How long does it take to form a habit? By study­ing 96 peo­ple as they each attempt to start a new habit, the answer comes out as between 18 to 254 days, with a mean of 66.

Some good news and caveats:

  • Miss­ing a sin­gle day did not reduce the chance of form­ing a habit.
  • A sub-group took much longer than the oth­ers to form their habits, per­haps sug­gest­ing some peo­ple are ‘habit-resistant’.

What this study reveals is that when we want to develop a rel­a­tively sim­ple habit like eat­ing a piece of fruit each day or tak­ing a 10 minute walk, it could take us over two months of daily rep­e­ti­tions before the behav­iour becomes a habit. And, while this research sug­gests that skip­ping sin­gle days isn’t detri­men­tal in the long-term, it’s those early rep­e­ti­tions that give us the great­est boost in automaticity.

I’m not sure why, but I find it inter­est­ing that there seems to be an upper limit on automaticity.

via Mind Hacks