Some say a habit can be formed in 21 days of consecutive application. Many others say a good rule of thumb is to expect something more like 90 days before a habit is truly in the automatic category. No doubt, the longer you stick with anything, the more likely it is going to become ingrained.

Habits can be transformative. Little by little, day by day we can crack the code of the change we want to manifest in our lives. We like to think about habits because habits are actions. Habits are the outward behaviors we integrate into our lives. Topics like mental health and self-awareness aren’t as tangible. But most of the time we find our habits are unconscious. They’re on autopilot. We are “creatures of habit” as we say.

Before we look at what some well-known figures and their thoughts and opinions on the habits and rituals they install into their lives, just remember this. Habits are much more likely to stick — both the healthy ones you create and the unhealthy ones you break — if you have done the inner work. Habit formation around self-awareness and the principles you want to live by might be the first habit to install into your life. Or perhaps alongside another small habit.

I want you to take with you out of this article one habit that you’re going to install or remove from your life. That’s right, it can be addition by addition or addition by subtraction. Just one thing. Now is the time for action.

A Brief History of the 21-Day Rule

You’re probably familiar with some self-improvement hype about how You-too-can-create-your-billion-dollar-self-in-just-21-days. I won’t name names, but it’s a babble that has become trendy every few years in one form or another for decade upon decade. So where did this idea come from?

The idea of the 21-day rule came from Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon practicing in the 1950s. He began to notice that his patients would take about 21 days to start getting used to their physical changes. Maltz went on to write a book about his patient’s experiences, as well as his own, in 1960.

The book, called Psycho-Cybernetics, went on to sell millions of copies. It was through his influence that a litany of self-help authors for decades to come co-opted the idea that you can make permanent life changes in 21 days.

We can infer that the popularity derived in part from the concept that it can be as easy as doing something for a mere three weeks to stick. It also seems like a reasonably long enough period to be realistic.

Recent Research Suggests It Takes Longer

There is actually a much more recent study conducted by Phillippa Lally when she held a Medical Research Council Ph.D. studentship in 2009. To investigate the process of habit formation in everyday life, 96 volunteers chose an eating, drinking, or activity behavior to carry out daily in the same context (for example ‘after breakfast’) for 12 weeks.

They completed the self‐report habit index each day and recorded whether they carried out the behavior. The majority (82) of participants provided sufficient data for analysis, and increases in “automaticity” were examined over the study period. The time it took participants to reach 95% automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days.

In other words, there was huge variation. The average length of time — if you really need a number — seems to be an average of about 66 days. It’s probably best to think about a practice becoming “totally automatic” in terms of practicing it for 2–8 months.

Of course, some habits are easier than others. Are we talking about how you want to put on your yoga pants when you wake up in the morning, or how you’re studying Korean for two-hours day?

Identity Plays A Critical Role

One piece of good news from the Lally study is that just missing one opportunity to perform the behavior did not materially affect the habit formation process. This is probably due to the idea of identity formation around the behavior.

In other words, turn your habit into your identity. You’re not just trying to start running; you are a runner. You’re not just trying not to smoke; you’re a nonsmoker. This is a mindset, a mental shift, a decision toward resiliency. It’s also one small shift in thinking that can pay big results. This is part of the inner work.

The identity shift can also come out of answering the “Why?” Why did I decide to post a daily blog post? Because I have a deeply held belief that I am a writer, and I am making that commitment because it is a part of who I am. I write because I am a writer, that is why.

Your habit needs to be completely you. You do it for yourself because you want to do it, regardless of what others want you to do. Of course it’s easier to believe in yourself taking on an identity the more you do your habit, but if you have a good reason behind why you’re developing a habit, and if you intend for the habit to be sustainable and ongoing, it helps to recognize that within you is the person you are becoming.

Reframe Your Habits As Rituals

Maybe you’re a goal-setter or someone who knows they could never do the exact same thing for more than a few weeks or months at a time. You may find that it helps you sustain your behavior patterns by thinking of them as rituals instead of habits. It’s a small reframe, but perhaps the idea of doing something ritualistically gives you a more spiritual or sacred purpose behind your motives for sustained change.

Twyla Tharp has written about the importance of daily routines in her choreographer’s book, The Creative Habit. She has a pretty intense personal routine:

“I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.”

The message is that ritual takes away the question of whether or not you’re going to do something. It’s one less thing to think about. It also happens to create urgency and an importance to your projects. You have something that you could put on your calendar.

In fact, Tharp is pretty obsessive about rituals and she has many throughout the day, partly because she believes so much in what she’s doing and partly because “a dancer’s life is all about repetition.” And even though such a life may not leave a lot of time on the social calendar, Tharp says:

“When it all comes together, a creative life has the nourishing power we normally associate with food, love, and faith.”

While not all rituals and habits are formed with the end goal of living creatively, they are formed toward building one kind of purpose or another. In many cases, your habits, however positive and meaningful, have to take up their residence in your lifestyle at some point in time. In other words, habits force you to choose what you aren’t going to be doing instead at that time. Not only do they require choices be made, but they may bring up the question of sacrifice.

Maybe a hobby has to be let go. I chose to let go of brewing after two years and fifty five-gallon batches when I decided to recommit to my music. Maybe you’ll have less unstructured time. Maybe you’ll have less social time. Only you can answer the question of what you truly desire, and how you choose to use your time to reward yourself.

Keep Habits Principled And Cyclical

Jack Canfield suggests the development of a new positive habit every 13 weeks, but he implies that after the 13 weeks you’ll have developed one particular habit and now — while maintaining it — you can go on and establish a new one.

Rituals and habits don’t have to remain the same. Many people want order in their lives, but the thought of doing the same habit for years on end sounds exhausting, boring, or simply overwhelming. There are endless ways to create and sustain structure and healthy, productive habits without sticking to the exact same way of living.

Novelist Nicholson Baker says:

“What I’ve found with daily routines is that the useful thing is to have one that feels new.”

Baker enjoys the excitement of coming up with variations on his routine for each different book. Benjamin Franklin had a 13-week schedule that he used when he could to achieve “moral perfection.” And in fact, many who seek the spiritual side of meaning-filled purpose to their life might attach a morality to their routines.

Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, became famous for an extreme regularity to his daily regimen. It was something that didn’t develop until after his 40th birthday when he developed a list of personal maxims that guided the uniformity of his habits. His lifestyle became more than mere habits, but a system of moral principles.

Principles are timeless and can help to sustain our activities and endeavors. For many, though, our routines and rituals and habits are far more pragmatic. We need a means for getting to where we aspire.

The Real Mystery To Crack Is You

The bottom line is that we’re looking for making time to automate ways of living we find desirable and attainable, however ambitious they may be. There is no one way to live a principled and ordered life, a life habituated and purpose-driven.

Bernard Malamud, whose biographer, Philip Davis, calls a “time-haunted man,” believed the same. He was a creature of habit, but feared there was too much focus on the question of how writers work.

He once told an interviewer:

“There’s no one way — there’s too much drivel about this subject. You’re who you are, not Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe. You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place — you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make time — not steal it — and produce the fiction. If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”

We all want a magic pill that will give us the perfect focus we need when we need it, and we also want a magic number. There is no magic number for how long it will take for a habit to develop. That depends on the nature of the habit, the resiliency of the person, and the context of the person’s life: age, responsibilities, experience with other habits, good and bad.

And when considering the habits we form to make these things happen, you also need to think about the when throughout each and every day you intend to get them done. That is where this article can help.

Trust the process. Put in the reps, as they say. The more you practice, the luckier you get. The time is now.