It takes 66 days to form a habit

It takes 66 days to form a habit

It takes 66 days for a healthy resolution to become an ingrained habit, researchers have claimed.
By Roger Dobson Published: 9:00PM BST 18 Jul 2009

That was the average time it took for volunteers in a study to begin doing automatically something they had adopted as a daily duty, such as eating fruit with their lunch or going for a run before dinner.
It means if you make a New Year's resolution to exercise or eat healthily and do it daily until March 7, it is likely to stick.
The research, the first to investigate how long it takes to form a habit, has significant implications for people who want to adopt a healthy lifestyle or stick to a diet.
The same team has now been funded by the Medical Research Council for more research looking at how to use habit creation in weight loss.
"What we found was that it takes 66 days on average for people in our study to acquire a habit," says Professor Jane Wardle, of University College London, who carried out the study with Dr Phillippa Lally.
"It varied between individuals, but the finding is that if you do something everyday in the same situation, it will become an automatic reaction in response to those situational cues, a habit. It is the first time this has been established."
"Performing an action for the first time requires planning, even if plans are formed only moments before the action is performed, and attention.
"As behaviours are repeated in consistent settings they then begin to proceed more efficiently and with less thought as control of the behaviour transfers to cues in the environment that activate an automatic response - a habit."
In the research, being reported in the European Journal of Social Psychology, the researchers set out to investigate how long it took for the repetition of behaviour to reach a stage of 'automacity', where it is performed whenever the situation is encountered without thinking, awareness or intention.
The volunteers who took part in the study were asked to choose a healthy eating, drinking or exercise behaviour that they would like to make into a habit.
It had to be done in response to a particular cue, such as eating a piece of fruit with lunch, drinking a bottle of water with lunch, or running for 15 minutes before dinner. Participants were asked to try to carry out the behaviour every day.
Each day they also completed a test designed to measure features of habits which are central to automaticity, including lack of awareness and lack of control.
Results showed that whilst the average time to form a habit was 66 days, more complex behaviours took longer, whilst an exercise habit took longer to form than a healthy eating or drinking habit.

This article was from Telegraph.co.uk 19 July, 2009