21 days to new habits? Not Quite

Have you heard the following statement before? “It takes 21 days to form a new habit.” I wouldn’t be surprised if you did, it’s a very popular piece of conventional wisdom.

The claim, however, isn’t really supported by research but on the observations of a plastic surgeon who made the claim that it takes “at least” 21 days for a change to become normal. Research, to the contrary, suggests that new behaviors don’t become habits for an average of 66 days, and that varies largely on the person, the difficulty of the goal, and other factors.

It can be inspiring to think that all it takes to make a new habit is 21 days of focused determination and after that the behavior will become automatic. However, if we believe that we can set ourselves up for disappointment and failure.

I’ve been tracking my habits carefully for almost a week and a half, and it’s almost disappointing to see how I’m doing. I’ve been doing well on my earliest habits, and my most recent habits, but in the middle of my tracker there is a lot of white space.

Before I started this challenge I was thinking of setting my goal at one new habit each week. Luckily for me my wife talked me down to one every two weeks. Honestly, that was probably still a little too ambitious. My pride wants to be able to say that I mastered X number of habits in one year, it wants me to keep pushing and adding more habits more frequently even though it’s shown to not be as effective as I’d hoped.

I was counting on that 21 day threshold to carry me through on my older habits. I was expecting to only really have to try for three at a time, tops, and then momentum would carry me through the rest of the way. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case.

My pride hates to write a post like this. I hate to dial things back. I’d much rather write that I didn’t set a hard-enough goal for myself and that it was time to turn things up to 11. But sometimes succeeding means admitting when you’re in over your head. Sometimes, in order to succeed, you need to put your pride aside and slow down a little bit.

That’s what I’m going to start doing from here on out. I’m slowing down the rate at which I add new habits. I’m going to slow down to a new habit every three weeks and see if I start seeing more success. I guess that’s part of the fun of an experiment, if you’re not seeing the results you want the whole point is to make adjustments until it starts working.

Is there an area of your life where you’re in over your head? Is there somewhere where your pride wants you to keep going at an unsustainable rate, even though you know you’d be more successful if you dialed it back a bit?