How to Create Good Habits

Let’s imagine that you want to start a new habit. For example, maybe it is time to get into shape, so you decide that you want to run every afternoon before dinner.

No one can give you a guaranteed system for creating a new habit—or for breaking an unwanted habit. However, habit experts, like Dr. Wood and Dr. Neal—have some advice that comes from their research.

• Don’t believe simple formulas about making or breaking habits. In 1960, a popular self-help book claimed that forming a habit takes 21 days.^[1] If this is true, then you just need to be sure to run before dinner every day for three weeks and you’ve done it! In 2010, psychologist Pippa Lally found that this timeframe for creating a new habit takes, on average, 66 days. But Dr. Lally’s more important point is that many factors determine how long habit formation takes. Her research showed a range of times from 18 days to 254, estimates based on self-reports. New behaviors vary in complexity and people have a variety of motivations and goals, different personalities and social support systems. True habit formation is a long-term commitment, so plan to make a conscious effort for many months.
• Make your habit the default behavior for a particular time or place. Habits are created from actions that are repeated frequently and in a particular context. This is particularly important on those days when your motivation is low—when you would rather sit at home than go out and run. But your brain is on your side in this. In a 2013 study, Neal and Wood found that, when we are tired or distracted, we avoid making decisions.^[2] In other words, we go with the decision that is easier. If you make your new habit (running before dinner) your default behavior, it will be easier to just go out and run than to put in the effort to decide to do something else.
• New habits require effort. According to a longitudinal field study on the role of self-control in habit formation, the initiation of such new behavior requires purposeful effort.^[3] The study found that the key to habit formation is consistent behavior over time, rather than relying on self-control, especially in the early stages. This suggests that the effort required to form a new habit is more about sticking to a routine than just resisting short-term temptations.
• Choose your cues. This point is related to the previous one about creating a routine. Habits are associated with cues. This is very obvious with “bad habits” where we know that a particular smell makes us want to eat or just hearing the cellphone ring can take our attention away from something important that we are doing. If you want to create a habit, use cues to take over some of the effort. For the person wanting to run each day, let the ritual of changing out of your work clothes create a set of associations—the drawer with your running shorts or the closet with your shoes—that help you get out of the house and onto the trail.
• Make a habit to break a habit. Old habits are hard to break. New habits can be hard to learn, but in general—assuming you stay motivated—it is easier to get rid of an unwanted habit by replacing it with something you want to do. You may like to drink a beer (or a soda or something else that isn’t water) when you get home from work. If taking that drink is a habit, you may find it hard to resist. But if you start your new running regimen, running as you get home from work, the unwanted habit will need to move aside. And every day that you don’t engage in the unwanted habit (because you are on your 5-mile run) it becomes weaker and easier to resist.

Final Thoughts

At the beginning of this activity, we suggested that “habits are the invisible architecture of our daily lives.” A lot of our time is spent engaging in habitual activities, some good, some bad, and most of them useful for getting ourselves through the day. But we have also suggested that old habits can be changed and new habits can be chosen and learned. In fact, this area of psychology says that you can decide what kind of person you want to be, and there is a reasonable chance you can become that person. But it isn’t easy and it won’t happen overnight.