Now, this is a kind of an article which one will have a glance at, even when he is rushing through the daily news in the morning and this pops up somewhere in the middle of it. Who doesn’t want to habituate himself into doing something he has always wanted to!
But before starting all of this, I’ll first of all talk about what behaviourism means! Behaviourism is the study of what connection does a mind have with the behaviour of a person. And the study of this behaviour will probably lead us to the answer to our question of how to make action our habit. The study is related to finding relations between the actions we perform and our behaviour associated with that action.
There was once a doctor named Dr Maxwell Maltz who noticed a common character between his patients. After the patients were operated, it took them a minimum of 21 days to get habitual of looking at their new faces. In a similar way when they had an amputation of one of their limbs, it took them at least 21 days to get used to seeing their amputated limb. The doctor, being very wise, imagined himself doing a similar thing while trying to make his action a habit. He could relate that phenomenon and noticed that he took almost the same amount of time to form a habit.
But as society progressed, this hearsay of his observation spread like a forest fire creating the myth that we all have today about habit making. According to the observation the doctor made, it took a person a minimum of 21 days to form a habit. A span of 21 days appeared very inspiring to people, who started the inculcation of gaining their desired habits instantaneously. But as it is said- the more the expectation, the greater the disappointment. It was later when it was understood that the idea of changing one’s life by adopting your desired habit in just three weeks isn’t that true after all.
The answer to this is that it takes around 66 days on an average to inculcate a habit in oneself. But to be precise, how soon does a new action become a habit is completely dependent upon the individual’s personality. It depends on how much is he keen on converting his new behaviour into a habit. No matter how many days it takes, if he is really passionate about improving himself and is keen towards building a better personality of his, there are fewer chances of him getting impatient during the process of forming a habit.
Image credits: https://time.com/5373528/break-bad-habit-science/
