It Does Not Take 21 Days to Form a Habit

In 1960, Dr. Maxwell Maltz published his bestseller book “Psycho-Cybernetics” in which he defines happiness as a habit and claims that “it usually requires a minimum of about 21 days” to form a new habit. The 21 day idea caught on, because 3 weeks is neither too short (that it’s unbelievable), nor too long (that it’s discouraging). However, Dr. Maltz was simply making an observation as a plastic surgeon. He was not declaring a statement of fact that is based on research. Also, the phrase “it usually requires a minimum of about 21 days” was propagated without the words “usually”, “minimum” and “about”. So how long does it really take to create a new habit? Published in the October 2010 issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology, the research article “How habits are formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world” (Phillippa Lally, et al.) attempted to answer that question. The study examined the habits of 96 people over a period of 12 week, and the data was then analyzed ... Read full article.