How long does it take to turn self-discipline into routine? How long does it take to develop a habit? Can you become a gym rat and develop self-discipline for training in 66 days?
From Motivation to Developing Self-Discipline
Years ago, I wrote an article on intrinsic motivation and self-discipline, routine, and addiction. In a nutshell, successful, long-term behavior changes follow a certain pattern. For instance, in the context of fitness at a gym, the first step is motivation, a reason to step into the gym. Then, to keep coming back consistently during that initial period, self-discipline is required. You may not want to, feel lazy, it’s not ‘in your system’ yet, but you push through, or you don’t.
This is the critical phase that usually determines success or failure. If you survive this challenging phase, the routine phase follows. The training becomes a habit, and you need less and less self-encouragement to go train. It just becomes part of your daily rhythm. Eventually, this can even turn into a kind of addiction. You feel crappy, even guilty if you skip the gym once. It becomes part of your identity.
Vacation destinations are now filtered based on resorts with a gym, and your Instagram profile is filled with cliché fitness quotes and photos in your underwear.
As mentioned, the critical phase is in the beginning when you still rely on self-discipline and motivation. So it might be handy if you could know in advance how long this period lasts. Perhaps you can endure those few extra weeks if you know it gets easier afterward.
“66 Days to Form Self-Discipline for a Habit”
In that earlier article, I could have actually included this research from 2010. Philippa Lally of University College London invited 96 volunteers for a study for her doctoral thesis. These volunteers chose a habit to learn themselves. An activity like having a certain meal at a certain time in a certain context. They tried to do this daily for 12 weeks. During these 12 weeks, they kept track of how much they performed the chosen activity daily. Additionally, they indicated to what extent performing the activity felt like an automatic behavior based on a ‘habit index’.
Most participants (82) provided enough data for analysis, allowing them to determine how much the activity felt like an automatic behavior as the weeks passed. The trend seen in the first 12 weeks was extrapolated over a theoretical period after this.
It took an average of 66 days to reach the maximum feeling of automatism in the different participants. However, to be honest, adopting that figure was mainly good for clickbait (which happened in many media outlets at the time). The results showed significant differences in the time it took for the different participants to feel the behavior as automatic. This ranged from 18 to 254 days.
The good news here is that skipping a single day had little impact on habit formation.
So, it’s not a big deal if you have an off day.
The bad news is that this study looked at the effect of performing a habit daily. That may be representative for daily dietary habits, for example, but what about training? Suppose you want to train three times a week and perform the habit every other day. Do you need to double the number of days from the above study? That would mean you’d have to keep it up until the first week of February at best to make your 2018 resolutions a reality.
In the worst case, you’d have to keep it up until spring 2019 before it starts to feel like an automatism.
Creatures of Habit
Coincidentally, earlier this week I wrote an article about specific cells in the brain that play a significant role in how a habit is learned and executed. In that study, mice were taught the habit of pressing a lever to receive sugar. For the research, the researchers selected mice that had picked up the habit (which was evident from the fact that they kept pressing the lever, even when they were already full or no more sugar came out).
Other mice that did not exhibit this behavior apparently did not or to a lesser extent pick up the habit, although it was often performed. The “habit mice” eventually did it out of automatism, while the other mice only did it when they were hungry and it actually paid off. It would have been interesting to see if the other mice would also develop the habit after a longer period.
Although “we” are generally creatures of habit, there can be significant differences in the extent and time it takes for us to pick up a habit. For one person, only a relatively short period of self-discipline is needed to reach the routine phase, while for another, this period may be much longer.
It can be very easy to look at someone else struggling to follow certain schedules and plans and point out a lack of self-discipline. Realize then that another person may need much more discipline to achieve the same as you.
References
Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W. and Wardle, J. (2010), How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol., 40: 998–1009. doi:10.1002/ejsp.674
