3 weeks to a New You.

A little bit of a failure to launch situation today. I wrote a note about what I wanted to write about and then didn’t actually write it.

More specifically, I wrote on a post-it, which I put on the back of a chicken-scratched piece of paper. A true visual manifestation of my hesitancy to Commit to the Bit.

The word that we often like to cite on the street is that it takes about three weeks to create a habit.

When we get a little bit more evidence-based, the favorite study to quote is one done by Lally et al. well over a decade ago, that showed it took between well over a decade ago, that showed it took between 18-254 days for people to show signs of automaticity, meaning doing something without thinking about it, the True definition of a habit.

Where I typically have pushback when people cite this study is that the participants in the Lally study were college students who selected the behavioral that they sought to become a habit. This means intrinsic motivation is alive and well, likely coupled with some extrinsic flavor as well.

When we need to create habits that are not necessarily things we readily want to do, as is the case in a lot of health care-related behavior change, we have to assume it’s going to take longer. There are going to be more trials and errors and iterations of the behavior to find the version that is just right, the version that sticks.

The Lally et al. study tells a happy story that we can make changes at a rapid clip. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it provides the activation energy for us to get started and change our behavior in the first place.

But for some people and some behaviors, the story line is going to take a little bit longer and a little bit more… grit.

The constellations of variables that affect our behavior on any given day are different for all of us. For some of us, the constellations stay relatively consistent, a breeding ground for burgeoning behaviors. For others, constellations are chaotic, making some changes tricker than others. But never impossible.