Automaticity
New research on how long it takes to form a habit shows that the 21-days myth to be overly optimistic, and 66 days to be more realistic. There’s some great commentary on recent research and a nice graph at Psychotherapy.
“Participants were then asked daily how automatic their chosen behaviours felt. These questions included things like whether the behaviour was ‘hard not to do’ and could be done ‘without thinking’.
When the researchers examined the different habits, many of the participants showed a curved relationship between practice and automaticity of the form depicted below (solid line). On average a plateau in automaticity was reached after 66 days. In other words it had become as much of a habit as it was ever going to become.”
From PsyBlog via Psychotherapy
