5 steps to develop new healthy habits
Conventional wisdom tells us that it takes about four weeks to build a habit. But is that really true? If you’re trying to eat more nutritiously or live an anti-aging lifestyle generally, how long will it take for a new healthy habit to stick?
There’s no doubt that establishing regular healthy habits (or breaking bad ones) can improve your longevity. Once healthy behaviors — like quitting smoking, drinking only in moderation, or getting regular exercise — are entrenched into your regular schedule, you’re more likely to do them consistently.
Despite that, there’s surprisingly little research on how much time is actually required to establish a new habit. University College London epidemiologist Phillippa Lally examined the habit formation process in everyday life.
How Is a Habit Defined?
Doing something for the first time takes preparation and intention. With consistency, less attention, thought, or effort must be paid. Lally describes a habit as a behavior that is repeated often enough so that over time, less conscious thought is required to make it happen. Rather, cues in a person’s environment or situations begin to trigger the behavior as an automatic response: it’s bedtime, so you brush your teeth (teeth-brushing has thus become a habit).
The paper cites the following characteristics of an automatic behavior or habit:
– It’s efficient
– You’re less aware that you’re doing it
– It’s unintentional
– It’s less controllable
How Long Does It Take?
According to Lally’s study, past research suggests that a behavior has become habitual once it has been “performed frequently (at least twice a month) and extensively (at least 10 times)”. Lally’s own research discovered it can take much longer than that.
A total of 82 adults were studied for a period of 12 weeks. They were asked to choose a healthy activity, drinking, or eating behavior that was not already part of their daily routine, and to perform it at a similar time or place each day. They were to identify a cue or situation that could prompt the behavior, as long as that cue happened only once daily. Each subject was to record on a website whether or not they performed the potential habit. No reward of any kind was offered as an incentive for repeating the behavior.
Subjects chose actions like running 15 minutes before dinner, eating a piece of fruit with lunch, or meditating.
The median length of time it took for a habit to become automatic was 66 days. The range, however, was 18 to 254 days for the habit to be established. In fact, about half of the subjects did not perform their chosen action consistently enough to create a habit.
Interestingly, increased repetition of an action does not always yield stronger habits.
Lally found that consistently repeating a behavior early in the process was more effective in creating an automatic action, than repetition later on. Further, after a certain time, the habit-forming process plateaus so additional repetition does not further solidify the habit. The relationship between repetition and strength of habit is therefore not linear in this study.
What This Means for You
Unlike the four-week time frame often cited as a threshold for establishing a habit, Lally’s research suggests that many more days and weeks of diligence might be necessary. You needn’t be discouraged by this finding; just recognize that behavior change is challenging, and look for ways to support your lifestyle tweaks—performing them consistently and often—to help make them permanent.
Here are some tips, backed by research, for forming new healthy habits.
The best way to form a new habit is to tie it to an existing habit, experts say. Look for patterns in your day and think about how you can use existing habits to create new, positive ones.
For many of us, our morning routine is our strongest routine, so that’s a great place to stack on a new habit. A morning cup of coffee, for example, can create a great opportunity to start a new one-minute meditation practice. Or, while you are brushing your teeth, you might choose to do squats or stand on one foot to practice balance.
Many of us fall into end-of-the-day patterns as well. Do you tend to flop on the couch after work and turn on the TV? That might be a good time to do a single daily yoga pose.
B.J. Fogg, a Stanford University researcher and author of the book “Tiny Habits,” notes that big behavior changes require a high level of motivation that often can’t be sustained. He suggests starting with tiny habits to make the new habit as easy as possible in the beginning. Taking a daily short walk, for example, could be the beginning of an exercise habit. Or, putting an apple in your bag every day could lead to better eating habits.
In his own life, Dr. Fogg wanted to start a daily push-up habit. He started with just two push-ups a day and, to make the habit stick, tied his push-ups to a daily habit: going to the bathroom. He began by, after a bathroom trip, dropping and doing two push-ups. Now he has a habit of 40 to 80 push-ups a day.
British researchers studied how people form habits in the real world, asking participants to choose a simple habit they wanted to form, like drinking water at lunch or taking a walk before dinner. The study, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, showed that the amount of time it took for the task to become automatic — a habit — ranged from 18 to 254 days. The median time was 66 days!
The lesson is that habits take a long time to create, but they form faster when we do them more often, so start with something reasonable that is really easy to do. You are more likely to stick with an exercise habit if you do some small exercise — jumping jacks, a yoga pose, a brisk walk — every day, rather than trying to get to the gym three days a week. Once daily exercise becomes a habit, you can explore new, more intense forms of exercise.
Habit researchers know we are more likely to form new habits when we clear away the obstacles that stand in our way. Packing your gym bag and leaving it by the door is one example of this. Wendy Wood, a research psychologist at the University of Southern California, says she began sleeping in her running clothes to make it easier to roll out of bed in the morning, slip on her running shoes and run. Choosing an exercise that doesn’t require you to leave the house — like situps or jumping jacks — is another way to form an easy exercise habit.
Dr. Wood, author of the book, “Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick,” calls the forces that get in the way of good habits “friction.” In one study, researchers changed the timing of elevator doors so that workers had to wait nearly half a minute for the doors to close. (Normally the doors close after 10 seconds.) It was just enough of a delay that it convinced many people that taking the stairs was easier than waiting for the elevator. “It shows how sensitive we are to small friction in our environment,” said Dr. Wood. “Just slowing down the elevator got people to take the stairs, and they stuck with it even after the elevator went back to normal timing.”
Dr. Wood notes that marketers are already experts in reducing friction, inducing us to spend more, for example, or order more food. That’s why Amazon has a “one-click” button and fast-food companies make it easy to supersize. “We’re just very influenced by how things are organized around us in ways that marketers understand and are exploiting, but people don’t exploit and understand in their own lives,” she said.
Rewards are an important part of habit formation. When we brush our teeth, the reward is immediate — a minty fresh mouth. But some rewards — like weight loss or the physical changes from exercise — take longer to show up. That’s why it helps to build in some immediate rewards to help you form the habit. Listening to audiobooks while running, for example, or watching a favorite cooking show on the treadmill can help reinforce an exercise habit. Or plan an exercise date so the reward is time with a friend.
