Habit? Schmabit!

Quite a few years ago, in articles in self-help magazines and books about changing your life and being more organized and getting things done, one recurring piece of advice about establishing new habits said that your could entrench new habits by doing the new habit activity for 21 days in a row.

If you do the things you want to institute as a habit (walking on the treadmill, eating a good breakfast every morning, going to bed at an appropriate hour to ensure you’ll get a good night’s sleep, etc.) for 21 days in a row, then you will have established a wonderful new habit in your life! That’s what the magazine articles said.

So I went about trying to create some new habits. I should get up early every morning and do some Bible study. I should eat a nice salad for lunch. I should develop a housecleaning plan and make lists of what should be done on which days, and stick with it for 21 days.

Sounds good, right.

I worked hard for 21 days, working on my habit-forming routines. And after 21 days, I felt all organized and settled and proud.

Problem was, in the ensuing weeks, there were always  interruptions of the routines. Important ones, like a sick kid or a family need. Or Sundays. Unimportant ones, like somebody I wanted to watch on David Letterman, which would keep me up too late, so I wouldn’t wake up early in the morning. (This was before I could just watch online the next day.)  And leaving town for 3 or 4 days? By time I got home, I didn’t even recall those habits. Hmmmm. Am I supposed to be vacuuming?

Here’s what I learned about extinguishing a habit: It took one, maybe two days to completely dislodge a habit I had spent 21 days building. Really? Really! Getting Up Early quickly became Waiting for the Alarm to Go Off. The housekeeping lists went…somewhere…I don’t know. I never saw them again. The desire for salad-eating completely disappeared, in about 21 hours.

So many starts and stops over the years. And I felt like it was all my fault. Well, to a degree it was, but here’s what I’ve learned, after looking into it. The “21 day-develop new habits” idea (which was ubiquitous for quite a while) was most likely based on some published information that didn’t even really apply to the development of good habits.

Even now though, there are still lots of books being published that rely on that “21 Day” idea. They may have great information; I haven’t read any of them. But I’m afraid they’re setting up their readers for frustration.

He has always been! It is His hand that holds everything together.
Colossians 1:17The Voice (VOICE)

The real research into establishing habits says that it can take any where from 24 from 254 days to create a new habit, with the average at 66 days. Sixty-six? About three times what used to be proposed! Too bad we didn’t have Snopes back then. They might have investigated, and I could have been more informed and had more successes than failures. Maybe. Meantime, I can know that God is holding it all together for me, while I’m trying to figure out how to get things done.