Habit Forming

They say it takes 2 weeks to form a habit. I don’t know exactly who they are or where they got their information. It was probably a bunch of professors with degrees out the wahzoo who spent millions of dollars trailing people for years.

I can just picture them now. They all wear glasses and white lab coats. They carry around clipboards & continually scribble in them. Of course they’d have to wait for a new habit to crop up or how could they track how long it takes to be firmly developed?

“Look! That subject just picked his toes. I never saw him do that before! Now I will watch him to see if he does it again and mark it down each time.” Or course he is following the test subjects secretly so he has no clue the guy was actually just scratching his toes because he has athlete’s foot.

Maybe the 2 week rule only applies to bad habits. It certainly can’t be applicable to good habits & I don’t need to conduct a scientific study to prove it. Countless people who change their eating habits, lose double digits off the scale, only to then go back to eating junk do well enough to prove my point.

What brings this up, you wonder? (Okay, maybe you didn’t wonder. Just pretend!) I have some arthritis in my knees. I take supplements & they do help. The pain is much less and I can bend my knees without grunting.

Now wouldn’t you think if you take supplements every day and especially if they help you not be in pain, you would remember to take them? Wouldn’t you have formed a habit of taking them? Yeah, that would be why I completely forgot to take them. For an entire week. I was reminded when the pain came back.

Seriously – how is it that you can get addicted to the heavy duty pain meds so easily or develop a habit of oh, say cracking your knuckles within a week or 2 but something useful and practical – of course not! That would just make life too easy. And we all certainly need our challenges!