Does It Really Take 66 Days to Form a Habit?
By: Adriana Sim
Tags: Self Experimentation, Inspiration, Habits, Life, Self Improvement

Does It Really Take 66 Days to Form a Habit?

Science came up with a random number and I decided to put it to the test.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

We all have that moment in our lives when we decide to get our life together. So we do an audit of everything that needs changing and figure out all the intricacies of how we’re going to make those changes happen. Except that this plan has one major flaw:

We try to change everything at once.

Nod if you’ve been doing this for years now. I get it. You’re too impatient to wait around and fix one thing at a time — that will take you ages. If you’ve been living life on a whim, chances are you’re dealing with a lot of unwanted behaviors you’re desperate to change.

In fact, I’m going to take a wild guess here: you’d like to wake up earlier, eat better, work out regularly, stay on top of cleaning, banish procrastination and become a productivity beast. You want to give up some vicious habits, and acquire some shiny new ones.

Well, good luck with that. It won’t be easy. And you’re already setting yourself up for failure by trying to change your entire life overnight.

I’ve been overzealous for years when “starting over.” Nothing stuck. Why exactly? Because I was too stubborn to only pursue one habit at a time. If I had done that ten years ago, I would now have at least a dozen habits in place, instead of just a couple of them. That, of course, is a very rough estimate. I don’t even know if I can operate with that many habits, although studies claim that nearly 40% of our daily activities have a very repetitive nature.

The point is that ten years from now, you’ll wish you started small and stayed consistent.

After a decade of failing, I’ve finally done just that.

But before describing my process, let me tell you how I came up with this seemingly random number — 66 days — for making a new habit stick.

How long does it really take to form a new habit?

Honest answer: no idea.

Popular answer: 21 days.

Sciency answer: 18 to 254 days.

Average sciency answer: 66 days.

Okay, let me explain. You’ve probably heard countless times that it takes 21 days to form a habit. People have been throwing this information around for decades, without actual fact-checking. This 21-day habit myth started as an erroneous observation of Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a cosmetic facial surgeon who studied self-image and concluded that it took most of his patients 21 days to get used to their new looks.

A 2009 study on habit formation found a very different result in real life. 96 subjects chose an eating, drinking, or activity behavior to practice under the same circumstances, over the course of 12 weeks. It took them 66 days on average to make that behavior automatic, and if you look at the individual numbers, there’s a huge variation: between 18 to 254 days.

A lot of questions are left unanswered in this study, though. Do complex habits take longer to form? How much consistency do we really need — is daily practice a must?

Knowing this, it’s safe to assume that we have no idea how long habits actually take to become part of our behavior. But it’s fun to come up with a random number. Like 66 days.

Or, according to Dr. Caroline Leaf, neuroscientist, and researcher of memory formation and the mind-brain connection: 3 cycles of 21 days, hence 63 days. I love her podcasts, but as much as I’d like to take her word for it, I didn’t find any links to back up her claims.

So we’re back where we started: there’s really no way of knowing how long it will take for a habit to stick, since there are so many variables. But we can certainly test different strategies and see what works and what doesn’t.

Make your new habit simple.

Cue: Accomplishing my habit before dinner.

Routine: Daily exercise with a duration of 20 to 30 minutes.

Reward: The habit itself…and eating dinner.

You might be familiar with Charles Duhigg’s work on habits, and his famous Habit Loop: Cue — Routine — Reward.

A “cue” is what triggers the habit in the first place. The cue could be a time of day, boredom, hunger, negative emotions, anything you can think of. When forming a habit, the cue is the tricky part. To this day, I don’t exercise at the same time of the day, because life gets in the way, and my days are sometimes very different.

But I do have a rule: I can’t have dinner if I didn’t exercise that day. And since I tend to do most things at the last possible minute, I often postpone my workout until late in the evening. It’s not ideal, but it works.

The “routine” is usually a 30-minute long workout of either weights, isometric exercises, HIIT, or yoga. For simplicity’s sake, I have a 3 month-long workout program that I follow, but sometimes I’m too exhausted to do a specific scheduled workout, so I change it up.

Finally, the “reward” is the satisfaction I get from staying accountable. I have an accountability buddy to thank for that — my husband(thanks, babe). When the day is over, and the habit is out of the way, we finally sit down to have dinner. This way, we can add that delicious food to the list of rewards, along with better health and higher self-esteem.

Make your new habit easy.

Your chosen habit may be simple, but not always easy to do.

Feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and unmotivated was often the norm these past two months, and I have my non-ideal health to thank for that.

Any other time, I would have given up because “it wasn’t a good time”. I would have vowed to start again in a couple of weeks when things settled down. It turns out there’s a better way to banish all excuses: do the absolute minimum.

Or in Leo Babauta’s words: “Make it so easy you can’t say no.”

So how did I make my exercise habit easy? I allowed myself to do light movements, like static yin yoga or stretches instead of the daily strenuous workout. It didn’t feel like much of an effort, and frankly, I was feeling rather down that I couldn’t do more, but at least I was staying consistent.

It’s been 66 days. Did my habit stick yet?

I stuck with exercising for 66 days and only missed 3 days (which we randomly selected as the number of days we were allowed to skip.) Aside from the fact that I’m incredibly proud of myself for not giving up, I’ve noticed a few things:

PROS:

Exercising daily, even if for just 30 minutes, positively impacted my health and made my back pain go away. This, in turn, motivated me to stick to it long term, since I’ve battled with chronic pain and neuralgia for a long time now.

Exercising is on my mind every day now, without any need for a reminder. I know I have to get it done before the day is over, and it’s non-negotiable.

CONS: