麥斯威爾瑪爾茲(Maxwell Maltz)，一個在60年代出版大眾心理學書的外科手術醫生，他宣稱：截肢的病患平均要21天的時間才能適應義肢，因此推論：一個人習慣的養成需要21天的時間。這個論點很快就被許多出版自我學習或學習指南的書籍所採用，因為用21天來學習一項新的習慣看起來有點難，是實上卻是很容易。－－這當然是胡說八道。

一項由倫敦大學學院(University College London)的心理學家拉里(Phillippa Lally)所做的研究顯示：要習得一項習慣平均需時66天，才可以使之成為自動自發，不會變的習慣；而個體差異卻是從18天到245天，而且每一種習慣的養成所需的時間也不同。

習慣，就其定義而言就是不易隨便改變的。我們大部分的人都深陷希臘人所說"akrasia"的泥淖中－－決定了最佳的行動方案，但卻去做別的事。另一種在文章裡沒有提到，但是我有的壞毛病"procrastination", 應該要做的事情卻偏偏不去做，要到最後關頭才來趕工。（希臘語的akrasia與英語procrastination在中文的表達辭語是甚麼呢？這已困擾我多年，還祈方家不吝賜教！）習慣就像無形的鎖鍊，輕輕地套著我們，讓我們難以察覺；當我們發現時，他已經牢牢的鍊住我們了！



  This column will change your life:        
How long does it really take to change a habit?        
'Self-help culture clings to the fiction of the 28-day rule'        

Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian, Saturday 10 October 2009

Illustration: Chris Haughton

Everyone knows that it takes 28 days to develop a new habit, or perhaps 21, or 18, depending on who you ask; anyway, the point is that it's a specific number, which makes it sound scientific and thus indisputably true. We probably owe this particular example of pop-psychology wisdom to Maxwell Maltz, the plastic surgeon who wrote the 60s bestseller Psycho-Cybernetics. He claimed to have observed that amputees took an average of only 21 days to adjust to the loss of a limb. Therefore, he reasoned – deploying the copper-bottomed logic we've come to expect from self-help – the same must be true of all big changes. And therefore it must take 21 days to change a habit, maybe, perhaps!

This is, of course, poppycock and horsefeathers, as a new study by the University College London psychologist Phillippa Lally and her colleagues helps confirm. On average, her subjects, who were trying to learn new habits such as eating fruit daily or going jogging, took a depressing 66 days before reporting that the behaviour had become unchangingly automatic. Individuals ranged widely – some took 18 days, others 245 – and some habits, unsurprisingly, were harder than others to make stick: one especially silly implication of the 28- or 21-day rule is that it may be just as easy to start eating a few more apples as to start finding five hours a week to study Chinese. (Another myth undermined by the study is the idea that when forming a new habit, you can't miss a day or all is lost: missing a day made no difference. Indeed, believing this myth may be actively unhelpful, making it harder to restart once you fall off the wagon.)

        make stick: Make effective or permanent, as in They tried to appeal but our lawyers made the verdict stick. This idiom uses stick in the sense of "adhere."

Self-help culture clings to the fiction of the 28-day rule, presum–ably, because it makes habit change sound plausibly difficult enough, but basically easy. The first problem with this is dispiritingly simple: changing habits is hard. We're all "cognitive misers", our brains ­ designed to take short cuts, rendering as many behaviours as possible automatic. "Really," asks the psychologist Ian Newby-Clark, "what would be the point of having a habit that didn't free up your mind to crunch on more pressing matters?" Habits are meant to be difficult to change.


The subtler problem is that we tend to think about habit change wrongly. (I'm not talking about physiological addictions.) We get trapped in a paradox: we want to, say, stop watching so much TV, but on the other hand, demonstrably, we also want to watch lots of TV – after all, we keep doing it – so what we ­ really want, it seems, is to stop wanting. We're mired deep in what the Greeks called "akrasia": deciding on the best course of action, then doing something else. The way round this, says Newby-Clark and others, is to see that habits are responses to needs. This sounds obvious, but countless efforts at habit change ignore its implications. If you eat badly, you might resolve to start eating well, but if you're eating burgers and ice-cream to feel comforted, relaxed and happy, trying to replace them with broccoli and carrot juice is like dealing with a leaky bathroom tap by repainting the kitchen. What's required isn't a better diet, but an alternative way to feel comforted and relaxed. "The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken," Dr Johnson observed gloomily, but maybe by looking at the problem differently we can still, Houdini-like, slip out of them.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/10/change-your-life-habit-28-day-rule

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