ESYB2 112 - Research and Myths About Duration of Building Habits
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[00:00:00] In this video, I want to talk about how long it takes to build a healthy habit, a new habit and how to actually go about it. So there's a lot of confusion about how long it takes to form a habit. You'll hear a lot of people, even experts, Even people who are extremely authoritative and whose books are widely sold will continuously repeat, it takes three weeks to form a new habit.

This is actually not exactly right. It's as little as three weeks to form a habit. But it can be as long as a year here is actual research. So we're looking at a piece of research and we're looking at an abstract for it. Usually when you have a research article by like a traditional, real scientific researcher.

What they publish is the full article, which is very complicated. And then they have an abstract, which is kind of like the summary. And we'll look at the abstract in this [00:01:00] video. And for most people, you don't want to read academic articles. So there's a ton of articles on the impact and the insight of this research that you can do on your own.

But I'll summarize it for you here. And then later in this video We'll go over. Well, how do you put this into practice? First of all, you see it says here it took people from about 18 days to 254 days to get to results, meaning to form a new habit. And also just because this abstract doesn't say everything that's in the research.

I'll also mention that. Let's say you have a more complicated habit that you want to build. Because, obviously, if you want to build a basic, simple habit that's easy for you, you probably don't need this course. You can do it on your own. Those are the habits that take the short amount of time. The complicated new habits, the ones that will really make an impact, and the ones that you still have not formed, precisely because they are hard for you, they are unnatural for [00:02:00] you, it's an internal struggle.

Like, for me, for example, like, I want to eat better. It's a multi year struggle. And of course, I'm improving over time, but I'm still not at my goal. And many people have these big things that they wrestle with for years. So those kinds of habits can take a lot longer. A part of this research shows that, of course, the more you practice it regularly The more likely this habit will be formed, but let's say you miss a day or two, it's not terrible, it's not a light switch, like yes or no, it's more of a gray area, it's more of a slow building kind of a thing, and you can always improve, and you can always regress, and you can always come back, so there's a lot of gray area in here, but repetition and consistency will help you, and keep in mind, this research was done, you see, In 2009, which by research standards, even though it seems like a long time ago, by research standards, [00:03:00] it's actually really recent.

And just to give you a tiny bit of background, the reason people started quoting the 18 day or three week mark, first of all, it's a nice thing to aspire to. It's very motivating to think that you can make an impact in your life in such a short amount of time. But there was a doctor in the fifties who saw.

About a three week period in his patients where they would be able to make significant changes or get used to significant changes in their life. And he published that finding and then a lot of the gurus, you know, the self help gurus kind of picked up that information, which was the best science available at that time.

And it became widespread, but now this particular research is coming about 50 to 60 years after that. So this is more recent. This is more current science. So how do you practice this consistently? I strongly recommend working from a calendar just like this, for example, with a Google calendar, which is free and you have access to it if you already [00:04:00] have a Gmail.

So what you would do is if you're on Google, let's say, and you're already signed in, you literally just click on these. 9 dots, and then you find Google Calendar. So here I made an example week for you, where you build a habit. You see it's the same activity every day, at the same time. And I gave it 2 hours, which is a really long time.

Most people don't have that. Although, if you look at it in a different way, like It's not a new thing, you're building a habit that you want over a habit that you don't want. So you can't likely take out something that isn't working out for you, is a bad activity, is something that's underperforming. You can try to replace it with something better.

In fact, Precisely because you've made it a goal to establish this new habit, it's valuable for you, and because it's valuable for you, you should find the time. It's important, it's high on the priority list. And also because you give it a big chunk of time, like two hours here, and it might seem like it's a long time, two hours a day, [00:05:00] but there's a benefit to it.

You're relaxed. You're not stressed out because imagine if you gave yourself a short time, you'd rush through it, you'd be stressed and the stress would make you avoid this activity. But actually this helps you make it an enjoyable thing. And the daily work on it at a regular time helps you schedule it into your day.

And as you get better, like here on the first day, perhaps it will be frustrating. You will not have a good time, but You'll get a little better. Then on the next day, it's not going to be as bad. You'll get a little bit better. And then on the next day, you'll get a little better, a little better. And then eventually, the idea is, you'll get good at that thing that you're trying to do, and you'll actually start to enjoy it.

When you start to enjoy it, there's less need for formally adding it to your calendar. You'll gravitate towards it. And as you start to gravitate towards it, become better at it. That enjoyment will help you speed [00:06:00] up the time in which the habit is built because it will be natural. A lot of the complexity of the habits and why a lot of times it takes a long time is because they're not enjoyable tasks.

But if it's a part of your work and you become good at that part of your work, it becomes an enjoyable task. This is a tremendous key to the equations. Recall in other parts of the course, the happiness hormones. If you enjoy your work, if you're good at your work, doing this will not only be something you want to avoid, it will stop being that.

And it will turn into something you look forward to and something that gives you happiness and fulfillment. That's something you get from work that you enjoy. So this is research on how to build habits, how long it will take, and the path to building great habits that you enjoy that become life changing and fulfilling.

