It makes sense why the “21 Days” Myth would spread. Dangerous lesson: If enough people say something enough times, then everyone else starts to believe it. It's remarkable how often these timelines are quoted as statistical facts. And as more people recited Maltz's story - like a very long game of “Telephone” - people began to forget that he said “a minimum of about 21 days” and shortened it to, “It takes 21 days to form a new habit.”Īnd that’s how society started spreading the common myth that it takes 21 days to form a new habit (or 30 days or some other magic number). You see, in the decades that followed, Maltz’s work influenced nearly every major “self-help” professional from Zig Ziglar to Brian Tracy to Tony Robbins.

The book went on to become an blockbuster hit, selling more than 30 million copies. In 1960, Maltz published that quote and his other thoughts on behavior change in a book called Psycho-Cybernetics ( audiobook). Maltz wrote about these experiences and said, “These, and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.” These experiences prompted Maltz to think about his own adjustment period to changes and new behaviors, and he noticed that it also took himself about 21 days to form a new habit. Similarly, when a patient had an arm or a leg amputated, Maxwell Maltz noticed that the patient would sense a phantom limb for about 21 days before adjusting to the new situation. Maltz would perform an operation - like a nose job, for example - he found that it would take the patient about 21 days to get used to seeing their new face. Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon in the 1950s when he began noticing a strange pattern among his patients.

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