How Many Days To Form A Habit For The Better?
So how many days to form a habit to replace another habit to improve the overall condition of one’s health? There are many speculative answers, although the officially accepted answer is thirty days. This is, of course, just an average and you can vary greatly depending on the way your mind works.
There have been studies done on those with uniquely high IQ scores and their likelihood to develop habits. It turns out that the higher your IQ is the less likely you are to develop habits. This isn’t really due to being super smart, but it is because with all that information floating around in there it is difficult to follow through on an action without thoughtfulness.
Since we have the ability to form habits for our benefit as well as to our detriment, can we not consider just about everything we do a habit? Perhaps. Since we are in the habit of showing up to work on time or late, we can say that we are habitual about our work habits. Habits imply that we take action without thought and even in some cases without control.
If we want to establish a healthy habit, we need only do it on a conscious level for seven to fourteen days. Depending on the habit that we are trying to instill we may need the whole two weeks or we might only need a fraction of it. If we are trying to break a habit then we need to introduce a new habit in its place.
So if you are trying to start a habit, or replace one habit with another, how can you go about it if you are thinking it through? If you are replacing cigarettes with physical activity you might need seven days, but you might also need fourteen days. If you are replacing poor eating habits with healthy eating habits you might need the whole month.
How many days to form a habit? As long as it takes you to stop thinking about the action. The more you tend to think about what you do on a day to day basis the longer you will take to form a full blown habit. If you tend to respond to your emotions with little thought, you may find you have an established habit within a week.