The Importance of Creating Habits and Routine

Summary & key facts

The authors say that making healthy changes last usually means turning them into a routine. They review research showing routines and habits take time to form and that about half of patients do not stick with long-term treatment plans. A simple habit study found it took about two months on average for a new health behavior to feel automatic, but people ranged from a few weeks to most of a year. The paper suggests health workers should help patients add one or two small changes at a time and build daily structure so healthy choices become easier and more automatic.

Key facts:

• Long-term health changes usually need to become part of a daily routine for people to keep them up over years.
• About half of patients do not follow long-term treatment plans for lifestyle-related health problems.
• A study of simple health actions found they took about two months on average to become automatic, but the time ranged from about three weeks to about eight months.
• Habits and routines are different: habits are tied to a specific cue like finishing a meal, while routines are repeated behaviors that do not rely on a single cue.
• Missing a day or two does not usually stop a habit from forming, so perfect performance is not required to make progress.
• Experimental research that isolates routine itself is limited, so many conclusions come from observation and related habit studies.
• The authors suggest that reducing daily decisions and planning ahead, such as preparing meals or scheduling workouts, can help people build routines.
• Adding too many changes at once often fails, so the paper recommends introducing only one or two changes at a time to avoid relapse.

Abstract

One of the greatest challenges to lifestyle medicine is patient adherence. Lifestyle diseases inherently require lifetime prevention and treatment. Therefore, adherence to lifestyle medicine recommendations must also be long-term. Long-term adherence implies that a routine incorporating health recommendations has been developed. Instead of focusing on the immediacy of adherence in lifestyle changes, health care providers could consider helping patients develop a routine to slowly incorporate those changes. This perspective may enable greater long-term adherence to lifestyle change recommendations.

Topics

Eating Disorders and Behaviors Mobile Health and mHealth Applications Obesity, Physical Activity, Diet

Categories

Health Sciences Medicine Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

Tags

Alternative medicine Artificial intelligence Computer science Epistemology Family medicine Gerontology Immediacy Lifestyle medicine Medicine Pathology Perspective (graphical) Philosophy

Conditions & symptoms

Sleep disorder Poor sleep