How long does it take to form a habit?

It takes an average 66 days to form a new habit, according to new research by Phillippa Lally and colleagues from the Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Research Centre based at UCL Epidemiology and Public Health. The team has completed a groundbreaking investigation into how people form habits, published last month in the European Journal of Social Psychology . Here Phillippa explains the key factors in creating and breaking habits and how we can help set up for ourselves new patterns of behaviour. What exactly takes 66 days?. In our study, we looked at how long it took people to reach a limit of self-reported automaticity for performing an initially new behaviour (that is, performing an action automatically), and the average time (among those for whom our model was a good fit) was 66 days. How do you define a habit?. Habits are behaviours which are performed automatically because they have been performed frequently in the past.