Be Like David Attenborough
David Attenborough, aged 100, is out on the African savannah filming a massive, majestic lion with the help of his twenty something cameraman Tony. Filming from a safe distance, the lion turns its maned head, growls at the pair, and starts padding towards them. Attenborough calmly puts on some running trainers and heads off. Tony shouts, "What are you doing? You can never outrun a lion." Attenborough retorts, "As long as I outrun you, Tony, I don't give a shit."
At the risk of sounding like a LinkedIn post, this has been a key metaphor for me since I stopped drinking. All you have to do is get a headstart on the person you were yesterday.
The Hole Where the Monster Used To Be
When you stop an addiction or a toxic trait, you find yourself with a lot of time, more like a large hole in your life where you no longer have to feed the monster. Willpower will get you past a few weeks. Discipline might get you a bit further. But when boredom sets in, you might let the monster you locked up back out of its cage.
Stop Calling It a Monster
Imagine if you didn't see it as a monster at all. Just a trap you fell into, like a dark pond. Gradually you learn to swim, you get better at it day by day, and eventually you're swimming alongside what you used to think was a monster. Now you see it for what it actually is: a highly marketed, socially normalised trap that charges you far more than it ever gives back.
How Long It Actually Takes
You'll hear that it takes 28 days to build a habit. That's not true, and it's worth knowing why, because expecting a habit to click into place after four weeks and then feeling like a failure when it doesn't is exactly the kind of thing that makes people give up.
The 28 day (or 21 day) claim didn't come from any research on habits. It came from a 1960 book by a plastic surgeon called Maxwell Maltz, who noticed his patients took around three weeks to stop being startled by their new face in the mirror. That got twisted into a habit rule over the decades and it stuck, because it's a nice tidy number.
The actual research is a 2010 study by Phillippa Lally and her team at University College London. They tracked 96 people trying to build a new daily habit, things like drinking water after breakfast or a short run, over 12 weeks. On average, it took 66 days for the habit to become automatic. But the range was 18 days for some people, 254 days for others. Nearly a year, for some.
So if you're on day 30 and it still feels like effort, that's not failure. That's the middle of the process for most people, not the end of it.
What To Actually Do
You do it one step at a time. Ten minutes a day. Distract yourself. Learn a language. Get guitar lessons. Start a training programme. Just be better than you were a month ago. Progress is rarely linear. Stick with it, expect it to take longer than you'd like, and the habit gets grooved into your psyche eventually.
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Be Like David Attenborough
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