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Do you tend to drop meditation practice whenever life gets hectic? You’re not alone.
You might know I have a day job as a post-secondary instructor. One of my classes is Mindfulness at Work where, as part of their 15 weeks of coursework, undergraduate students follow my habit-building plan to create a daily meditation habit. (By the way, if you want the plan, just sign up for the Mindful15 Newsletter or become a member of Mindful15.)
The students start with three mindful breaths every day and by the end of the semester, they’re up to 15 minutes of meditation daily. But, there’s a hurdle that often gets in their way. By about week 10, the stress of assignment deadlines and final exams ramps up. At this point, about half of the students report that they’ve stopped meditating, but they “plan to start again after final exams.” The problem is, they will likely struggle to get started again and may well be so discouraged as to drop out of practice altogether.
Why do we drop meditation the minute we’re stressed? In a study of habits and stress, researchers David Neal, Wendy Wood, and Aimee Drolet showed that, in stressful times, we have less willpower and consequently fall back on our strong habits, be they bad behaviours or good ones.
This suggests, if you’re dropping meditation, it’s because meditation isn’t yet a strong habit for you – or that you have other coping habits that are stronger than meditation. That makes sense for my students. Although most of them find it easy enough to follow the habit-building plan, they’ll only have been meditating for 9 weeks or so by time the stressful season rolls around. Their meditation habit isn’t strong enough by that point to be a fallback for them. And, if they’ve always done other things to cope, maybe eating or drinking or sleeping, they’ll fall back on those habits, instead.
But, you say, it only takes 21 days to create a habit, right? Wrong. This myth arose from a misinterpretation of Dr. Maxell Maltz’s research on self-image. Dr. Maltz was a plastic surgeon who noticed that it took his patients about 21 days to get used to their new face after surgery. Maltz wrote that “it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell,” which really says nothing about habit formation at all.
New research by Philiippa Lally offers evidence that it takes about 66 days for a new behaviour to become automatic, and most importantly, the exact amount of time varies widely from person to person, anywhere from 18 to 254 days in her study!
So now we understand the problem: Just when you’re stressed and need it most, you’ll drop meditation if it isn’t yet a strong enough habit. What’s to be done about that? I have a simple strategy:
Step 1: Notice what’s happening.
Realize that you’re skipping meditation because you feel too stressed or tired or hassled to do it. How do you know this is happening? You’re most likely telling yourself stories like these:

I don’t have time to meditate right now
I’ll do it tomorrow
I’ll start again whenever <insert stressful event here> is over
I’ve just got to get this done, then things will be normal again

Step 2: Let yourself off the hook, but keep practicing.
The most important thing here is to keep the habit alive. You need to continue practicing every day, BUT you only need to do a teeny tiny bit of practice. My recommendation is to take three mindful breaths every day. That’s it. Do that, and then celebrate!