One of the major tenets of this book is that you can develop a habit that will completely change your life in about 30 days. This isn’t just a nice idea, but it actually something that you will find to be true. That is, as long as you do it correctly. This chapter will be an overview of how the 30 days to building a new habit will progress and give you a picture of what it actually takes to build a habit.
What is a New Mindset?
You are constantly creating a new mindset without even realizing it. Sometimes it hits you like a ton of bricks and other times it is more subtle. Think of a time in your life when you realized that something you had taken for granted for a long period of time was untrue (or true in some cases).
It may have been something that you assumed about a friend or co-worker, or it might have been something about yourself that you only just realized. Whatever it was, it changed your mindset. You had a psychological shift as a result of that revelation.
It works the same way when you create a new habit; when the habit has become ingrained so that it is almost automatic, your mind changes and the way that you feel about the habit changes.
Just as an example, suppose that your habit was working out at the gym every day for a month. At the end of that 30 day period, many people find themselves actually looking forward to going to the gym and working out, and even missing it when they cannot find time to go.
That’s because their mindset has changed about the activity of working out. Now, it is something that they enjoy and get pleasure from whereas before, when they first started forcing themselves to go, it was pure drudgery that took all of their strength to do.
That’s the power of changing your mindset and it is something that you will experience with every new habit that you form and every bad habit that you replace with something positive.
Why does it Take 30 Days?
This is a really good question and one that science has been asking and answering for decades. To understand the reason behind the 30 days rule you have to understand a bit more about the science behind that rule and the reasoning behind this post.
First of all – and bear with us here – it doesn’t take 30 days to form a new habit. At least, it doesn’t take 30 days for everyone. The 30 days is used as a guideline because the authors of this post believe that it is a good, solid time period to develop a new habit (as long as it is practiced daily) based upon the currently available research.
The original guideline, which was in place from the 1950’s until almost 2010, is that it took 21 days of doing something every day to form a new habit. This number came from a surgeon who studied plastic surgery patients and amputees. Based upon his (relatively unsound) research, that was how long it took people to get used to their new plastic surgery look or to get used to losing a limb.
But the truth is, studies have shown that it can take anywhere from about 18 days all the way up to 66 days to form a new habit. This will depend upon what the habit is that you are trying to master and your own ability to train yourself to learn it.
Keeping it Simple
One of the most important things that you can do when you are building habits during the first 30 day period is to keep it relatively simple. That means building just one or two – or at the most three – habits at a time.
This will allow you to concentrate on those habits and make sure that you are taking action every day.
As you become more experienced, you can add more and more habits that you are trying to learn, tying them to trigger actions that you already do. For example, if you brush your teeth every night without fail then you can safely tie a new habit to this trigger action without putting too much pressure on yourself. But the first time you take these techniques for a test drive, you should stick with three habits or less.
Complementary Habits
There is an exception to this rule in the form of complementary habits. These are habits that reinforce each other. When you have several actions that are related, you can use them to trigger one another and you can add several more habits to your day.
This works best when all of the habits are necessary for you to reach your goal. For example, suppose that your goal is for you to get in shape to run a marathon in 12 months. Even if you are overweight and need to cut down on calories, dieting alone is not going to get you in shape for a marathon. Instead, you can use dieting, exercise and even stretching to reinforce each other.
You do want to be careful of trying to do too much, even with complementary habits. If you try to do too many things in a day you are going to get overwhelmed quickly and you may not be able to complete everything in one day, which results in frustration and depression.
The Recap
Just remember, 30 days is more of a guide than an actual number that will mark when you have learned a new habit. You aren’t going to go from no habit on day zero to magically performing a habit perfectly on day 30. Be flexible and reinforce when you need to.
Keep your habits simple and try to stack complementary habits on top of each other so that they reinforce each other. But try to keep the number of habits you are trying to learn in a 30 day period down to a small handful because you want to train yourself for success so that next time you do a 30 day session you will already have the confidence to make habits stick.
