Despite all your best intentions, the regular gym sessions, the fastidious meal prepping, the scroll-free bedtimes, and the lunchtime walks have fallen by the wayside. You’re not alone. According to YouGov, 17% of people give up their New Year resolutions within a month or less. By two to three months, 21% of people have slid back into their old routines. Because the data gathered relies on people self-reporting whether they did or didn’t give up, the true stats are likely far higher. Take Strava’s study, for example, which found that 80% of people surveyed had given up on their resolutions by the second Friday in January.
That isn’t to say that setting goals is pointless—on the contrary, committing yourself to healthier routines is one of the best ways to stave off burnout, improve your fitness, and feel better generally. But the pressure of maintaining drastically altered (and ambitious) “new year, new me” routines can see even the most committed among us faltering eventually.
Wisdom would have it that a new habit takes 21 days to form and 90 days to stick. The funny part is that this much-repeated adage is actually a myth. A misquoted and often misinterpreted part of plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz’s book, Psycho-Cybernetics, the 21 days actually referred to his patients mentally adjusting to bodily changes post-surgery.
Meanwhile, new research has shown that habits actually take between 59 and 66 days to start forming, but up to 335 days to bed in and establish. That’s a marked difference. A systematic review of the existing literature on habit formation (in which the 21-day myth has been repeatedly discredited) from the University of South Australia looked at 20 studies around trying to form healthier routines, and included things like taking vitamins, flossing, reducing the amount of time people are sedentary for, exercising, and drinking water.
This isn’t to dissuade you from setting good habits, just a reminder to set realistic expectations about how long it will take before sticking to them starts to get easier. “Our brains are constantly seeking to create ‘habit loops’ because it makes life easier,” Paul Dolan, a podcaster, writer, and professor of behavioral science at LSE, previously explained to British Vogue. “This makes breaking an old habit hard, and when it comes to embedding a new habit in our automatic system, it takes a couple of months—two at least.”
