At three American health clubs, the records of 7,752 members were followed for three years. Those who chose a flat fee of over $70 a month went, on average, 4.3 times a month. That works out at more than $17 a visit. A ten-visit pass would have cost them $10 a visit. Over their membership they gave up about $600 each.
They paid for the person they planned to be on the day they signed.
We know that day. The enthusiasm is real, and this time feels different. Then comes a bad week or a broken routine. We miss once, then twice, and what remains is a familiar story about our lack of willpower. We know our own version of it by heart.
The story is wrong. When 200 people were followed after making New Year pledges, 77% were still going after a week and 19% after two years. The ones who lasted were no saints. More than half of them slipped at least once, and the average number of slips over the two years was 14. A clean record is not what set them apart. Something carried them back after each slip.
This article is about that something: what keeps a habit going after motivation leaves.
Why motivation fails
Motivation is a feeling about the future, and it is good at one job: getting us to sign.
It is much weaker at the next one. Across 47 tests in which people's intentions were deliberately strengthened, a medium-to-large rise in intention produced only a small-to-medium change in what they went on to do. Meaning it more did help, and by much less.
There is a second reason, and it is a kinder one. We choose goals for the reward that comes later: health, strength, a calmer mind. We keep going for the reward that comes now. When people were asked about their New Year resolutions, how much they enjoyed the activity predicted who was still at it. How much the long-term benefit mattered to them did not.
So motivation fades for an ordinary reason. The reward we signed up for is months away, and the effort is today. Nothing is wrong with our character. Something else has to do the carrying.
What a habit is
A habit is a link between a situation and an action. Each time the two happen together the link gets stronger, until the situation sets off the action without our help.
The word carries the idea. "Habit" comes from the Latin habitus, a condition or a way of dressing, from habere, to have and to hold. It is the same word as the habit a monk wears: something we have, and something we put on each morning without a thought.
The evening snack is the usual example. We get home, we sit down, we eat something. The cue is the sofa, not hunger. Repeat it often enough and getting home is all it takes.
What makes a habit so useful is what it no longer needs. In the words of the group at University College London that measures them, habits "do not rely on conscious thought, memory or willpower".
Brushing our teeth stopped needing motivation long ago. We do not stand at the basin weighing up the benefits.
William James saw the point in 1890. "The great thing, then, in all education," he wrote, "is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy." He went on: "The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work." And he had no envy for the alternative: "There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision."
The people with steady habits did not find a way to stay motivated. They stopped needing to be.
How long it takes
The figure that gets repeated is 21 days. It goes back to Maxwell Maltz and a book he published in 1960. People who had had plastic surgery, he wrote, took about 21 days to get used to a new face, and it "requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell".
He was writing about the picture we carry of ourselves, and he said "minimum". Both details got lost on the way.
When habits were measured, the answer was longer. Ninety-six volunteers each chose one small daily action, such as a glass of water after breakfast, and reported every day how automatic it felt. On average it took 66 days to become as automatic as it was going to get. The quickest person needed 18. The slowest had not arrived when the 12 weeks ended and was forecast to need 254.
A later review of 20 such tests, with 2,601 people between them, found the same spread: typical times of 59 to 66 days, averages of 106 to 154, and individuals anywhere from 4 days to 335.
Someone who quits at week three because it still takes effort is quitting near the beginning.
The steep part comes first
This is the finding that changes how those weeks feel.
A habit does not sit flat for weeks and then arrive all at once. It climbs fastest at the start. In the 96 volunteers the first repetitions brought "quite large increases" in how automatic the action felt. Each later repetition added a little less, until the curve levelled off.
So by week four the steepest part of the climb is behind us. The effort we still feel belongs to the long, slow stretch at the top, and it is no sign that the plan is failing.
How to tell it has taken
Counting days tells us little, since one person's 18 is another's 254. A better test is the one used to measure habits in the first place. It comes down to four statements about the action: "I do automatically", "I do without having to consciously remember", "I do without thinking" and "I start doing before I realise I'm doing it".
The more of those are true, the further along we are.
There is a fifth sign, and it is easy to mistake for a problem: the habit stops holding our attention. When people kept hourly diaries, those in the middle of something they did by habit were mostly thinking about something else. They also felt less stress than people doing something that was not yet a habit. The excitement of week one has gone because it is no longer needed.
Start smaller than feels respectable
The quickest way there is to ask for less. Simple actions became automatic sooner: among the 96 volunteers, drinking a glass of water settled in more quickly than doing 50 sit-ups.
The gym is the hard case. In records of more than 12 million gym visits and 40 million hand-washes in hospitals, the hand-washing habit formed in weeks and the gym habit took months. Among 111 new gym members, the least that built an exercise habit was four sessions a week for six weeks. What predicted it was consistency, a simple routine, a setting that helped and enjoying it.
So the goal in the early weeks is repetition, not performance. Two minutes of movement counts. One paragraph counts. The version small enough to do on a bad day is the one that gets repeated, and it can grow once it runs without us.
Anthony Trollope wrote novel after novel while holding down a job at the Post Office, and he knew how it was done. "A small daily task, if it be really daily," he wrote, "will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules."
And one at a time. Specific plans for when and where helped people with a single goal. When they made such plans for several goals at once, the benefit largely went: seeing everything laid out side by side made the whole lot look harder, and commitment dropped.
Then take the friction out of the first move. Clothes laid out the night before. The glass already on the counter. The book already open on the table.
Tie it to something that already happens
A habit needs a cue, and in the measurements above the cue was an event: "after breakfast".
An event does better than an alarm. In a four-week test, people who relied on reminders kept repeating the action, and the habit itself was held back. Cues tied to an event made the action more automatic. A look at 115 habit apps found them built around tracking and reminders, with no support for cues of that kind.
How much the setting matters showed up when students moved to a new university. Their habits of exercising, reading the paper and watching television survived the move only where the setting around them stayed the same. Where it changed, the habit lapsed. Wendy Wood, who led that work, sets out the evidence in .
A habit begun on holiday meets the same problem when we come home.
It cuts the other way too. Where the students' setting changed, in some cases old habits loosened and they acted on what they now intended. A new home, a new job or a new timetable is the cheapest moment to drop a habit we dislike, or to start one we want.
The easiest setting to borrow is a habit we already have. When 50 people set out to floss every day, half were told to do it before brushing and half after. The ones who flossed after brushing tended to build the stronger habit, and eight months later they were still flossing more often. The finished action had become the cue for the new one.
We can write it as one sentence. After I brush my teeth, I floss. (A kept beside the toothbrush puts the cue in plain sight.) After I clear the breakfast table, I walk to the corner. After I shut the laptop, I put my shoes on.
The same sentence can be pointed at a habit we want gone. Take the evening snack. "When I sit down on the sofa after dinner, I make a pot of peppermint tea" names the old cue and puts a new action in its place. In three tests, plans of that kind took away the old habit's head start: it stopped being the first thing to come to mind. The new action did not become automatic at once. What the plan gave people was a real choice in the moment, and how often they took it depended on how much they wanted the alternative.
A usual time
Mornings have an edge. Forty-eight students learned one daily stretch, half of them on waking and half before bed. For the morning group it became automatic in about 106 days and for the evening group in about 154. The explanation offered was cortisol, a hormone that runs high on waking.
But leave a second way in. People were paid to exercise in one of two ways: for each visit inside a two-hour window they had planned, or for a visit at any hour of the day. The fixed-window group went less often, both while the money lasted and after it stopped. A routine that can only happen in one slot is lost on the day the slot is taken. A usual time, then, and a fallback.
And write the second sentence. A plan for the action works better with a plan for the obstacle. Of 211 people leaving a heart rehabilitation programme, those who planned when and where they would exercise, and also how they would handle the barriers they expected, were doing more exercise two months later than those with the first plan alone. If it is raining, I climb the stairs indoors. If I get home late, I do the short version.
Make it pleasant now
We keep going for the reward that comes now, so the habit needs one.
One way is to save a treat for the habit. People given audiobooks they could only listen to at the gym went 51% more often at first than a comparison group. A favourite podcast kept for walks does the same job, and leave the ears free for the street.
The honest ending is that the effect shrank as the weeks went by, most of all after the Thanksgiving break. Even so, 61% of the people chose to pay to keep the arrangement once the test was over.
Plain money has done it too. People paid to attend a gym a set number of times in one month were still going more after the payments ended, and the whole gain came from those who had not been regulars before. Any reason to repeat will do at first. The repeating is what builds it.
A treat gets us through the door for a while. What keeps us coming back is finding a version of the thing that we like for itself: the walk with a friend, the class with good music, the route with the view.
Across 66 reports on exercise, the pattern was the same. Valuing exercise tended to be what got people to take it up. Enjoying it was the better guide to who stayed.
I have to, or I choose to
Those 66 reports sorted people's reasons as well. The more a person's reasons were their own, the more they exercised, and that held consistently. For guilt and "I should", the evidence was mixed.
It is worth finding the reason that is ours. "I exercise because I want energy in my fifties" is the same half-hour as "I exercise because I should". It is a different thing to carry.
What about seeing ourselves as "a runner" or "a reader"? People who see themselves as active are more active: across 62 sets of findings the two went together. Which comes first has not been shown. It may well be the doing, repeated, that changes the picture.
There is a line for that: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." It sounds like Aristotle, and it is Will Durant, summing Aristotle up in 1926. The thought stands whoever wrote it.
When we miss
William James handed down a rule for this, which he credited to a Professor Bain. "Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life," he wrote. "Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again."
It is a lovely image, and the measurement went against it. In the 96 volunteers, missing one opportunity "did not materially affect the habit formation process".
What does the damage is what we tell ourselves next.
We eat the biscuit we had sworn off. The plan we have kept for eleven days ends right there at the kitchen counter, and by dinner we have decided the week is lost and eaten accordingly. The eleven days feel erased by twenty minutes.
Janet Polivy, who tested it on dieters, called this the "what-the-hell effect". In one of her tests everyone was served the same slice of pizza, and some were led to believe that their slice was bigger than another person's. The dieters among them tended to eat more cookies afterwards. The non-dieters tended to eat fewer. Nothing had changed except the belief that a rule was already broken.
The same kind of test found the way out. Young women who had just eaten something off their plan were prompted to think about it with some kindness toward themselves. Among the strictest dieters, that left them less upset, and they ate less afterwards than those given no such prompt.
The lapse is a data point. The verdict on it is ours to give.
A large test of exercise schemes points the same way. In it, 61,293 members of an American gym chain were put through 54 different four-week programmes. The one that worked best offered a small reward for coming back after a missed workout.
That is the true reason behind the rule "never miss twice". The miss is cheap. The return is the part to protect. And if a clean line helps, the start of a week or a month is a good place to draw it: people begin more new things at such landmarks.
Benjamin Franklin made his peace with all this long ago. He listed thirteen virtues, ruled a book with a column for each day of the week and put a black spot against every lapse. Order gave him the most trouble. In the end he decided that perfection was out of reach, and that the attempt had left him better and happier all the same.
Willpower is the wrong tool
When a habit fails, weak willpower is the verdict we reach for first. For years the textbook picture was a tank of willpower that drains through the day. When 23 laboratories ran the classic test again, with 2,141 people between them, the effect all but disappeared.
People with good self-control turn out to do less resisting. Their habits carry them past the temptation before it starts. How to Outsmart Cravings and Make Healthier Choices Without Relying on Willpower has the evidence, and what to do about the cupboard.
One wrinkle. The New Year resolvers who lasted two years did report using more willpower than those who gave up. They also reported changing their surroundings more and rewarding themselves more. Willpower was in the kit. It was never the whole kit.
Hard weeks
Slips have a pattern. Among the resolvers they were typically set off by stress, low mood and a sense of having lost control.
What we do in those weeks is whatever we do by habit. "Habit a second nature!" the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed. "Habit is ten times nature." Across five tests, people with little self-control to spare did more of their habits, the helpful ones as much as the unhelpful.
That is the best argument for building a habit in a calm month. It will still be running in a hard one.
Other people
Company helps, and later than we might expect. Among the resolvers, support from other people made no difference to who was still going in the first six months. After six months it did.
One of the earliest findings in this corner dates from 1898, when Norman Triplett noticed that cyclists rode faster alongside other cyclists than alone. Nobody has to be watching us. For a simple, well-practised task, someone nearby doing the same thing can be enough.
A walking partner, a class, or a weekly message to one person saying what we did: any of them will do.
What survives
One last caution, from the same 54 programmes. Forty-five percent of them raised gym visits while they ran, by 9% to 27%. Only 8% left a change that could still be measured afterwards. And the judges asked to forecast which programmes would win could not do it.
A smaller test tells the same modest story. When 537 adults with obesity were given either a leaflet of ten habit tips or the usual advice, the leaflet group lost 0.87 kg more over three months. Two years on they had kept it off, and by then the others had lost about as much.
So no single method is guaranteed, and nobody can pick ours for us. We try one, watch for a few weeks and keep what works. A tick on a calendar is enough to watch with.
Where to begin
The gym members at the start paid more than $17 a visit for a plan that depended on feeling like it. The plan that works assumes we will not feel like it, and is built for that day.
One small action. Tied to something we already do. Pleasant enough to repeat. With a rule for the day we miss: go back the next day.
The story we carry about our failed habits, that we lack willpower, that we are a different kind of person from the one who exercises or reads or eats well, is a story about the wrong thing. The version of us with the habits we want has the same character as the version without them.
Write one sentence tonight. It starts "After I brush my teeth, I will", and the rest is ours to finish.
Is the hard part getting started at all? Why Your Brain Sabotages You Every Time You Try to Start — why we put things off, and eight ways to make a beginning.
Not sure the goal itself is the right one? Success Conditioning: How to Set Goals You Reach — choosing a goal that is ours, planning the moment, and what to keep to ourselves.
Know someone who has started the same habit three times and blames their willpower? Send them this, and tell them to start at the toothbrush.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional. If your mood has been low for weeks or you're having thoughts of harming yourself, reach out for help today.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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