Researchers from the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania
Scientists have focused on two types of habits:regular exercise and hand washing by hospital workers. To collect exercise data, the researchers followed 30,000 members of a chain of fitness centers for 4 years. Scientists collected information about 12 million visits.
The researchers also analyzed the resultsobservations for 3 thousand hospital workers for about 100 shifts. The company that provided the data for the study used radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to monitor handwashing in hospitals. The total set contained more than 40 million records.
There is a widespread notion thatIt takes 21 days to form any habit, good or bad. However, the results of the analysis of the data collected showed that this was not the case: it takes months to develop the habit of going to the gym, and weeks to develop the habit of washing hands in the hospital.
The study also showed that the time of day,when a person went in for sports, did not affect the formation of a stable habit. But, for 76% of visitors, there was a correlation between the time that had passed since the last visit and the likelihood of habit formation. In other words, the more time has passed since the visitor last went to the gym, the less likely it is to become a habit.
You may have heard that to formhabit takes about 21 days, but this estimate has not been based on any scientific data. Our work supports the idea that the speed of habit formation depends on the behavior of a particular person and many other factors.
Colin Camerer, study co-author at Caltech
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