Habits, Resolutions, and Motivation

A mini review of habit formation, New Year’s resolutions, and getting to action.

Originally published on my Substack — but always good to know!

So welcome all you wonderful subscribers into 2025 — as I write this, it is now the 5th of January which means that most people’s New Year’s resolutions may already be history.

New year always provides an opportunity to review research into resolutions and sometimes researchers get their articles published to coincide with the this. And so it was for a review on habit formation published in December 2024. And this is a very useful insight into how long it actually takes to form a habit in health behaviours — these include things like eating healthily, going to the gym, avoiding sugar, or flossing your teeth.

The old rule that habit requires 21 days of consistent practice comes form Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz published in 1960 originally — no this was not evidence based. So is this true?

Well, Ben Singh and colleagues in Australia conducted a systematic review and meta analysis of habit formation in health behaviour and found that, no, it wasn’t 21 days.

It must be noted that habit formation i.e. automaticity of behaviour took longer and was very variable…