or eating healthier only to have it fail after a week or 21 days?

If you're serious about starting a new habit,

what might surprise you is how long it actually takes to build a new healthy habit.

Welcome to another video on The Sum of Our Lives,

where we support each other to live more resilient,

fun and fulfilling lives.

In this video we'll answer how long it takes to build a new healthy habit

and whether forgetting to do the activity once,

affects your success in building the habit.

Behavioral scientists who study habit formation say that many of us try to

create healthy habits the wrong way.

We can be too ambitious making big plans

that require big changes in our behavior.

In reality the high willpower and

motivation needed to make such a change often can't be sustained.

Researchers in 2009 studied how people form habits in the real world,

asking 94 participants over a 12-week period

to choose a healthy eating, drinking or exercise behavior that they wanted to

make into a habit.

The behavior had to be one that

i) they did not already do

ii) it could be performed in response to an

obvious daily event also known as a cue

and iii) the cue had to occur every day and only once a day.

Examples included eating a piece of fruit with lunch,

drinking a bottle of water with lunch

and running for 15 minutes before dinner.

Participants were asked to complete a daily survey on whether they carried out the behavior

and how automatic it felt.

So what were some of the findings?

The study showed that the amount of time

it took for a task to become automatic

also known as a habit ranged from 18 to 254 days.

This indicates a lot of variation in how

long it can take people to develop habits.

The median time it took to develop a habit was 66 days.

So what's the good news?

Missing one opportunity to perform the behavior

didn't significantly affect performing a new habit

It was found that with more repetitions in a consistent context,

the level of automatic behavior increased for individuals.

So how do we use these insights

and what are some tips for developing a new healthy habit?

Stay tuned as I'll be covering this in my next video!

How long has it taken you to develop healthy habits in the past?

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don't forget to like, subscribe and to share the video.

Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time!