In this podcast episode, I share my frustration with the myth about how long it takes to change your habits to work towards a goal.
Science is always simplified to share its messages with the non-scientific, but this arbitrary time limit only sets us up to fail.
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Episode Transcript:
One of the most frustrating myths, in my opinion, around habits is the idea of giving it an arbitrary time limit for expecting habits to stick.
If you’re familiar with my work at all or Rooted Reinvention, you will probably know this is a massive trigger of frustration for me.
It’s really common for scientific concepts to be reduced and simplified, particularly when we’re looking to get a message out to people who don’t have that scientific background or wouldn’t understand the sort of full nuances of a scientific study.
However, the idea that you can make a new habit in 30 days, in 60 days, in 90 days, is just wrong.
And I’m going to do my best not to swear because it makes me so frustrated when I see those kind of comments or I see this myth going around and these expectations being set up for people, which are essentially setting people up to fail.
If you’re expecting something to change in a certain time, and it doesn’t, generally for a lot of us, we feel like we’ve failed, that we’ve not done it right.
But from human psychology and from neuroscience and generally the biology of the human body, there are so many different factors in most habits that we cannot rely on some magical number that’s always going to be, or even very often going to be, accurate.
So today’s episode is a little bit ranty. However, I did also ask in my last newsletter what people wanted to see more information about, and the overwhelming winner of the poll was systems to actually prioritize and set goals effectively.
So let’s talk briefly about when we’re setting goals, when we’re thinking about habits, new habits we want to form, new things we want to be doing with our life.
I think it has become fairly common knowledge that the best way to achieve a certain goal that we might set is to look at the habits that will get us to there, the steps that take us from where we are now to where that goal is, to where we want to be, to whatever we want to achieve what that outcome is.
We are looking at setting some form of habit, whether it’s a weekly exercise routine or a daily wake up schedule: There is usually some form of habit that we are looking to set up in order to reach a goal.
Which brings me onto this myth.
So the idea, for example, of waking up at a certain time will take “X number of days” for your body to adjust to and for it to become a habit for you.
Now, I think of a habit as something that is done somewhat automatically, somewhat subconsciously, without a massive amount of effort. When something is habitual, you do it without thinking too much.
And from a biological perspective, this is where, where we have certain neurons (so the wires that go between the different areas of our brain) are then very effective. They’re sending impulses, some communication from one side of the brain to the other very easily and very efficiently.
The idea of there being “X number of days” for a habit to form is suggestive of there being a certain number of days for that neuron, that wire, to become efficient.
I have a Master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience. I could talk about myelin sheaths and things like that and how they make it effective, but I’m not going to go into that because actually you don’t need to know that in order to set effective goals and think about habit formation in a realistic way.
So, for example, the idea of waking up at a certain time will rely on so many biological and environmental systems:
When you last ate, how much water you had before bed, what level of light is in the room, what temperature the room is, whether you did any exercise the day before, how your circadian rhythm is, whether you had caffeine, whether there is much noise around you, whether you have a baby sleeping in the room next door, whether you’re anxious about something.
There are so many factors that impact our sleep cycle, our waking cycle, our circadian rhythm.
There are so many different things. You cannot give a time period that every human or even 10% of humans, even a small percentage of humans – I don’t see how you can set a number of days or a certain number of times of doing a habit that will generally be true for everyone.
The other thing around habits is that usually changing a habit involves starting something and stopping something.
So when I’m thinking about, “Oh, I want to wake up at 6am every day”, I am thinking about waking up earlier and becoming more tired. I am thinking about whether my bedtime is going to change for the following night. If I’m particularly tired that day, will I be able to go to bed earlier? Will I be able to get to sleep earlier? Will that then help me the next day I’m thinking about, say, what I’m eating, what I’m drinking, how much light there is.
There are so many things I might need to change. And I’m thinking of things like the “Project 50”, where the idea is that you read 10 pages a day, that you spend an hour on a hobby, that you do these certain things in order to give you that evening routine and then having that early wake up.
Those evening routine aspects are all individual habits and they are all individual habits that are both starting something new and stopping something old for most of us.
You know, when we are choosing, I’m going to sit down with my journal, or I’m going to sit down and read a book, or I’m going to do a hobby. We’re stopping that habit of sitting on the sofa watching TV. We’re stopping that habit of scrolling mindlessly. We’re stopping whatever habits we have already got around, what we do when we get home from work, how we’re spending our evenings, for example. And therefore there are so many cogs that have to change for one habit to shift.
And once that habit has shifted, that does not mean it is now a new habit.
It has to shift. There has to be consistency on that shifted aspect and then it needs to be consolidated. We need that consistency where it will start to become more habitual.
So I guess the main lesson you can take from that is that there is no arbitrary countdown or timing that we can expect habits to form or to reach certain goals.
However, that doesn’t mean that you just have to kind of wing it and guess and there is no guidance for you. Baby steps add up and consistency of baby steps has been shown to be the most effective way to have habits that are long lasting.
One of the key tips I think about when I am setting a goal, when I am looking at changing a habit I’ve got, whether it’s starting something new, stopping something old, or maybe continuing with something, but just tweaking it slightly, is to focus on what I can commit to doing on my lowest energy days.
Now, I say that as someone with multiple disabilities, but who has generally been very organised and feels quite confident in setting new goals, making new habits, and reaching certain outcomes. That is something that I very much enjoy and I feel like I’m fairly good at achieving the goals I set out.
And one of the key methods or reasons that I’m able to do this is that I set my absolute minimum of a habit when I am starting it.
So, for example, rather than saying “I will do a 30 minute workout three times a week”, I have said that “at least two days a week I need to do some form of exercise”. Which for me includes yoga, the ring fit exercise, game on my switch, walking around the local park, doing a bodyweight workout, which I can do in my own home with what I have here, going swimming, going roller skating.
When I have this minimum, it means that even on a “I can’t be bothered” day or an “I’m not well enough” day, I do not lose that consistent practice. I do not lose that consistency which is what builds habits.
For example, my current exercise routine is that I exercise Monday morning or Sunday night and then on Thursday morning or Friday morning. Those are the two days that I have set.
At the beginning of the year, I did plan very much to do three days of exercise per week. I found throughout the year that for me I was failing. I’d obviously set the bar too high to go from nothing at that point, or nothing consistent to three times a week.
And therefore what I’ve now said is either Sunday/Monday I do some form of exercise and Thursday/Friday I do some form of exercise. And that can be as simple as a 10 minute yoga routine all the way up to a full workout – cardio and body weight for example.
And for me, not setting any set timing, not setting a certain specific type of exercise to do, what I have been able to do is be really consistent on building my routine and actually been more inclined then to add a third workout in, in the middle of the week when I feel like it.
Compared to when I was trying to reach 10 minutes three times a week at the beginning of the year, I am being more consistent. I am feeling the benefits of regular exercise because I am not in this boom and bust cycle where I’m managing it for a week and then I miss multiple sessions and feel bad about myself and don’t want to get back on that horse, so to speak.
Because when we set expectations too high, we’re only actually failing ourselves.
When we feel like something is too hard, it makes us not want to do it.
When we feel like something is so easy I could do it even on the worst day, the likelihood of doing it, the actual consistency of those baby steps genuinely will push us further and mean that by the end of that time period I will have exercised more than if I tried to set my sights too high.
And the last thing to be aware of is thinking about when you are making adjustments and how soon you’re making adjustments.
So for me I tried three days a week and it did not work.
Therefore I dropped it to two days a week and I have then been able to keep that up for a couple of months now. According to many of the myths around how many days it takes or how many times it takes to form a new habit, my two times-a-week should be ready to be adjusted.
However, I know that it’s coming into winter and I do struggle more in the winter with my mood and my energy. We are currently in the middle of moving house. I am still in the transition of moving to fully full time work with my business.
And if I were to tweak my expectations on myself and push myself that little bit further, I know I would fall off, I know I would fail. Therefore, what I have done instead in order to tweak it over those months is I have shifted slightly how much exercise I am doing or what my sort of mini goal within that is.
So rather than showing up twice a week for whatever, I do twice a week for a minimum of 10 minutes. I have upped the difficulty on the Ringfit game that our family like to exercise with by a couple of levels across the last few months.
Which has meant that each time I’m doing bodyweight exercises or cardio, it is upping the reps slightly, even just one or two reps on a couple of the exercises and then waiting another month or so before I then up it again.
The other issue with setting an arbitrary time period is that it doesn’t account for differences in days.
So if I were working out four times a week, then an average four week month would give me 16 sessions of consistent baby steps forming that habit. The fact that I’m only doing it a minimum of twice a week means I’ve only got eight in that same month.
So try not to get too caught up in the number of sessions, the number of days, the number of months that it takes, and really focus on what you feel capable of changing.
When you really start to feel like this is becoming a habit,” this is becoming a little bit effortless, I’m not having to think about this quite so much” then I would think about tweaking one aspect and I would always err on the side of caution and take a baby step of change.
Because again, the research shows us that this is the most effective way to shift a habit.
So the one takeaway I want you to get from this episode is that there is no time limit.
The idea of there being certain number of days for something to happen often makes us feel worse because it sets us up to fail.
Focus on tiny systems of consistent baby steps.
Identify that step towards your goal, whatever it is that you can do on your worst day, on the hardest day, on a day when you’re like, “oh my goodness, I don’t even know if I can do the normal things. But I don’t want to lose progress on this new habit. I want to make sure I’m sticking to it. I want to work towards it being habitual. I need to be consistent.”
What is your smallest, you know, 30 second step that you can take and you can set for yourself that you’ll be able to do even on the difficult days and set that for yourself without any specific time period of when you’re going to adjust it and only adjust it when you feel it is becoming habitual, when you feel like it is almost getting effortless or it is not requiring that much thought or that you are doing it without prompting, that is when you want to be adjusting it.
And as always, I will see you next time. Bye.