(Habits) No magic number for time it takes to form habits (article)
“The same study also looked at how long it takes health care workers to get in the habit of washing their hands: an average of a few weeks.
"There is no magic number for habit formation," says Anastasia Buyalskaya (PhD '21), now an assistant professor of marketing at HEC Paris. Other authors of the study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, include Caltech's Colin Camerer, Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics and director and leadership chair of the T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience, and researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. Xiaomin Li (MS '17, PhD '21), formerly a graduate student and postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, is also an author.
"You may have heard that it takes about 21 days to form a habit, but that estimate was not based on any science," Camerer says. "Our works supports the idea that the speed of habit formation differs according to the behavior in question and a variety of other factors."”
My Takeaways:
Habits take 21 days to form. Or goes the old saying. Turns out the popular “life-hack” was based on more so anecdotal and not scientifically backed evidence. New research shows that habit building varies significantly from person to person and activity to activity.
For example a simple enjoyable task of eating chocolate after every dinner is a very easy habit to form. It gives pleasure immediately and it's relatively easy to do. However the habit of eating 10 stalks of broccoli may be much harder to do given broccoli (at least for most of us) does not have as much of an appealing taste as chocolate. Eating 10 stalks per day can be quite burdensome.
However, habits can be made. Perhaps restructuring our ideas of certain activities can help us promote habit building sooner. Portraying broccoli as something that helps your health and then physically feeling that health benefit later down the line can help us establish that habit!
Full article is here!
#Hobbies #Habits #Time
What are your tips to building a habit?
@sunnyWriting4806
Thanks for sharing this with the community. Interesting information.
For me, creating a "Habit" comes down to what habit I'm exactly trying to form. For instance, I've always been a "night-owl" but am now going to bed MUCH earlier and setting better sleep goals..... Also, I've always been the type that didn't care for "Morning workouts" because I don't care to get up early in the mornings....(and always found I preferred attending AND Teaching afternoon classes).
~I was able to create and form the habit to "Get up earlier" to catch or teach a morning workout by "Going to bed earlier". (So those two came in hand in hand, and I had to create TWO habits at once).
I feel for me it came down to how much I wanted to "fulfill the goals that I had for myself". And because the Group fitness classes that I now like to attend (or teach) are in the mornings, I had to create different habits for that.
I also found that once I laid down earlier and set myself up for earlier and better sleep habits, that my body actually responded well to an earlier bedtime. (Although weekends I still treat myself to "later" nights) ;)
@PoliteOcean
I really need to learn how to do that! I'm such a night owl myself but it really doesn't help when I stay up on work nights waking up all groggy and tired in the morning. You make a great observation that sometimes the way we see habits in relation to other factors in our lives can affect how we pick them up. For you it was the classes and also the realization that waking up early means sleeping early! Once you see that it makes easier to apply tangible steps into building such a habit overtime. Thank you for sharing :)
@sunnyWriting4806
Well "hello fellow night owl"! **Fist bumps**😉
Awesome Summary! You truly grasped what I was trying to relay.
I'm still a night-owl by all means. But, I've just gotten a little different at it to adjust things for myself.
It doesn't come overnight, but little by little. after awhile, its a kind of a 2nd nature.