But 21 days after the experiment began, something amazing happened to one astronaut. His world turned rightside up again. The goggles hadn’t changed, and he was still wearing them continuously, but now he was able to see everything normal around him. Then, for the next several days, all the other astronauts followed suit.
After about 30 days, every astronaut’s world looked the right way up. Their brains created enough new neural pathways that turned the upside-down images that their eye perceived, the right way up. Their brains helped them function more effectively!
Interestingly, when the astronauts removed their goggles, it took their brains another 25 to 30 days to view the world as you and I do, the right way up.
Later NASA did a second study that had half of their astronauts remove their goggles for 24 hours halfway through the experiment, on day 15. For the brains of those astronauts to flip the upside down image the right way up, they had to wear their goggles for an additional 25 to 30 days. In other words, it took about 21 to 30 days of uninterrupted, constant input of new perceptual (conscious) information for the subconscious brain to accept that it had to adjust to this new information and consider it as normal.
Our conclusion? It takes an uninterrupted period of up to 30 days to reprogram your unconscious mind and develop a new habit.
So, if you skip even one day in between, you have to restart. Can you imagine how many times you have done that in the past? Starting a new habit, visualize being consistent for one week and then skip for a few days. And we wonder why our lives do not change!