activities will never become habits for us.

And finally, the last tip, and I think the most useful for forming new habits, is something you may have heard athletes doing to be successful in their sports. Pre visualization or mental simulation. So whatever habit you want to do, actually imagine doing that activity, all the little steps from start to finish, and this can be helpful especially for the more complex routines.

So a study out of UCLA showed pre visualization about executing on good study habits, not just visualizing a good grade for an exam, reduced anxiety, and increased the likelihood that these students would actually get good grades on exams.

For example, for pre visualizing my gym routine to help myself, I could mentally rehearse myself waking up, getting out of bed, changing my clothes, getting ready in the bathroom, getting in my car, and driving to class. Then when I actually have to do the task in the morning, the memory of that pre visualization lowers the activation energy and mental effort required because my brain is sort of following what I already imagined.

So hopefully these tips will help us on the right path to making our lives better, one new habit at a time. Be kind to ourselves, take the long view in making ourselves better, and never give up. Thank you.

My weekly thankful is Crossover Symmetry. I don't have any specific interest or investment in the product, but as I mentioned, I've been dealing with this left shoulder issue with severe impingement for a while. I kept working out through pain and achiness for months, and it got worse as I kept ignoring it and kept grinding through workouts.

And finally, two months ago, the shoulder pain was not only constant like a toothache in my shoulder, but the pain was even there when I would try to sleep. And when I started to need around the clock Advil just to keep that pain down, and I hate taking Advil, I knew I was in trouble. I never took my shoulder problem seriously until I got to that point.

Finally, I stopped doing shoulder workouts and I started using Crossover Symmetry. seriously doing it every day for 20 to 30 minutes. Crossover Symmetry, as I mentioned, are a set of resistance bands along with exercises which go through a bunch of movements designed to strengthen the rotator cuff and scapula.

And these exercises, while incredibly boring, have really helped me tremendously. I knew I had some shoulder and scapular muscle imbalances, but I never realized how bad they were and how much I neglected these muscles until I started doing these exercises.

It took a long time, but now I can tell from a week to week basis how much progress I've made.

And I've just gotten to the point where I started doing light wall balls and dumbbell presses again, pain free. And it's funny because I never thought I'd be happy to actually be doing wall balls.

I almost made this weekly thankful about wall balls, but I still hate wall balls so much that I couldn't bring myself to do that.

But it just goes to show, sometimes you don't appreciate what you have until it's taken away. And at this point, I think I'll be doing Crossover Symmetry for a long time.

So what new habits would you like to make? What tips do you have about starting new habits? Let me know. As always, DM me @BotoxAndBurpeesPodcast on Instagram, or leave a comment at YouTube.com/@BotoxAndBurpees. Thank you.