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It’s that time to make your New Year’s resolutions for 2014 and also to start putting them into action. Many people have long said to take A 3 week period to create new habits stick.?
Experts state that this common thought might not be so true. A study from the University College London about how habits form says there might ‘t be a perfect number, but that in reality if there was, it would be much longer than 21 days.
Led by researcher, Phillippa Lally, the study followed nearly 100 individuals who self-reported their healthy changes that they were trying to make habitual in their everyday lives.
It turns out that for most it took them nearly 66 days to create these habits second nature. Lally discovered that for some people it may happen to be a shorter period, but some discovered that it took up to 254 days.
Lally said, in a statement to TODAY Health, this doesn’t mean that it will always take 66 days, but it does show that it’s usually going to be considerably longer than 21 days for habit formation.
So what exactly are some things you can do to assist those habits stick?
- Ensure you do exactly the same activity at the same time and put every day until it is instinctive, suggests expert psychologist, Wendy Wood, in the University of Los angeles. ?
- Find out what prompts your improper habits and make a vary from there by avoiding those triggers, recommends David Neal, a specialist on habit formation, inside a TODAY Health interview.
- Try replacing a classic habit that you want to prevent having a different behavior in its place. It’s easier to form a brand new habit than break a classic one, Neal added.
And if you are still looking to help make your New Year’s resolutions, start here.
