7 Tips to Form Long-Lasting Habits

When you decide to form a long lasting habit, consistency is the key.

We have already explored

• how habits work &
• how to form good habits while replacing bad ones

However, I felt that tackling forming long-lasting habits needed a more in-depth dive.

How Habits Work

As a refresher, habits work in a cycle. There is a cue (or trigger) that tells us what habit to perform, we do a routine, and we get a reward.

The process is the same for both good and bad habits. For example, running.

The cue is seeing the running shoes by the door, the routine is going for a three-mile run, and the reward is the dopamine rush and positive feelings about yourself.

To counter, see a bad habit like spending too much time on social media. Usually cued by feeling bored, the routine is scrolling through for an hour, and the reward is the dopamine rush social media provides. Both habits work the same way. The name of the game then is making the cue trigger a positive routine that rewards you with results that lead you to your long-term goal.

Plan for more than 21 Days for your Habit

We all have heard the 21 or 30 days to form a habit. This is a helpful rule of thumb to remember to do your new cue + routine habit every day, but it isn’t scientifically accurate.

Phillippa Lally is a health psychology researcher at University College London. In a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Lally and her research team decided to figure out just how long it takes to form a habit.

They analyzed 96 people who all wanted to incorporate a new long-lasting habit into their lives over 12 weeks. Some people wanted to do small habits like, “drink a bottle of water with lunch”, where others wanted to “run for 15 minutes in the afternoon”. What the researchers found debunked the 30-day rule.

On average, it took 66 days for a new habit to form. Depending on the person and the behavior, the quickest habit formed in 18 days, and the longest habit took 254 days (almost 8 ½ months) to form.

When you are planning which habits to adopt, recognize you will be in this for a long-haul! Which is fine. You want to make this a habit anyway. It will just take a little more time to stick with it.

How to Form a Long-Term Habit

1. Pick on Habit to Start

Think of your willpower as a muscle. When you are developing a habit, you are changing your identity. This identity change takes willpower to follow-through with your cue + routine + reward habit. It also weighs on you mentally. When times get tough you might ask yourself “am I strong enough to do this” or “what’s the point?” It takes effort to push past these obstacles.

Ego depletion is the idea that willpower and the ability to control your emotions is a limited resource. By changing a new habit, you are using more willpower than normal. If you try to develop more than one habit at a time, you will most likely spread yourself too thin to be able to follow through with any of them.

Ask yourself, “What one new habit do you want to form?” What would really change your life? Then start from there!

2. Work towards micro-goals and micro-quotas

Having a long-term goal like losing 60 pounds or writing a book sounds so daunting you might as well continue to sleep under the covers. However, going for a twenty-minute walk each day and writing 500 words a day doesn’t sound too bad at all.

In a study on self-determination and intrinsic motivation, researchers found that those who achieve their big dreams are more motivated by getting the daily work of the task done. These people look at their long-term goal, and the timeframe they want to have it accomplished. They then break those bigger goals into smaller goals, which are then broken into micro-quotas they need to reach.

For example, losing 60 pounds becomes losing 5 pounds a month, which is about 1.2 pounds a week, translating to eating 500 calories less every day. Much more manageable than some big goal out in the future.

Also, the added benefit is this works on building the healthy long-term habits required to get to that goal over the long-term. There might not be a quick fix, but time is going anyway. Might as well use it to build your habits and your long-term goals.

3. Speak in if-then

Willpower is not great for building new habits. It takes too much energy to try to muster and requires a lot of thinking to get you to do the work.

Studies have instead found thinking in “if-then” helps you get work done. For example, if the habit is you want to keep your home cleaner, instead of trying to “keep my home tidier”, you need to take specific actions.

Such as, “if I come home, and it is dirty, then I will clean my bedroom and kitchen immediately before doing anything else.” Creating your tasks like this manifests actionable steps that help you get your work done.

4. Eliminate the “what the hell” effect

When you are working on goals and habits, especially new ones, when we slip off the band-wagon, there is the thought of “what the hell?”

For example, if you are dieting and are taken to a restaurant with friends you will be tempted to eat more than normal. You have some peanuts at the bar, a breadstick at the table, maybe ship some alcohol, and before you know it, “what the hell” you say and order that loaded pizza.

Instead of cutting our losses and getting back on the diet train, we are prone to just throw all progress out the window. We could have stopped with the peanuts at the bar, but we just kept slipping.

This is because there is a disconnect between today and the longer-term goals. Slipping today doesn’t seem so bad because you will make it up tomorrow. However, that rarely happens.

When you feel yourself slipping on the habit, remind yourself of your long-term goal, recognize what triggers the “what the hell” effect in you, and try your best to stick with the new habit.

5. Plan for obstacles

WOOP to see obstacles that will stop your progress. By WOOPing you can see issues long before they come to challenge you.

Then you can “if-then” plan for how you will overcome it. For example, if friends take me out, then I will order a chicken salad.

6. Make the Habit the Default Setting.

Make your cue one of the first things you see in the morning, and make the routine simple enough and the reward big enough that you stick with your habit.

By putting gym clothes in your room, you can increase your rate of going to the gym by 300%, or by only having fruit in your house (instead of candy), you can easily lose 5 pounds a week. Set your default environment to work with you, not against you.

7. Be Patient

Forming a new healthy habit can take 8 months to take hold. Plus, if you want to keep this habit in your life forever, then it will be with you for the rest of your life. Practice self-compassion (link) and treat yourself like a best friend. Celebrate your little victories (link) and pick yourself up when you fall short of your daily quotas.

Do your best each day and work towards your goals!

Main Take-Aways

• Forming positive habits takes time and work.
• Break your big dreams down into small daily quotas. You will be surprised at how easy these big dreams seem once you have it down to the day-to-day work.
• By making processes automatic and thinking ahead, you can greatly increase the chances of sticking with this new healthy habit you are trying to implement.

Action item

What habit do you want to form? What is your big goal with this habit? Break it down into its smaller components and plan this week for what your obstacles will be. Then go make that dream a reality!