75 Grow Challenge Rules: The 2026 Guide
The 75 Grow challenge rules explained: the MAP framework, what's confirmed versus community-invented, and how it compares to 75 Soft and 75 Medium.
You saw 75 Grow on TikTok, or in one of the 2026 trend round-ups, and now you want the rules before committing 75 days to it.
Every article says something slightly different. There is no official rulebook, no website, no book. The rules live in a creator’s videos, and each outlet that covers them paraphrases a little differently.
This guide lays out what is genuinely agreed on and marks where sources contradict each other, instead of dressing up one paraphrase as the rulebook. Then it gets to the harder part: turning three vague categories into three habits you can actually finish.
What is the 75 Grow challenge?
Psychiatrist Margaret Duncan created 75 Grow on TikTok as a deliberate counter to transform-or-else wellness challenges. Duncan has described her challenges as “challenges based on actual behavioural change, science, whimsy and self-compassion,” which is a useful sentence to keep in mind while reading the rest of this.
The timeline gets reported sloppily. Trend pieces in 2026 call it brand new. Duncan runs it as an annual challenge starting on 1 August, and her own newsletter opened August 2026 by welcoming readers to year three, which puts the first run in 2024. The press attention is what is new: it picked up in late 2025 and surged this year.
The reference point everyone reaches for is 75 Hard, created by Andy Frisella, which asks for five non-negotiable daily tasks and sends you back to Day 1 if you miss one. 75 Grow is built as the opposite of that. Three habits, all chosen by you, and no restart.
The 75 Grow rules: the MAP framework
The structure is short enough to fit in a sentence. You pick three habits for 75 days, one from each of three categories: Movement, Avoid Avoidance, Practice Creativity. The acronym is MAP, and that structure is the only part of 75 Grow that every source agrees on.
The Everygirl phrases the rule as choosing one goal from each of the three groups. That is it. What the habit is, and how much of it counts, is yours to decide.
M: Movement
Move your body. No source anywhere prescribes a type, an intensity, or a minimum duration for this pillar, which is either liberating or paralysing depending on your temperament.
Concrete options sized for a real week:
- A 20-minute walk after lunch
- 10,000 steps
- One yoga flow, however short
- Three strength sessions a week plus daily stretching on the other days
- A 15-minute mobility routine before bed
If you want a sanity check on whatever you pick, the CDC’s adult guideline is 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per week plus two days of muscle strengthening. A daily 20-minute walk lands you at 140 minutes, which is close to that floor. That is a reasonable target, not a rule of the challenge.
A: Avoid Avoidance
This is the pillar readers understand least, and the one that makes 75 Grow distinct from every other 75-day variant. It means deliberately doing the thing you have been putting off.
The only number published anywhere for this pillar comes from Duncan’s own description, quoted by The National: setting a timer for 15 to 45 minutes most days to do something that has been hanging over your head. That is her framing rather than a hard rule, and no other outlet repeats a figure, so treat it as a starting point instead of a threshold.
Examples that fit:
- The email you have been dreading for three weeks
- 20 minutes of admin: bills, filing, that form
- Booking the appointment
- The conversation you keep rescheduling in your head
- One box from the pile in the spare room
There is a reason for the gentle framing. Research by Fuschia Sirois on procrastination and self-compassion found that across four samples, trait procrastination was associated with lower self-compassion and higher stress, and suggested self-compassion interventions as a route in. Beating yourself up about avoidance is part of the loop, not the exit from it.
P: Practice Creativity
Make something. There is no output standard, and the framing across every source is that this is phone-down time rather than a performance.
Low-barrier starting points:
- 10 minutes of drawing, badly, in a cheap sketchbook
- Learning a song on an instrument you own
- Writing 200 words of anything
- Cooking one recipe you have never made
- Taking one photograph you actually thought about
This pillar sounds like the fluffiest of the three and has the tightest evidence behind it. In a 13-day daily-diary study of 658 young adults, Conner, DeYoung and Silvia found that creative activity on one day predicted increased positive affect and flourishing the next day. The direction ran forward in time, which is what makes it interesting.
What the rules do not say
This is where most coverage quietly extrapolates. What follows is what 75 Grow does not specify.
Daily or most days? Sources contradict each other. Brit.co describes the three habits as something to practise on a day-to-day basis without fail. The National, relaying the creator, describes 15 to 45 minutes on most days for the Avoid Avoidance pillar. Those are different instructions, and there is no published tiebreaker.
No completion threshold. 75 Medium has its 68-of-75 rule. 75 Grow has no equivalent number, so “finishing” is self-assessed.
Miss a day and you carry on. There is no restart rule. No source claims otherwise, and the premise of the challenge argues against it.
Diet, water, alcohol, reading, weigh-ins, progress photos: none of it is required. None of the 75 Hard scaffolding carries over. If a page you are reading adds any of it, that page is filling in blanks.
Movement and Creativity have no time minimums. Only Avoid Avoidance has a number attached anywhere, and only from one outlet.
No official tracker exists. No app, no printable, no template blessed by the creator.
If you see a stricter list presented as the 75 Grow rules, it is someone’s interpretation. That is not a scandal, it is just what happens to a challenge that lives on TikTok. It does mean you should feel free to set your own terms, because the framework expects you to.
75 Grow vs 75 Soft vs 75 Medium
The useful axis is who writes the rules, not how strict they are.
| 75 Grow | 75 Soft | 75 Medium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who sets the tasks | You, within three categories | Fixed list | Fixed list |
| Daily tasks | 3 | 4 | 6 |
| Prescribed diet rule | None | Eat well, limit alcohol | 90/10 diet, no alcohol |
| Water rule | None | 3 litres | Half body weight in ounces |
| Miss a day | No penalty | No penalty | 68-of-75 threshold |
| Completion defined by | You | Finishing the 75 days | 68 of 75 days |
| Best for | People who want structure without a script | People who want a clear list | People who want strictness with a buffer |
For the full task lists, see our guides to 75 Medium’s rules and how 75 Soft and 75 Medium compare. If you landed here after burning out on something stricter, the easier 75-day alternatives roundup covers the wider field.
75 Grow is the least prescriptive of the three, which makes it the easiest to sustain and the easiest to fool yourself on. A checklist someone else wrote can be failed. Three habits you defined yourself, vaguely, cannot.
How to make your three habits specific
Duncan herself asks people to get specific and measurable with the broad categories, and this is the step most write-ups skip entirely. The method below takes about ten minutes.
1. Attach a measure. “Move more” is not a habit, it is a mood. “20-minute walk” is a habit. Pick a number, a duration, or a count for each of your three slots.
2. Set a floor, not just a target. Decide the smallest version that still counts on a bad day. A five-minute walk. One dreaded email. Three lines in a sketchbook. The floor is what protects your streak during the week everything goes wrong, and bad weeks are guaranteed inside 75 days.
3. Pin each habit to a cue. After lunch. Before bed. Straight after the morning coffee. A habit tied to an existing moment survives longer than one tied to willpower.
A worked example set:
- Movement: 20-minute walk, floor of 5 minutes, after lunch
- Avoid Avoidance: 15 minutes of admin, floor of one task, at 4pm
- Practice Creativity: 10 minutes sketching, floor of 3 minutes, before bed
The 75-day window has some evidence behind it. In the UCL study by Lally and colleagues, which followed 96 participants for 12 weeks, habit automaticity took a median of 66 days, with a range of 18 to 254 days. Seventy-five days clears the median with room to spare, which we dig into in our guide on how long it really takes to form a habit.
The same study found that missing a single opportunity did not materially affect the habit-formation process. That is the research-backed case for 75 Grow’s no-restart stance, and a good argument against inventing a stricter version for yourself. If you want to go further and design the whole thing from scratch, our guide to building your own 75-day challenge covers the structure.
How to track 75 Grow
A pre-made 75 Grow tracker cannot really exist. Every participant’s three tasks are different, so a printable grid with someone else’s habits on it is useless to you, and a blank grid is just a calendar.
What works is a custom three-task setup with three properties. It has to let you name your own tasks, it has to run for 75 days, and it must not punish you for a missed day, because that would contradict the challenge.
A custom challenge in Reset75 is a close structural match: set the duration to 75, leave the strictness on forgiving so a missed day does not reset anything, and add one task per MAP pillar. Movement works as a duration task (20 minutes) or a counter (steps). Avoid Avoidance fits a duration task of 15 to 45 minutes, or a simple checkbox if your version is “one dreaded thing per day.” Creativity can be duration, checkbox, or a text task if you want to note what you actually made.
Two details worth setting up on day one: a separate reminder time for each pillar, since these habits rarely happen at the same hour, and a glance at completion rate rather than streak alone. On a challenge with no completion threshold, “I hit 64 of 75 days” is a far more honest read of how it went than a streak that broke in week two.
75 Grow, then, is three self-chosen habits, one each from Movement, Avoid Avoidance and Practice Creativity, held for 75 days with no restart penalty. Everything past that is interpretation, including whether it is a strictly daily practice.
That looseness is the design, not an oversight. It also means the work is on you: pick a number for each habit, pick a floor for bad days, and decide now what counts. A challenge you defined yourself is only as real as the definition you gave it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the rules of the 75 Grow challenge?
Pick three habits for 75 days, one from each of three categories: Movement, Avoid Avoidance, and Practice Creativity (the MAP framework). You define the specific habit and its measure inside each category. There is no prescribed diet, water target, reading rule or progress photo, and no official completion threshold.
Who created the 75 Grow challenge?
Psychiatrist Margaret Duncan created it on TikTok as a deliberately gentler alternative to strict transformation challenges. She has described her challenges as being based on behavioural change, science, whimsy and self-compassion.
Do you have to do all three habits every single day?
Sources disagree. Most write-ups describe 75 Grow as a daily practice, while coverage quoting the creator describes spending 15 to 45 minutes on the Avoid Avoidance habit on most days. There is no published completion threshold, so the honest answer is that consistency is the goal and perfection is not the requirement.
What happens if you miss a day of 75 Grow?
Nothing. Unlike 75 Hard, 75 Grow has no restart penalty, so you pick up the next day. That matches the habit-formation research: in the UCL study by Lally and colleagues, missing a single day did not measurably derail habit automaticity.
What does avoid avoidance mean in 75 Grow?
It means deliberately doing the thing you have been putting off: the email, the admin, the appointment, the conversation. It is the challenge's answer to procrastination, framed as practice rather than punishment.
What counts as the creativity habit?
Anything where you make something, with no quality standard attached. Drawing, writing, learning an instrument, cooking something new, photography. The consistent framing across sources is that it is phone-down time, not output.
Is 75 Grow easier than 75 Soft?
It is less prescriptive. 75 Soft hands you a fixed task list (workout, flexible diet, water, reading). 75 Grow hands you three empty slots and asks you to fill them. That makes it more adaptable but also easier to let drift, which is why setting a specific, measurable target for each habit matters.
How do you track the 75 Grow challenge?
Because everyone's three habits are different, no pre-made printable tracker really works. A custom three-task setup is the fit: in Reset75 you can create a 75-day custom challenge in forgiving mode, which matches 75 Grow's no-restart rule, add one task per MAP pillar, set a separate reminder for each, and watch streaks and completion rate.