Philippa Lally and her colleagues at University College London (UK) have studied how habits are formed in everyday life . Through a study with 96 volunteers published in the European Journal of Social Psychology , they found that as we repeat an action or a choice (what to eat, what to drink, what exercise to practice …) the automatism increases, although the The time it takes people to make a behavior automatic and not need the will to carry it out varies a lot, ranging between 18 and 254 days, although the maximum is around 84 days of repetition . The work disproved the idea that skipping a habit that you are trying to acquire for a single day interrupts the fixing process, and therefore it is not necessary to "start over" in that case.
The formation of habits is important, it makes our lives easier, as published by neuroscientist Joe Z. Tsien in the journal Neuron, since they provide freedom and mental flexibility allowing activities to be carried out with "automatic pilot" while the brain concentrates. in more urgent matters . And according to his research, NMDA receptors on dopaminergic neurons in the basal ganglia of the brain play a fundamental role in the process of turning learned behavior into an automatic habit.
