고등학교 영어Ⅰ (NE능률 오선영) 연계 글

The idea of forming a new habit in just 21 days is widely popular, and the number appears in many articles about personal change. The figure seems to have started with a 1960 book by Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon. In the book's preface, Maltz observed that after surgery, the average patient needed about 21 days to adjust to a new face. Likewise, people who had moved needed about three weeks before a new house began to feel like home. From cases like these, he concluded that an old mental picture usually needed a minimum of about 21 days to change.

Maltz, however, was describing the process of getting used to a change, which psychologists distinguish from acquiring a habit. In psychology, a habit is an action that a familiar situation triggers automatically after many repetitions. How a remark about surgery patients grew into a rule for all habits is unclear, but somewhere along the way, the word "minimum" was lost. If you expect a habit to form in just three weeks, you will be more likely to give up when it still feels like hard work.

About fifty years later, Phillippa Lally and her colleagues from University College London studied how habits form in everyday life. Their 96 volunteers each chose one behavior involving food, drink, or physical activity to carry out daily at a fixed point in their routines, such as after breakfast, for twelve weeks. Each day, they also rated how automatic the behavior felt.

Typically, the feeling of acting automatically grew quickly at first, but each repetition added less until it leveled off. On average, reaching this plateau took about 66 days, roughly triple the time that the popular rule suggests. Yet the time varied greatly, from just 18 days for one volunteer to an estimated 254 days for another who had not reached the plateau by the end of the study. Simple behaviors, such as drinking water, also leveled off sooner than demanding ones, such as doing fifty sit-ups. Moreover, missing a single day did not seriously harm the process of building a habit.

These findings suggest that the habit of counting days is less useful than it seems. If you treat 66 days as a new deadline, you will merely replace one misleading number with another. However, if you persist in repeating an action in a consistent setting, it will gradually require less effort.