How are habits formed?

TRANSCRIPTION OF VIDEO

The next cycle of the Habit Lab begins on the 1st of May, and I revisited the paper from University College London asking the question, how do we form positive habits? Now, the research was based upon 96 participants who chose to try to create a good habit around eating, drinking, exercise, and a couple of the participants chose activities such as meditation, and what it showed was that the median length of time for a person to cultivate a good habit was 66 days, and it, it, it, the range was anything from 18 to 254 days. So what made a difference in this range was basically how complex the task was. If the task was very simple, such as drinking water with dinner, it was much easier to embed in people's lives. It took a shorter period of time, and if the task was much more complex, such as going to the gym, then it took a much longer time.

So complexity was a major component. In fact, the researchers questioned whether a simple task or whether a complex task ever really becomes a true habit. Um, a true habit is basically something that is completely automatic. It requires no conscious effort or control, and it's something that is able to come in our life in a completely mindless way.

For example, having a cigarette with a cup of coffee or brushing your teeth when you wake up, these are true habits. They take no conscious awareness. They're something we do automatically. Whereas going to the gym, for example, it's more complex, it requires more steps. And according to the researchers, they say it likely will always take a certain amount of conscious effort.

And there, the fact is that not only will it require effort, but there's also a need to remember the original reason why you started the activity in the first place. For example, I, I'm going to the gym because I want to look better or I want to be more athletic. The, this is the original goal, and that goal will need to be remembered in order to maintain the action of, uh, of that behavior.

While the behavior will become more streamlined, more accessible in our lives, what the researcher shows is it, it probably won't become a, a, a true habit in the sense that it's completely effortless and automatic. I think this is important because it reminds us that actually we always have to put some effort into developing good behaviors, and especially in the beginning, there is a need for self-control and discipline to make that behavior more automatic in our lives. The researchers showed that an important factor in establishing a successful habit was that we would engage in the habit regularly, especially at the beginning.

So there was more chance of something becoming automatic if we did it with greater repetition at the beginning, and they also showed that if we miss the occasional day, it will not completely derail the progress. But, um, if we miss too many days, it will start to impact the progress. But missing an occasional day will not significantly detract from our intention to cultivate good habits.

And the researchers also noted that having a situational cue for the behavior, for example, I will exercise after breakfast or before lunch, that that is a much more effective, uh, pattern than the time-based cue, for example, saying, I will do this activity every day at the same time, at 9:00 AM. We're more likely to fail if we say that we will do an activity every time at the same day because our lives are busy. We, you know, we have, we're not able to stick to that. But if we attach the habit to something that is already happening every day in our lives, such as I will exercise after breakfast, we're more likely to succeed in a behavior becoming established in our lives.

Um, so these were the major findings of the research, and this research, it really was the jumping-off point for my 66-day Habit Lab cycles. Not because I think that we can establish a habit in exactly 66 days. Um, some habits, as we see, we can establish in a much shorter time. And more complex habits, they take a long time of sustained, uh, discipline and effort. But rather that I thought, well, 66 days, it gives us a good amount of time to, uh, deepen our connection with the behavior, to assess, uh, to really get a sense that we're starting to embed these positive behaviors in our lives, and that, um, we can, you know, this is a, a significant amount of time. It's a commitment that we can stick to, and that we can begin to, um, deepen, um, this behavior that we want to embed more fully in our lives. So that is the research from University College London, um, and that was the basis of beginning these Habit Lab cycles.

reference: Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 998–1009