Forming a new habit sounds simple: you decide to do something and you do it. In practice, most resolutions fall by the wayside in the first few weeks, not because of a lack of motivation but because of the way they’re set up. Below is what behavioural research tells us happens when behaviour becomes routine, and how you can use that process to your advantage. If you’re specifically looking for help with planning around the New Year, you’ll find that in our article on sticking to your New Year’s resolutions; here, we’re focusing on the underlying mechanism – namely, how behaviour is triggered by a cue.
How do you build a new habit?
You build a new habit by making it small, linking it to a moment that’s already part of your day, and then simply repeating it often. Slips are part of the process and don’t set you back to square one.
These four elements (small, linked, repeated, forgiving) recur time and again in research into habit formation. After all, a habit is not the same as a decision. With a decision, you weigh up whether you feel like it each time. With a habit, the behaviour is triggered by a cue from your environment, without you having to expend any energy on deciding. The aim of the first few weeks is therefore not to ‘persevere through willpower’, but to establish that cue.
How long does it take for something to become a habit?
Expect it to take several months, not just a few weeks. In the best-known study on this subject, the median was around 66 days, with a range of 18 to 254 days among participants.
These figures come from a study in the European Journal of Social Psychology, in which participants kept a daily record of a new eating, drinking or exercise habit. The researchers observed that the degree of automaticity increases rapidly at first and then levels off. The initial repetitions yield the greatest gains; later repetitions mainly serve to stabilise the behaviour.
The oft-cited ‘21 days’ does not stem from behavioural research. It originates from a plastic surgeon’s observation of how long it took patients to get used to their changed appearance. That is different from learning new behaviour. A more practical approach than setting a target figure: assume that the first one and a half to two months will require conscious effort, and that simple behaviour becomes ingrained more quickly than complex behaviour.
Why does starting small work better than starting big?
Small steps work better because they require little energy and can therefore be maintained even on busy, tiring or chaotic days. It is precisely those days that determine whether a habit survives.
Anyone who wants to exercise every day, eat differently, go to bed earlier and drink more all at the same time is changing four routines in one go. Each of those routines demands attention in the early stages, and attention is a limited resource. As soon as life throws a spanner in the works, the whole package falls apart, and then it feels as though ‘it hasn’t worked out’.
Practical tip: choose one behaviour and make the initial version almost ridiculously small. Not an hour’s exercise three times a week, but twenty minutes twice a week. Not two litres of water a day, but a glass of water with every meal. If you manage that for two weeks in a row, then take the next step up slightly. That way, you build up the rhythm first and only then the volume.
How do you link a new habit to an existing moment?
By linking it to something you already do every day, and writing it down in advance in the form ‘after X, I do Y’. The existing moment then becomes the cue.
This works because, at a fixed, recognisable moment, your memory automatically triggers the corresponding behaviour. A vague resolution (“I’m going to exercise more”) has no cue and therefore depends on whether you happen to think of it. A specific resolution (“after dinner, I’ll go for a ten-minute walk”) does have one.
Good anchors are moments that are already fixed in your routine: making coffee, brushing your teeth, closing your laptop, putting the children to bed. Choose one and stick with it for a few weeks. Changing the moment means you have to start building up the cue all over again. If you want to apply the same link to what you eat, our article on how to change your eating habits explains how to do this for fixed mealtimes and shopping.
How can you make a habit easier to stick to?
By lowering the barrier to the behaviour you want, and raising it for the behaviour you want to replace. Your environment will then do some of the work for you.
In practical terms, this means: laying out your sports kit the night before, putting your water bottle on your desk rather than in the cupboard, keeping your running shoes by the door, and choosing the gym that’s on your route rather than the one ten minutes further away. Any obstacle you remove in advance is one you won’t have to overcome when the time comes.
Reminders are part of this. A recurring appointment in your diary, an alarm on your phone or a note on the fridge will, in the first few weeks, replace the cue that isn’t there yet. Once the behaviour becomes second nature, you can do away with the reminder.
Does it help to keep track of how often you succeed?
Yes, provided you note down whether you’ve carried out the behaviour, rather than whether you’ve achieved a result. After all, you can influence the behaviour, but you have far less control over the outcome.
A simple list of days with ticks is enough. What you write down reflects your progress: two weeks of ticks show that things are going better than they feel, and three blank days reveal where it went wrong (usually a moment you didn’t plan for, or a step that was too big). Assess yourself on a weekly basis, not daily. Five out of seven days is a good week.
What do you do if you slip back into your old habit?
You pick up where you left off the next day. In the study mentioned above, missing a single day had no significant impact on the habit-forming process.
That is the most important antidote to the all-or-nothing mindset that causes many resolutions to fail: skipping a single day is interpreted as proof that it doesn’t work after all, and that idea then does more damage than the missed day itself. After all, the cue you’ve built up doesn’t disappear just because you didn’t respond to it once; it’ll simply be there again the next day. Old routines don’t disappear either; they remain available as an alternative. Especially when the context changes (holidays, moving house, a busy period at work), the new behaviour can easily fall by the wayside because the familiar cue is temporarily absent. In such cases, decide on a scaled-down version in advance for that period, linked to a moment that is fixed within that context.
Why does it help to let those around you know?
Because the people around you are part of your cue: they help determine what your day looks like and when a particular moment is fixed. If they know what you’re planning, they’ll plan around it instead of getting in the way of it.
So be specific about the time, not the goal: not “I’m going to exercise more often”, but “I’ll train on Tuesdays and Thursdays at seven o’clock”. A flatmate who knows this won’t move dinner to that exact time, and that saves you the argument that would otherwise undermine your anchor every week. You can take it a step further by making a commitment with someone else: going for a walk or training together makes the other person part of your cue, making it harder to skip your routine.
Frequently asked questions
How many habits can you form at the same time?
Preferably one, or at most two if they coincide (for example, a glass of water with breakfast and your supplements with that same breakfast). More than that at once demands too much attention in the early stages.
Is it better to start in the morning or in the evening?
The time slot that’s fixed in your diary is the best option. For exercise, it also depends on when you realistically have the time. We’ve set out the considerations in our article on the training time that suits you best.
What if the habit still feels like a struggle after a few weeks?
Usually, the step is too big or the time is too vague. Halve the step and set it for one specific time. If it still feels like a struggle after that, the question is whether the behaviour itself actually fits in with your weekly routine.
How do you turn drinking water into a habit?
Link it to fixed times rather than a daily total: a glass with every meal and a bottle on your desk. You can read about what happens if you don’t drink enough in ‘What happens if you don’t drink enough water?’.
Supplements in your daily routine
Supplements require the same approach as any other habit: a set time, a set place and a dosage as per the label. Keep the jar by your coffee or next to your toothbrush, and you won’t have to think about it any more. If you want to know exactly what’s in a product before adding it to your routine, you’ll find the full list of ingredients and the recommended intake for our products in the Ekopura shop.
