Robin Sharma breaks habit formation into three phases: destruction (20 days of breaking old patterns), confusion (a messy middle), and integration (20 days until it's automatic). He says it takes 66 days total to rewire a habit, then your willpower is free to build the next one.
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66 days
Approximately 20 days
Approximately 20 days
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The ritual plasticity. What does ritual plasticity mean? Well, just like there's neuroplasticity, your habits, your routines and your rituals are plastic.
Ritual plasticity. Here's a model that will explain. Hopefully, habit installation. First of all, every habit goes through three phases. Number one, destruction.
Of course, it's going to be hard at first. You're destroying your neural pathway of the old habit and the emotional architecture of that old habit. Every routine or ritual or habit goes through number one, destruction.
Approximately 20 days.
66 days to install. Look at this. From the starting point to anything you've learned today, you want to install as a habit from 0 to 66 days. At 66 days, you will reach what researchers call automaticity. It'll be easy. You'll get up at 5am automatically. You'll journal, go the extra mile, practice your craft automatically.
But you have to stay with it for 66 days. First 20 days approximately, is phase number one, destruction. Phase number two, confusion. After you've destroyed it, it's like a renovation.
There's a mess. Now you're confused. It's normal if you're confused. If you're confused, you're still thinking for yourself. If you're confused, it means you're growing. Society says, what's wrong with you? You're confused all the time. I'm suggesting to you, you're confused all the time. Because every single day you're disrupting who you used to be yesterday. And of course society doesn't understand you. To have the results very few have, you've got to live and behave like very few dollars. After confusion. Stage number three, the final 20 days, approximately. Integration. Integration of the new habit. Destruction. Of course it's going to be hard for 20 days. Confusion. Phase two, messy in the middle. You're going to feel like giving up. This won't make sense. It's new to you. Finally, integration. You get to automaticity. It becomes a part of your new belief, your new way of being. It becomes easy. Here's the fascinating thing. You only use willpower until you get to automaticity. This is the secret of the great athletes. They are spending all this energy on willpower just to install the routine. Once the routine becomes automatic, the exciting thing is they free up their willpower for their next routine to be installed.
