Habit Forming – Is 21 Days Enough? (The Myth & The Truth)

It is a well-known fact that the habits of highly successful people allow them to keep doing things that lead to even more success overtime. This includes great habits in almost every aspect in their life from what they eat, how much they sleep, when they exercise and how they tackle their tasks.

If you have heard about habit forming in 21 days, and wonder how this came up, keep reading as this article is all about how a habit is formed, if habit forming in 21 days really work and how this theory has exploded in the habit formation landscape.

Highly successful people have learned to develop good habits and also developed the courage, discipline and resilience required to keep up with those habits on a daily basis. Wouldn’t all of us like to be able to form good habits that takes us towards our goals and keep it in place on a daily basis? We all know that this can lead us to success eventually yet it’s just easier said than done.

How many times have you started something like a daily meditation, drinking more water every day, daily reading or exercising etc.? It’s often a little easier to keep up with these habits for the first few days when our motivation levels are high. But then the hard times start when there is no immediate gratification, we start missing the bigger picture and our minds make up all sorts of excuses to drop the habit. And soon, we’re completely out of it just like that. It’s just too easy to not do something than to do something, right?

A lot of people believe that it takes 21 days to form a habit. They believe that If you do something without missing it for 21 days, a habit is formed. There’s just way too much misinformation on this subject on the internet and many people like to believe that it must be true. It sounds easy, I mean who wouldn’t want to do something for 21 days and then be able to just magically do it every day as if it’s something like brushing your teeth?

Is 21 days enough to form a habit?

Unfortunately, It’s just not as simple as that. There are too many people who can vouch for this. The whole Habit forming in 21 days’ myth began from a misinterpretation of Dr. Maxwell Maltz’s 1960 book about behavior “Psycho-Cybernetics”. When Dr Maltz did an operation on a patient, he noticed that it took upto 21 days for them to adjust to the change in their body. Based on this finding, he wrote in his book that “it requires a minimum of 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve”. Now this finding itself is not necessarily a myth or untrue. However, as this concept started spreading over the years, people somehow dropped the part which says “minimum of” writes James Clear, the author behind New York Times Best Seller “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way To Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones”.

This changes everything. Doesn’t it? The power of these two words couldn’t be any more significant. More than 50 years later, Habit forming in 21 days is marketed by so many experts across many different platforms. While forming a life changing habit in just 21 days sounds great and all too achievable, it’s rarely true that just after doing something for 21 days, it becomes a habit. Let’s be real, being great is not easy. Even if you make something a habit, it still takes perseverance and an unbreakable mind set to keep it up daily.

Now that we know how the 21 days habit forming concept came up and how it’s not as simple as some people have preached, Let’s look at a more realistic timeline of forming habits that lead you to success.

How is a habit formed?

According to experts, a habit is formed when a new behaviour becomes automatic through repetition and is starting to happen with minimal effort. This is a result of these behavioural patterns becoming deeply engrained into our neural pathways.

A More Realistic Timeline for forming habits

According to a study published on European Journal of Psychology by health psychology researcher Philippa Lally, it took anywhere from 18 to 254 days to form a new habit. On average, it took around 66 days or a little over 2 months for a new habit to become automatic. The results showed considerable variation from person to person on how long it can take to reach their limit of automaticity. Against popular belief, it also showed that missing one day of performing the habit did not affect the habit formation process.

Simply put, habit formation is not a one size fit all process and it can take you anywhere from two to eight months to form a new habit into your life. It all depends on the what you want to make a habit, how badly you want it, and how consistent you are

Final Thoughts on habit forming

If you truly want to make something a habit, the best thing you can do is to committing to making it happen today. Don’t worry about how many days it’s going to take before you cab do it effortlessly. The goal is to do it every day, right? So, it shouldn’t be tied to a certain timeline of when you want it to start happening automatically. When you’re ready, that will definitely happen. All you need to do is tell yourself that today I will do this and make sure you actually do it.

This mind set shift is going to take a lot of pressure off from you and make it seem like a lot more achievable. When something seems easier to do, we tend to find ways to actually do it. Just commit to making it happen once a day and before you know it, you’ve already formed yourself a new habit.

What habits do you want to start working on? Let us know in the comments.