How People Internalize Habits

1. Most personal development coaches recommend the 21-day rule, as originally suggested by Maxwell Maltz. Do an activity for 21 days straight and it becomes an easily-adopted habit.

2. Steve Pavlina has always recommended 30 days. He’s done it for everything, from trying out vegetarianism to sleeping like Frank Sinatra.

3. Gleb Reys from Personal Development Tips suggested giving the activity a name that means something to you to help personalize it and give it more weight for transitioning into a habit.

4. Various authors recommend visualizing and NLP work. I think a lot of us have done this at one time or another with varying degrees of success.

5. My current personal preference is to combine several activities all geared towards developing the new habit.

a. Perform the new action for 21 days. Like many, 21 days has been a magic number for me. I’ve always liked the number 13 so I actually started out doing things for 13 days but it never quite worked out as well.

b. Read 1 hour a day about things that will reinforce the new habit.

c. Write about it. I found I learned and internalized things faster the more I turned it over in my head.

d. Throw some appreciative love towards it. I like imagining how much quality the new habit will add into my life. It makes it more powerful, more real and brings me closer towards really wanting to fulfill it.