Habits are an example of automatic behaviour. We can deliberately cultivate habits or acquire habits without intending to. Good habits are helpful and bad habits, of course, are not. Bad habits can also be difficult to break. Habit-formation was reviewed recently in Psychology Today.
Habit-formation is the process whereby behaviour becomes automatic, and we develop countless habits over our lifetimes. We are creatures of habit for a reason. The automatic nature of habits helps people to meet their daily life needs more effortlessly and efficiently, enabling us to perform useful behaviours without having to spend a lot of time and energy pondering about what to do.
Simple examples of habits would be automatically buckling your car seat belt (good habit) and munching peanuts when watching TV – one of my not-so-good habits. Common bad habits include smoking, eating or drinking more than is recommended, misuse of various drugs, including alcohol, excessive use of mobile phones, and many more.
Habits are built through learning and repetition in the course of pursuing goals such as, for example, driving to a particular destination. We learn to associate certain cues with behavioural responses that assist us to meet the goal, such as turning at a certain corner.
Both habits and routines involve repeated behaviour, but a habit is a response to an ingrained impulse, while a routine usually is not. For example, your routine of dressing in the morning is motivated by your recognition that you need to do this, rather than responding to an ingrained impulse.
[ Five easy steps to forming healthy, sustainable habitsOpens in new window ]
Research shows that repeating a simple action in a stable context can, through associative learning, make the behaviour automatic, reducing the need for conscious effort. Consequently, breaking a habit may be hard to do because consciously intervening in our own habitual behaviour doesn’t come naturally.
How long does it take to establish a new habit? There is a fairly widespread belief that a new habit can be acquired after 21 consecutive days’ practice. This idea was popularised in 1960 by cosmetic surgeon and author Maxwell Maltz.
He noticed that, for example, it takes about 21 days for patients to adjust to their new appearance after undergoing facial plastic surgery. He also noted that amputee patients experience phantom limb syndrome for about three weeks after the operation. He based his 21-day habit-formation hypothesis on such observations, and not on controlled clinical trials. But it turns out that things are not as clean cut or as easy as Maltz thought.
One rigorous experiment on habit-formation was published in the European Journal of Psychology in 2010 by Phillippa Lally and others. The researchers studied how automatic behaviour developed when people establish new habits. Ninety-six university students were asked to develop new habits relating to healthy eating, drinking or exercise. The habits had to conform to three criteria – (a) the habit could not be behaviour they already practised, (b) the habit must be linked to a daily stimulus, eg “run for 15 minutes before dinner”, (c) the stimulus had to occur once daily to ensure consistency.
Creating and maintaining a habit calls for more than willpower; it requires approaches that smoothly integrate the behaviour into daily life
Participants practised their chosen habits for 84 days. The results showed that (a) automatic behaviour plateaued after 66 days on average, (b) exercise habits took 1.5 times longer to acquire than eating/drinking habits – median time 91 days to establish an exercise habit, and (c) almost half the participants in the study did not practise their behaviours consistently enough to form a habit.
A recent meta-analysis/review examined the time necessary to develop healthy habits and what factors affect this process (Mauro Proenca, American Council Science Health). The most commonly studied habits included exercise and dietary changes. Habit-formation times ranged from two to five months, with some studies finding rapid initial gains, while others showed gradual increases over more than a month, highlighting the subtle interplay of psychological, behavioural and contextual factors. The review emphasised the need for long-term interventions and professional support to sustain behavioural changes.
[ Why New Year’s health resolutions are a waste of timeOpens in new window ]
Creating and maintaining a habit calls for more than willpower; it requires approaches that smoothly integrate the behaviour into daily life. Taking anywhere from four days to a year, habit-formation isn’t a one-size-fits-all timeline – it’s a slow grind of repetition, context, and, most importantly, realistic expectations.
William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC
