We all get into some less-than-ideal routines now and then. Maybe you often watch one more episode of your favorite show before bed than you’d like to, or you scroll through social media first thing after your morning alarm goes off. Hey, you’re human in the 21st century!

But once you’ve identified a particular habit that isn’t working for you, what do you do about it? How do you actually stop the cycle, and how long does it take to break a habit? We spoke with behavioral health experts for answers.

What Are Habits and How Are They Formed?

Habits are essentially behaviors we learn to do automatically. Building habits frees up time and energy for other behaviors that require more brainpower. “Imagine having to re-learn everything, like putting on your clothes and making breakfast, every day,” says Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, author of Unwinding Anxiety and professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University. Instead, “you set a habit and forget about the details so that you can go on with your life,” he says.

Habits are formed largely through repetition. If you stick with a certain behavior long enough, one day, often without realizing it, you find it’s basically become automatic. “The more we repeat something, the easier it starts to feel to do it, and the less we have to deliberate about it,” says Leor Hackel, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “We just sort of do it without thinking about it.”

This often happens in response to some kind of external stimulus, he adds. Like instinctually grabbing your keys every time you head out your front door, “it’s some kind of association between some kind of context cue around us and a response that we perform,” he says.

How Long Does It Take to Break a Habit?

It would be nice if there was an exact amount of time it takes to break every habit for every person. But the reality is, your experience likely won’t follow any specific timeline like clockwork. There’s no exact number of days until you’re over your habit, Dr. Brewer says.

Research has tried to pinpoint one, but the results are wide-ranging. For example, in one 2024 study in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being of nearly 200 people, it took anywhere from 1 to 65 days for people to break a habit.

Generally speaking, some health professionals say it takes around 10 weeks to build a new habit. But breaking a habit is a bit of a different exercise. “One day makes sense, and 1,000 days makes sense,” Dr. Brewer says, because breaking a habit is all about how long it takes you to recognize the behavior is not rewarding. 

That’s often harder when you perform the habit multiple times a day over many years, he says. For example, changing eating habits may be more difficult than changing sleep habits simply because we eat more often every day.

Breaking a habit can also be harder if your environment doesn’t support a good habit you want to adopt instead. For example, if you want to stop looking at your phone in bed, but your phone is right there on your nightstand, “there’s already an uphill battle that makes it hard to break the habit,” Hackel says. 

How to Break a Habit

Habits occur in a cycle of trigger, behavior, reward, Dr. Brewer explains in his TED Talk on the topic. To disrupt this cycle, which is also called a habit loop, “you have to see how unrewarding the unhelpful habit or the bad habit is,” he says. “If you don’t do that, you’re not going to break it. You can’t skip that step.”

Our brains are wired to pick the most rewarding of our options, he explains, so the best ways to break a habit involve highlighting other behaviors that might feel better and making those stick. 

Here are a few strategies that can help you do that.

1. Experience Every Unrewarding Sensation of the ‘Bad’ Habit

Dr. Brewer recommends cultivating mindfulness around the habit you’re trying to break. If you want to cut down on screen time before sleeping, for example, tune in next time you’re scrolling in bed. Are you actually more revved up than calm? Is your mind racing? Are your eyes dry and bleary? When you start to really be present with the negative aspects of the habit you want to break, your brain will naturally start choosing the more rewarding alternate behavior—in this case, simply going to sleep.

When Dr. Brewer has worked with people on habit change who commit to such mindfulness, they’ll often return to him and say, “How did I not notice this?” His reply? “Well, you weren’t paying attention,” he says.

2. Ask: What Am I Getting From This?

This question is another way of framing the same deal you’re making with yourself: How rewarding is the habit you want to break really? How does it truly make you feel? The answers that come up may inspire you to break the habit.

3. Create Friction

“Anything that creates more friction in doing a behavior decreases our likelihood of doing it,” Hackel says. “We can try to engineer our environments to make it low-cost to do the things we want to do and higher-cost to do the things we don’t want to do.”

In the example above where you might want to stop looking at your phone at night, this could be as low-lift as simply leaving your phone in another room. The friction of getting out of bed might not be worth it to you. An option that creates even more friction would be installing an app that blocks your access to social media or monitors your screentime, Hackel says, but really, “any friction can push you in a certain direction.”

4. Find a Replacement Behavior

It’s typically harder to break a habit if you don’t replace it with some other behavior, according to the American Heart Association. Instead of swearing off soda, for example, you might decide every time you crave a cola, you’ll enjoy some herbal tea or sparkling water instead. Consciously choosing this new behavior stops your brain from automatically cracking open a soda.

Make this new habit you’re attempting to form something you actually enjoy; that might also help you break the “bad” habit, Hackel says. For example, if you want to replace your habit of scrolling social media with reading, pick a book genre you truly enjoy—not a book you think you should read.

5. Think About the Last Time You Did the ‘Good’ Habit

Once you’ve identified a replacement behavior, dial in on how it makes you feel.

Let’s say the habit you want to break is sitting on the couch scrolling through social media after work. It probably feels pretty good in the moment to relax and decompress like that, Dr. Brewer says. But if you’re trying to replace scrolling with physical activity, conjure up the last time you worked out and how it felt instead. Chances are, you felt pretty good afterwards, right? “If I recall that it feels good, that’s the motivation that gets me to do it again,” Dr. Brewer says.

6. Stop Relying on ‘Should’ 

Simply telling yourself not to do the habit you’re trying to break or chiding yourself to replace it with a different behavior isn’t likely to get you the results you’re looking for. Rather, “our brain, almost universally, is driven by how rewarding something is,” Dr. Brewer says.

7. Avoid Triggers

Automatic behaviors can be triggered by something external. For example, maybe every time you get a work email notification on your phone, it's a habit to check it right away, no matter what time it is. But if you’re trying to improve your work-life balance, you could turn off email notifications after, say, 5 PM each day to avoid the temptation altogether.

“If we recognize a context where we have a bad habit, we try to apply these principles of context and repetition and reward to replace it with a different behavior instead, and then we get ourselves to repeat that until that becomes a healthy habit,” Hackel says.

8. Create a Stable Environment for the Replacement Behavior

Remember, a habit may be performed in response to some environmental cue. So make sure you’re setting yourself up for success with your replacement “good” habit by creating an environment that supports that behavior. 

“For example, that might be the same time of day: Maybe we go jogging at 7:30 AM every day, and that time is a really stable context for us to repeat the behavior in,” Hackel says. “Maybe it’s a place we’re in or a person we’re with.”

This is similar to the concept of habit stacking, where you pair a new behavior you want to become a ritual with something you already do habitually. 

The Takeaway

There’s no exact amount of time it takes to break a habit. Instead, breaking a habit requires mindfulness around how the undesirable habit really makes you feel and replacing it with a healthier behavior habit that’s more rewarding. Generally speaking, it takes longer to break habits you perform more often. Rather than relying on willpower alone, try to create an environment that supports your healthier replacement habit, and aim to avoid triggers that cue you to perform the habit you want to break.