Habit Building: The Journey to Automaticity

I recently embarked on a journey to create a new habit, and it has been nothing short of revolutionary for my life. This all started after reading The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma, which led me to pick up The 5AM Club by the same author. Both are easy reads, and I highly recommend them to anyone interested in personal development or growth.

The main principle I took away from Sharma’s teachings is how critical mornings are in setting up your day. This is based on factors affecting willpower, neurotransmitters, and other variables that determine how we use the rest of our day. Remember how precious time is? Let’s use it to serve us and others in the best way possible. Sharma introduces the 20/20/20 formula—a simple yet profound morning routine: 20 minutes of physical activity, 20 minutes of reflection/meditation/journaling, and 20 minutes of learning/reading/expanding your skills. It’s been a game-changer for my creativity and productivity, and I’ll dive deeper into the massive impact your morning routine can have in a later post.

This morning, I reflected on how this new habit had reached a level of automaticity—the point at which you automatically do something without consciously thinking about it. We all have numerous habits on autopilot, but how many of them are positive? So much of what we do daily happens without intention—checking our phones, grabbing a snack when bored or upset, emotionally reacting to outside stimuli, and so on. Unfortunately, many of these automatic habits are negative.

That led me to ponder: how do we undo negative habits and replace them with better ones that benefit our lives and the people we interact with? I’ve struggled to make lasting changes using traditional habit-building advice.

The 66-Day Habit-Building Journey

The common wisdom is that it takes 21 days or three weeks to build a new habit. However, Sharma presents a new take on this: it takes 21 days to eliminate the old habit, but that’s only if you’ve replaced it with something new. James Clear, in his excellent book Atomic Habits, discusses strategies like habit replacement and habit stacking. In reading The 5AM Club, I learned that research out of England suggests it actually takes 66 days to truly build a new habit to the point of automaticity—and that excited me.

I’ve gone through the process of building new habits many times, frankly it excites me, I enjoy the challenge of trying new things. I’ve used willpower to push through the initial 21 days and then put the habit on autopilot. However, 3,6 or even 12 months later, I’d realize I’d quit the habit without even noticing! Willpower is useful to develop and understand but there are many other factors that tie into building new habits.  This ties into the idea from Ben Hardy’s book Willpower Doesn’t Work—which, by the way, is a phenomenal read on changing your habits and life. We’ll talk more about willpower in another post. 

Currently, I’m on Day 49 of the 5AM Club challenge. For transparency, I should note that I’ve actually been doing the “5:30AM Club” because I started this during harvest season. I needed to make my goal achievable, and it became clear after a few days that I couldn’t handle the rigors of harvest while making such a significant change in my sleeping schedule.

A few weeks ago, I noticed it was getting easier to wake up, and recently, I’ve consistently been waking up before my alarm, feeling full of energy. It’s now easier to get up at 5:30 AM(often 5:00 AM without the alarm) than to keep sleeping. I believe I reached automaticity or something close to it around the 35-45 day mark. I’ll continue to stick with it and celebrate when I hit the full 66 days, but I already feel like I’ve achieved the purpose behind the goal.

Discovering Automaticity and Its Impact

The truly exciting part is the discovery of automaticity—being aware of it and using it to deeply engrain a new habit. After years of struggling to make new habits stick, I now have hope that by sticking with it for around 66 days, I can make lasting changes in my life. Two months to make a change that could impact the trajectory of my life? Pretty exciting stuff!

So, if you’ve struggled with making changes in the past, I encourage you to check out the books by James Clear and Ben Hardy. If you’re looking to start a new habit or replace an old one, focus on the 66-day timeline and see if it helps you reach automaticity.

Thanks for reading. Until next time, God bless!