You’ve probably read somewhere that it takes between 21 and 28 days to embed a new habit. So as we finish January you’re  there with turning your New Year’s resolution into a life-long habit, right?

Erm, sorry folks…Those of you who read these blogs have come to know there is usually a bit of Lemony Snicket perpetual bad news…

So don’t read on if you are going to be gutted that it’s probably going to take a lot longer…

The myth of “it takes a month to make a new habit” did come from science. Most people have traced this back to a book called ‘Psycho-cybernetics’ written in the 60s by Dr Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon turned psychologist. He wrote:

‘It usually requires a minimum of about 21 days to effect any perceptible change in a mental image. Following plastic surgery it takes about 21 days for the average patient to get used to his new face. When an arm or leg is amputated the “phantom limb” persists for about 21 days.”

Maltz then went on to find “evidence” that this translated into other situations. And as we know, if we set off to prove a hypothesis right, our brain can usually find evidence that we are…And once we have a definite number in our head that came from”science” it becomes fact right?

Well sadly not. So a real bummer if you were over the 21 day threshold in an exercise regime and thought you were home and dry…A much more robust and valid study undertaken at UCL* in 2010 tracked people for 84 days to find out how long it took them to feel that a new “health promoting” behaviour (so diet or exercise) had become “automatic” – ie a new habit.

They found it took on average 66 days for the habit to become “automatic”. So 6th March for those of you manfully hanging in there…

But there is good news! Hurrah!

Another myth that the study quashed is that if you miss a day or fail a few times then all is lost. That was found to be rubbish. Missing a day made no difference to the creation of the habit in the long term. Believing that myth is really unhelpful – it makes it you feel you may as well give up trying to cut down your drinking, just because you succumbed to a night on the wine in dry January.

Unsurprisingly the “average” 66 days wasn’t that simple either. Even though all of the people in the trial did their “health thing” every day, it took them very different amounts of time to turn this into a real habit. They found people were very different. No?! Really?!

For one person it took just 18 days. Another had not fully embedded the habit by the time the experiment ended after 84 days – but was predicted to have succeed after 254!

The scientists also tested how “strong” the habit became by using a 1 to 42 scale. They formed another hypothesis about habits – It takes less time for a simple habit (e.g drinking a glass of water) to become “strong” and more time for more complex habits (doing 50 sit-ups).

Rather than find a convenient truth that it takes us 28 days, what the rigorous science found was “people differ in how quickly they can form habits, and how strong those habits can become”.

So how can this help us at work or at home? Well the study did prove that as long as you continue doing a new behaviour consistently in a given situation a new habit will form. But you have to persevere. It will take more than a month.

At work, when there is a new way of working, it’s likely that some people in your team will find it easy – they might nail it in a little over 2 weeks. But equally likely is that some may struggle and may need support for the best part of a year.

Remember that when you quickly get your head around a change or a new process, that does not mean that everyone else around you feels the same. And sadly, if you are the boss and people see that you have it sussed and are praising those around you who found it pretty easy too, they are likely to feel really reluctant to fess up to the fact that they are still finding it pretty hard…Whatever they might tell you! So just be careful about the language and signals that you use when you are encouraging people to do something new.

It’s worth knowing that habits are formed through a process called ‘context-dependent repetition’. For example, imagine that, each time you get into the office each day, you decide you won’t log into your emails straight away and instead you will pin up a post-it with a single achievement you want for that day first.

When you first write and pin up your post it upon arriving at your desk first thing, a mental link is formed between the context (arriving at your desk) and your response to that context (writing your post-it). Each time you do a post-it in response to arriving at your desk, this mental link gets stronger. When you arrive at your desk and this prompts you to post-it your daily objective automatically without giving it much thought, a habit has formed.

So again thinking about supporting your team to create new productive habits. Until it becomes automatic you can help by making the post-it something that you notice and ask about.

Our brain likes habits because they are mentally efficient – Having a habit frees up the energy that we would otherwise put into remembering to do something or controlling a behaviour into something else. So it’s helpful to begin to imagine what fantastic use you could put your “spare” energy into if you just created a new habit (say defining your daily objective) and got a bad habit (wasting hours recycling email) out of the way.

As a final thought, you might need to think about your good and bad habits in a different way. Imagine you are trying to stop doing something you really like, that you look forward to and makes you relaxed and happy – (say pouring a glass of wine when you get in from work). Imagine that are trying to create a habit that is “better for you” by trying to replacing that with something you don’t like and won’t look forward to (those 50 sit ups again). It’s going to be really difficult.

Look at what you really want and how your habit (good or bad) provided that. In the case of the glass of wine, perhaps you looked forward to it because it relaxed you and made you feel happy? If so it’s no surprise that it’s a hard habit to break if you are trying to replace it with something that doesn’t make you relaxed and happy and is something you dread and makes your heart sink when you remember you’ve “got to do it”. You will probably fail because needing to relax and wanting to be happy probably contributed to creating the habit in the first place! It’s no surprise that your brain will find lots of reasons to revert back to the thing that makes you happy and that you like. You’ll probably be able to find lots of evidence that your wine intake is OK after all…

So you’ll probably be more successful if you cut down your wine by replacing the first glass after work with something else that makes you happy (calling a friend who makes you laugh or indulging in a guilty TV pleasure). You might to accept that your desire to do those crappy sit ups is never going to be strong enough to turn it into a habit. Would leaving your desk for 10 minutes at lunchtime for a quick walk serve a similar purpose and be easier to turn into pleasure?

Good and bad habits persist over time because they are automatic and easy. And our brains like that. So your challenge for yourself and your teams is to create some good habits that override some of the bad ones. And stick at them long enough for them to become tactics for your success. Like most things, if it was easy we would all be doing it already. And the self-help market worth £millions promising a 28 day result would not exist…

So I vote for accepting that changing habits is not easy…but using some simple tactics to make it easier.

* (Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts, & Wardle, UCL. 2010).