Building good habits

There's nothing original in stating that our lives often are the sum or our personal habits, whether good or bad, so it might be a good idea, as we go along to add good habits and weed out bad ones as we progress into our lives. 

The difficulty in selecting habits is first to be aware of what we have that helps us or hinder us, work when possible on improving the good and little by little focusing on the bad ones and turning them around. 

This isn’t easy as some folks say and if you can recall most people might tell you that it takes “21 days” to form a habit, as Dr. Maxwell Maltz suggested in his 1960 book “Psycho-Cybernetics”. At the time Maltz didn’t make this claim but rather referenced this number as an observable metric in both himself and his patients. 

He then wrote: “These, and many other commonly observed phenomena, tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to gel.” 

However, a more recent study published in 2009 in the European Journal of Social Psychology, stated that it takes from 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit, and about an average, of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. 

Obviously, this ultimately depends on the habit considered. As for me, I wish I had paid much more attention to habits, good and bad, when I was younger…