hey there, improvement pill here welcome to lesson three of the tamed course if you
have not watched the previous lessons pause this video right now and click on
the link in the description below because remember in order for you to get
the most out of this course in order for you to really learn how to change your
habits and change your life you're gonna have to watch each and every single one
of the videos in today's video we're going to debunk two of the biggest
misconceptions people have about building habits and the first is in
regards to how long it takes to actually form or break a habit you've probably
heard at one point or another oh it takes 21 days and it's simply just not
true this misconception actually stems from a guy named Maxwell Maltz Maltz was
a plastic surgeon back in the 60s and he noticed that when he worked with people
who got a new nose or add some sort of facial reconstruction these people would
feel uncomfortable when looking in the mirror and multi found that it took them
about 21 days to get used to what they were seeing before they were more
comfortable with the new faces and what's funny is that he took this simple
observation with little to no science backing it up and he stated that it
takes 21 days to form or break a habit in his book psycho-cybernetics
which was a self-help book that went on to becoming a best-seller and eventually
sold millions of copies and over time people just assumed that this 21 days to
build a habit thing was true so how long does it really take to form or break a
habit well the recent study conducted at the College of London by Professor
Philippa Whaley found that it really depends they looked at a group of people
and tracked how long it took for them to reach a point of maximum automaticity
for a variety of different habits now for those of you that don't know what
automaticity is it's basically how little thought you need to put into a
task for example if I told you to tie your shoe you wouldn't have to think
about it very hard chances are you've tied your shoes enough times that it's
already reached a point of maximum automaticity a routine is considered to
be a fully embedded habit when it reaches the highest point of
automaticity and here's a graph from the study that depicts tis the study found
that every single routine out there has what's called the automaticity line a
point where if you've repeated the routine enough times it becomes as
automatic as it's going to get at this point your routine is now a habit and
this study found that it can take anywhere from two weeks to
nine months with an average of 66 days to reach this line and it all depends on
how complicated and hard the routine is for example the routine of taking her
supplements in the morning might only take three weeks before it reaches the
line of automaticity before it becomes a fully embedded habit that you don't even
have to think about on the other hand a routine of going to the gym and working
out might take six months before it hits this line so for all of you out there
who think oh I only need to stick to this routine for 21 days or oh I just
need to complete a 90 day challenge you're gravely mistaken you have to
understand that it's going to be a long long journey a journey that could
potentially take almost a year to complete depending on what sort of
habits you're trying to build now this might seem scary for a lot of you how am
I gonna stick to these habits without missing a day for an entire year and
this brings us the common misconception number two which is that if you relapse
if you give in and smoke a cigarette or have a drink or you miss a day of
meditation that it's all over a lot of us have what I like to call the
all-or-nothing mindset we think Oh once the streak is broken all of my hard work
is gone and because it's gone I should just relapse over and over again right I
might as well enjoy myself and this is far from the truth a significant number
of people in the same study missed a day or two when building their assigned new
habits maybe they were too tired or maybe they just forgot the researchers
took this opportunity to look at its effects on the automaticity line and to
their surprise they found that missing a single day does not have a clear effect
on your progress the amount of progress loss was almost non-existent however
they found that if you continue to relapse if you continue to miss days of
going to the gym or doing your daily meditation then you started losing a lot
of progress and the amount of progress loss was exponential so missing two days
was significantly worse than missing just one day and missing a week was way
worse than missing two days so what does this mean for us this means that we need
a shift our mindset we shouldn't focus on a numerical streak
we should not count the amount of days it's been since our last relapse the
mindset that we should have is that we're gonna try our best to stick to
this habit for as many months as it takes until it reaches this line of
automaticity because chances are you're going to
laughs at one point or another in fact studies have shown that 90% of all
people trying to overcome their addictions or build new habits relapse
at least once throughout their journey what's important is that you force
yourself to go back to building your good habits the following day you must
resist the urges to binge because that's when you actually start losing progress
as long as you can do this you will eventually reach the automaticity line
you may have postponed it by a day or two but as long as you get back up and
try again don't worry about the streak you will eventually reach that line and
once you hit that line it becomes automatic so now that you know how
habits work and you also know how long it really takes to form a habit now it's
time for us to select a habit together there's dozens of good habits out there
that are all beneficial so we're gonna cover a bunch of them and then we're
gonna pick one and focus on that one for the rest of the course because remember
our strategy is to adopt good new habits so that they can eventually replace your
current addiction the same course was brought to you for absolutely free with
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