Short answer
It depends, it can be anything between 4 days and 335 days. You might ask it depends on what? Continue reading and you will find out the answer in this article.
What is the definition of forming a habit
When a behavior requires constant mental effort to start it, perform it, and finish it, it is governed by the conscious mind. The brain requires focus and constant high levels of attention. Conscious thinking, mental and physical management of the body’s and brain’s resources is what fuels and maintains conscious behavior. At this stage, behavior is not a habit.
To be considered as a habit, the behavior is performed automatically, and with fewer conscious decisions.
Your habits can be noticed in every aspect of your life. From the automatic behavior of washing and cleaning your teeth at night before bed, to your ability to use a bicycle or drive a car after a long time, to your everyday unconscious behaviors.
Creating habits depends on what?
While what you are interested in knowing is the time or duration, you have to know that time is not the only factor.
When you want to form a new habit, you need to take care of the following elements:
How easy/hard is the habit itself
The complexity of what you want to make as a habit can be a huge decisive factor for habit formation. When something is too hard, too complex to be done all at once, it will require huge will power to be done and maintained every day. Will power is a currency that you might not be able to have every time.
What you should aim for is to reduce the complexity of what you want to form as a habit. Complex projects can be divided into small parts that can be further divided into smaller steps.
Try to go with a less complex habit that serves the overall goal you want to achieve.
How rewarding is the habit
We can classify habits as positive and negative habits. Smoking is a negative habit. Getting the habit of smoking is far easier and faster compared to establishing the habit of going to the gym. While the difficulty of the task has been already explained, what makes smoking far easier to transform into a habit is the high level of rewards it is associated with.
The moment you inhale smoke, nicotine inside the cigarettes will cause the release of dopamine which makes people feel good.
Strong desirable rewards associated with the behavior will result in faster habit formation.
How many repetitions have been performed
According to science, the more you repeat an action, the more myelin is produced, and the stronger the connection between the pathway neurons for that action is.
In simpler words, the more you repeat an action, the better you get at performing that action.
In the habit formation context, more repetition of the actions related to the habit, would result in faster habit building.
Think about it like this, if you practice the habit one time a day, the formation of the habit would take longer if you practice the habit 2 or 3 times a day.
How well did you integrate the habit in your life
When you don’t have a specific time / location to do the habit, you would most likely not repeat it that frequent. In order for the habit to actually form, you need to have a location and time in mind for when you would practice the habit.
When do you want to practice reading 30 pages of a book a day? Is it night time, morning, when exactly?
Also, where would this action happen? Is it gonna happen in a library, at home in your living room, or in your kitchen?
Having a physical space where you practice the habit, and a time frame of when you are going to practice it, is essential.
However, let’s say you don’t or can’t pair it really with time, or location. What you can do is to pair the habit with an event. Would you read the 30 pages after you eat your lunch at the office?
How suitable your environment is compared to the habit you want to build
What you might oversee when trying to adopt a new habit, is how well you integrate the habit with what you do and the environment in which it is done. For example, it would be super hard to practice relaxation and meditation if you are in an environment where you are needed every minute. Let’s say you are a mom and your kids are at their peak energy in the morning, where they would keep asking you, speaking or doing stuff. It would be hard for the habit of meditation to be performed in the morning while they are awake. However picking the time where the kids take a nap, would be suitable.
It is not to say that it is not possible to do that. It is just harder, and the harder you need to perform a habit, the harder it is for the habit to become a habit.
The duration needed for the habit to form
So how much time does it take to form a habit?
When you make sure all the other elements for habit formation have been taken care of, then we can talk about how much time it takes for the habit to stick.
Maxwell Maltz has observed that it takes himself and his patients 21 days or more in order to push a conscious behavior into an automatic one and therefore building a habit.
However Philippa et al found out that habit can be formed in between 18 and 254 days. They concluded that the average duration can get as low as 10 am.
On the other hand, this systematic review of 20 studies about habit formation found that the median time necessary to form a new habit was 59 to 66 days. However if we take into consideration the mean time, the duration increases to 106 to 154 days. Across these 20 studies, the minimum and maximum reported duration to form a habit was 4 and 335 days respectively.
How to be consistent when forming new habits
Reduce friction to perform the habit
Imagine with me, you are a working adult who likes drawing. You always liked drawing, but your drawings sucks and now you want to learn how to draw. So you choose to watch YouTube tutorials about how to draw different stuff and replicate what they draw.
If you keep your pencils and drawing papers in a hard to reach place in your wardrobe or your house, you will find it daunting and hard to actually find the pencil and papers to want to draw.
Now imagine, you put those pencils and drawing papers right in the corner of your desk in an easy to reach place. You will more likely be able to draw more, and continue forming this daily habits of drawing, compared if the papers and drawing tools were in a hidden hard to find place.
When you reduce the friction needed to actually perform the task you want to perform, you will increase your chances of performing the task.
The same analogy can hinder your progress for consistency when forming or maintaining a habit. If you increase the friction necessary to start or maintain the habit, you are setting yourself up for failure in the habit of establishing.