It Doesn't Take Just 21 Days to Break a Habit

Misbar has discovered that the 21 day rule for habit breaking originates from a 1960s book written by a plastic surgeon who noticed his patients seemed to take about 21 days to get used to their new faces after surgery. Since then, people have latched onto the idea of taking 21 days to change habits. 

However, more recent research has demonstrated that it can take much longer than 21 days to change a habit, and how long it actually takes depends on multiple factors. For example, in a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, the time it took participants to reach 95 percent “automation” of a behavior ranged from 18 to 254 days; indicating considerable variation in how long it takes people to create a new habit and highlighting that it can take a very long time (way more than 21 days). Advice written in the British Journal of General Practice in 2012 suggested telling patients to count on around 10 weeks for a new habit to form, even with daily repetition. 

According to the National Institutes of Health, there is a reason that habits can be so hard to break. Habits are often helpful to us, says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse. “When behaviors become automatic, it gives us an advantage, because the brain does not have to use conscious thought to perform the activity,” Volkow says. “This frees up our brains to focus on different things.”

How long it takes to break a habit can also depend on which brain chemicals are involved. For example, pleasure-based habits are so much harder to break according to Dr. Russell Poldrack, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Enjoyable behaviors can prompt your brain to release a chemical called dopamine. “If you do something over and over, and dopamine is there when you’re doing it, that strengthens the habit even more. When you’re not doing those things, dopamine creates the craving to do it again,” Poldrack says. “This explains why some people crave drugs, even if the drug no longer makes them feel particularly good once they take it.”

Experts agree that there's no typical time frame for breaking a habit, and the right recipe is going to be a mix of personality, motivation, circumstances, and the habit in question according to MDLinx.com.