“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle
We’re creatures of habit. Habits are so powerful that once you develop a study routine, you’ll find it difficult to go into relaxation mode without studying. But how, exactly, do we rewire our habits once they have congealed into daily routines? We already know that it takes more than “willpower.” In a study carried out at University College London, 96 participants were asked to choose an everyday behavior that they wanted to turn into a habit. They all chose something they didn’t already do that could be repeated every day; many were health-related: people chose things like “eating a piece of fruit with lunch” and “running for 15 minutes after dinner.” Each of the 84 days of the study, they logged into a website and reported whether or not they’d carried out the behavior, as well as how automatic the behavior had felt. This notion of acting without thinking — known in science as “automaticity” — turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be a central driver of habits. And it helps illuminate the real question at the heart of this inquiry: How long did it actually take for people to form a habit? Research writes: “The simple answer is that, on average, across the participants who provided enough data, it took 66 days until a habit was formed. " Stremlus QBank is an excellent approach to develop study habits. For the first few weeks, we recommend taking just 3-4 test sessions for 15 min each every day (total 1 hour on Stremlus platform). Then, you can increase the number of sessions and reach 2-3 hours of total task-taking time. Remember, that developing a test-taking routine can take over 2 months. Just keep going.