Does It Really Take 21 Days to Form a Habit?

Years ago, an executive at my previous employer said that he read that it takes 21 days to establish a habit. I thought that was interesting and, while I didn’t look into it, the memory stuck with me. Recently, I saw a best-selling book on Amazon called The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg. That stoked my interest in the subject of habits and prompted me to explore it further this time around. So I bought the book, but first did some web reading to check whether the 21-day factoid has any merit.

I found explanations of the 21-day habit phenomenon that the executive cited. It turns out that a cosmetic surgeon named Dr. Maxwell Maltz, who practiced in the 1950s, observed a pattern among his patients. It took them at least 21 days to get used to their changed appearance after plastic surgery. He also found, in his own personal experience outside of work, that it took him a minimum of 21 days to establish a new habit.

In 1960, Maltz published that observation and other thoughts on behavior-change in a book called Psycho-Cybernetics. The book sold more than 30 million copies. The 21-day phenomenon was further popularized in other books in subsequent decades. Self-help authors, including Zig Ziglar and Anthony Robbins, misinterpreted Maltz’s quote as simply: “It takes just 21 days to form a new habit.” And the 21-day myth was born.

It is so tempting to want to believe it though – 21 days seems like a modest amount of time to make a change in one’s life. New Year’s resolutions would be much more successful if it was possible to cement new habits by just focusing on them every day for 21 days into the new year. But the sobering news is that the subject of habits has by now been formally studied and the more recent research shows that it takes a minimum of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic and, depending on the behavior, the person and the circumstances, it could take much longer – up to 254 days for some cases.

That curiosity satisfied, I moved onto the book. I had heard over the years that a substantial number of our behaviors are unconscious, driven by habits. A Duke researcher in 2006 had accumulated data to back that up. He found that more than 40 percent of the actions people do each day weren’t decisions, but habits. Habits are choices that all of us make deliberately at first, but then over time we stop thinking about them, and keep doing them. We stopped making a choice and they became automatic.

The habit process is a three-step loop. First there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go in automatic mode and which habit to use. The second step is the routine, which is the action or behavior, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time the loop becomes more automatic. The cue and reward can become combined into a powerful anticipation. The more the cue triggers the craving of the reward, then the more likely that the routine becomes a habit.

For example, say someone wants to develop the habit of running every morning. The cue could simply be that upon waking up, the first thing that the person thinks of is running. The routine in this case is to do the run. The third step is the reward, which could be the sense of accomplishment or just feeling good – the runners high. The craving might involve already anticipating the sense of accomplishment before even starting the run, thus reinforcing the regularity of the habit.

Positive habits can be the basis for the success of a world class athlete, like Michael Phelps, who used visualization as a powerful daily tool to both relax and rehearse successful races in his head in moment-by-moment detail. In one Olympic race, his goggles filled with water and he was blinded, but he won the race anyway because he had rehearsed how he would handle this situation many times in his head.

Some habits tend to have a ripple effect that yield more positive changes. Studies have looked at the impacts of exercise on daily routines. When people start regularly exercising, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They also tend to be more patient with others and less stressed. For many, exercise is a foundational habit that triggers wider change. Another example, making your bed every morning, is correlated with greater productivity and a greater sense of well-being. (Retired Navy Seal William McRaven agrees. He just released a book called Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life… And Maybe the World.) These core good habits can start a chain reaction that help other good habits take hold.

Finally, while the book was great for learning about habits and how they form, it also had some great anecdotes which I had not heard before. Here are a few:

• Cinnabon positions their mall stores away from the food courts where most of the food vendors are. The reason is the scent of their cinnamon rolls is a powerful attraction; they want their store isolated so that the cinnamon roll smell is prominent and people are drawn to it from a distance.
• Pepsodent became the first successful toothpaste, but almost by accident. The inventor added some ingredients to make it taste fresh, but they had another unintended effect. They were also irritants that happened to create a cool, tingling sensation on the tongue and gums. Customers came to associate that tingling with clean teeth. If it wasn’t there, their mouths didn’t feel clean. Competitors copied them and to this day most toothpastes contain additives that make your mouth tingle.
• Foaming is important for users of shampoos, toothpaste and laundry detergents. It does not add to their cleaning ability, but customers feel better if they see suds during cleaning. If it’s not there, they assume the product is not working.
• NFL Coach Tony Dungy turned around a losing football team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, using a philosophy focused on changing players’ habits so that they would respond automatically and therefore more quickly to cues on the field. To implement this approach, the team had a relatively small selection of plays in their playlist compared to other NFL teams. But they practiced them so many times that the players could respond on the field without thinking, giving them a speed advantage over competitors.
• Retail stores are designed around our habits. Most grocery stores have the produce section right inside the front door. This is because once we load our carts with healthy food, we feel freer to spend more money on the less healthy food in the rest of the store. Also, it is well known among retailers that most shoppers entering a store will turn right. Because of this stores will position some of the more profitable products to the right of the entrance.

It was satisfying to learn more about habits. Like many, I’ve found it very hard to try to stop bad habits or form new positive ones. But the book was reassuring that it can be a little easier if you are more aware of the cues and rewards that control them.