hey there, improvement pill here welcome to lesson three of the tamed course if you have not watched the previous lessons
pause this video right now and click on the link in the description below
because remember in order for you to get the most out of this course in order for
you to really learn how to change your habits and change your life you’re gonna
have to watch each and every single one of the videos in today’s video we’re
going to debunk two of the biggest misconceptions people have about
building habits and the first is in regards to how long it takes to actually
form or break a habit you’ve probably heard at one point or another oh it
takes 21 days and it’s simply just not true this misconception actually stems
from a guy named Maxwell Maltz Maltz was a plastic surgeon back in the 60s and he
noticed that when he worked with people who got a new nose or add some sort of
facial reconstruction these people would feel uncomfortable when looking in the
mirror and multi found that it took them about 21 days to get used to what they
were seeing before they were more comfortable with the new faces and
what’s funny is that he took this simple observation with little to no science
backing it up and he stated that it takes 21 days to form or break a habit
in his book psycho-cybernetics which was a self-help book that went on
to becoming a best-seller and eventually sold millions of copies and over time
people just assumed that this 21 days to build a habit thing was true so how long
does it really take to form or break a habit well the recent study conducted at
the College of London by Professor Philippa Whaley found that it really
depends they looked at a group of people and tracked how long it took for them to
reach a point of maximum automaticity for a variety of different habits now
for those of you that don’t know what automaticity is it’s basically how
little thought you need to put into a task for example if I told you to tie
your shoe you wouldn’t have to think about it very hard chances are you’ve
tied your shoes enough times that it’s already reached a point of maximum
automaticity a routine is considered to be a fully embedded habit when it
reaches the highest point of automaticity and here’s a graph from the
study that depicts tis the study found that every single routine out there has
what’s called the automaticity line a point where if you’ve repeated the
routine enough times it becomes as automatic as it’s going to get at this
point your routine is now a habit and this study found that it can take
anywhere from two weeks to nine months with an average of 66 days
to reach this line and it all depends on how complicated and hard the routine is
for example the routine of taking her supplements in the morning might only
take three weeks before it reaches the line of automaticity before it becomes a
fully embedded habit that you don’t even have to think about on the other hand a
routine of going to the gym and working out might take six months before it hits
this line so for all of you out there who think oh I only need to stick to
this routine for 21 days or oh I just need to complete a 90 day challenge
you’re gravely mistaken you have to understand that it’s going to be a long
long journey a journey that could potentially take almost a year to
complete depending on what sort of habits you’re trying to build now this
might seem scary for a lot of you how am I gonna stick to these habits without
missing a day for an entire year and this brings us the common misconception
number two which is that if you relapse if you give in and smoke a cigarette or
have a drink or you miss a day of meditation that it’s all over a lot of
us have what I like to call the all-or-nothing mindset we think Oh once
the streak is broken all of my hard work is gone and because it’s gone I should
just relapse over and over again right I might as well enjoy myself and this is
far from the truth a significant number of people in the same study missed a day
or two when building their assigned new habits maybe they were too tired or
maybe they just forgot the researchers took this opportunity to look at its
effects on the automaticity line and to their surprise they found that missing a
single day does not have a clear effect on your progress the amount of progress
loss was almost non-existent however they found that if you continue to
relapse if you continue to miss days of going to the gym or doing your daily
meditation then you started losing a lot of progress and the amount of progress
loss was exponential so missing two days was significantly worse than missing
just one day and missing a week was way worse than missing two days so what does
this mean for us this means that we need a shift our mindset we shouldn’t focus
on a numerical streak we should not count the amount of days
it’s been since our last relapse the mindset that we should have is that
we’re gonna try our best to stick to this habit for as many months as it
takes until it reaches this line of automaticity because chances are you’re
going to laughs at one point or another in fact
studies have shown that 90% of all people trying to overcome their
addictions or build new habits relapse at least once throughout their journey
what’s important is that you force yourself to go back to building your
good habits the following day you must resist the urges to binge because that’s
when you actually start losing progress as long as you can do this you will
eventually reach the automaticity line you may have postponed it by a day or
two but as long as you get back up and try again don’t worry about the streak
you will eventually reach that line and once you hit that line it becomes
automatic so now that you know how habits work and you also know how long
it really takes to form a habit now it’s time for us to select a habit together
there’s dozens of good habits out there that are all beneficial so we’re gonna
cover a bunch of them and then we’re gonna pick one and focus on that one for
the rest of the course because remember our strategy is to adopt good new habits
so that they can eventually replace your current addiction the same course was
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Related posts:

  1. How To Stop Bad Decisions With Willpower
  2. How To Recharge Your Willpower
  3. How I Learn And Remember Things Easily – The Effort Rule
  4. How To Quit ANY ADDICTION (The Strategy)
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