How long to Establish a Habit?
Thursday, June 21, 2007
I've been involved recently in an interesting discussion with Stephen over at HDBizBlog, regarding the time it takes to establish a new habit. The accepted wisdom is it takes 21 days - but researching into this has revealed some interesting points. The full discussion can be found here & here. The main points are:
Maxwell Maltz wrote a book in 1960 called Psycho-Cybernetics. It was in this book that the idea of 21 days first arose.
All other sources quote this book as proof of the 21 day time frame.
The book seems to offer no firm scientific evidence that it takes 21 days to establish a new habit - just the authors empirical observations.
So a whole raft of self help literature all quote a single source from over 40 years ago, a source that does not seem scientifically based. Is this something we should be accepting when trying to change our habits?
Don't always accept conventional wisdom - do your own research. If your habit takes longer to establish you are not a failure - some habits can take longer depending on a multitude of factors.
More on habits later...
5 comments:
@Stephen: "A lie told often enough becomes the truth." - A quote from Lenin. It all seems to be "Proof by Assertion", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion
There are many examples of Groupthink, think of how many people believed blacks were not human and should be slaves? How many believed that Jews were inferior just because Hitler said so? How about religion and cults? Why are there so many? Can they all be true?
Mythology is a human tradition based our tendency to believe people in power (like our parents, teachers, etc.) and our tendency to want easy solutions to problems. And at the same time, we don't believe what we don't want to till there is so much evidence in our face it hurts personally. How many people still think Global Warming is a myth?
We are not taught or truly encouraged to be independent thinkers, some of us just really try.
Check out my post on the 21 days to a habit myth here.
http://www.neatliving.net/blog/2007/06/mythbusting_new.html
Thanks Rob, for getting this discussion started!
WOW. This helps a lot... ok maybe it is worth it to keep trying
Thanks
Or how many still believe "Global Warming" myth.
This is one of the great mysteries. How on earth did one "study" turn into a generally accepted principle?