Have you ever tried to build a new healthy habit such as exercising daily
or eating healthier only to have it fail after a week or 21 days?
If you're serious about starting a new habit,
what might surprise you is how long it actually takes to build a new healthy habit.
Welcome to another video on The Sum of Our Lives,
where we support each other to live more resilient,
fun and fulfilling lives.
In this video we'll answer how long it takes to build a new healthy habit
and whether forgetting to do the activity once,
affects your success in building the habit.
Behavioral scientists who study habit formation say that many of us try to
create healthy habits the wrong way.
We can be too ambitious making big plans
that require big changes in our behavior.
In reality the high willpower and
motivation needed to make such a change often can't be sustained.
Researchers in 2009 studied how people form habits in the real world,
asking 94 participants over a 12-week period
to choose a healthy eating, drinking or exercise behavior that they wanted to
make into a habit.
The behavior had to be one that
i) they did not already do
ii) it could be performed in response to an
obvious daily event also known as a cue
and iii) the cue had to occur every day and only once a day.
Examples included eating a piece of fruit with lunch,
drinking a bottle of water with lunch
and running for 15 minutes before dinner.
Participants were asked to complete a daily survey on whether they carried out the behavior
and how automatic it felt.
So what were some of the findings?
The study showed that the amount of time
it took for a task to become automatic
also known as a habit ranged from 18 to 254 days.
This indicates a lot of variation in how
long it can take people to develop habits.
The median time it took to develop a habit was 66 days.
So what's the good news?
Missing one opportunity to perform the behavior
didn't significantly affect performing a new habit
It was found that with more repetitions in a consistent context,
the level of automatic behavior increased for individuals.
So how do we use these insights
and what are some tips for developing a new healthy habit?
Stay tuned as I'll be covering this in my next video!
How long has it taken you to develop healthy habits in the past?
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Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time!