Four-Day Challenges

Want to build a new habit? Try the four-day challenge. Four-day challenges are habit-building exercises in which you practice a new behaviour for four days. When you do something consistently for four days, you lay the foundation for a habit. On the fifth day, you can decide to throw your efforts over the last days away and forget about reaching your goal of forming a new habit. Or you can realize that you've already mastered the hardest part in forming a new habit and decide to keep working on it. Why four days? While you could say behaving in a certain way for four days is not quite a habit, or automatic, four days is a somewhat magical threshold. One day is a fluke. Two days are a coincidence. Three days are an attempt or a seed. But once you reach four days, something changes. Looking back one day is easy, we call it yesterday. Looking back two days is no big deal either, you remember yesterday and the day before. But looking back three days is not quite so easy to grasp mentally. We don't even have a way to abstract the concept of “three days ago” or a concise way to express this day without resorting to numbers. Being aware of the day of today plus the three previous days simultaneously is not as simple as looking back one or two days. A timespan of four days is reaching the limits of our working memory, and is more than we can easily comprehend.

So we start telling a story. Or the beginning of one. And while creating that story you have already gained initial support of a new friend, inertia. Inertia makes it so that at any point of building a new habit, what lies before you tends to become easier as you go. Until eventually, continuing with your new habit will become the path of least resistance, easier to do than not to do. It is at that point that you have a new habit.

You have already created the beginning of a story. Four days of success. Now on the fifth day, it's your turn to decide whether to move that story ahead or bury it in sand and forget about it. It's a good story so far, and you have already told the most challenging part, the beginning. And the beginning of that story of yours is inspiring and marked with success and the promise of more profound growth ahead. What do you have to lose if you keep moving that story forward, keep creating more solid ground for that new habit to grow in? From here on out, the trend is clear: with decreasing mental effort (to a point), you keep reaping the intensifying and compounding benefits you are just getting acquainted with.