Everyone has a bad habit they’d like to shake in the name of wellness. Maybe you can’t seem to quit nail-biting, snoozing your alarm six times, or procrastinating before bed. I, for example, have a problem with my phone. I reach for it during TV commercials, when I’m walking my dog, and right when I wake up. Then I scroll through social media—endlessly. I hate it!
So how long does it take to break bad habits? The inconvenient answer is that the time frame varies from person to person, Karen Ingersoll, PhD, clinical psychologist with UVA Health and professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, tells SELF. According to scientific evidence, it can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days—and 66 days on average—to change your behavior so that you don’t automatically repeat unhealthy patterns.
How hard your old habits die will largely depend on what they are (some behaviors take longer to change than others) and how consistently you repeat new, positive habits to replace them, Dr. Ingersoll says. As stubborn as they are, bad habits can be changed—demolished, even. If that’s your end goal, the following expert advice can help get you there.
How to actually break a bad habit
Let’s start with what not to do, according to Dr. Ingersoll: Give yourself a (literal or mental) slap in the face and try to get rid of the bad habit overnight. People often want a quick fix, she notes, but for us mere mortals, that rarely works.
She gives this common example: Someone who rarely exercises wants to ramp up their workout routine and instead of gradually tacking on a yoga class here or a jog there, they start immediately training for a half-marathon. “They think, if I do something intensively, I will change myself,” she says. But this often backfires—it’s too much too fast, which is a recipe for burning out and giving up.
The key to habit smashing is to start small and go at it gradually. Dr. Ingersoll recommends this three-step approach:
Step one: Picture your future self.
First, think about the good habits you want to have and how you want to feel once you’ve adopted them. (Hint: These new behaviors should, ideally, improve your mental hea