Recap: How to maintain new habits in the New Year | Tara Swart & Sarah Berry
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What common New Year's resolutions do people set each year?
Hello, and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're talking about habits. Every January, millions of us set ambitious goals for the year ahead. Maybe you want to eat better, move more, stress less. But by February, millions of those well-intended resolutions are already in the bin. So why is changing your habits so hard?
Why is it challenging to maintain new habits beyond January?
Neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart joins me and Sarah Berry to explain how to implement small consistent improvements that will set you up for success. Tara, is there anything in the science that talks about how long something takes to be a habit? Because just as an anecdote for myself, I could totally overindulge on Christmas Day or if I'm in the States and I'm invited around for Thanksgiving. And like one day doesn't really change my habits very much. So if I have that one day, then actually I find it quite easy to return to whatever my normal pattern is about food where I'm generally quite thoughtful. I definitely find that if I go for a whole week, with something that is really off, then actually I feel like somehow I've almost got into that pattern and it's hard to return backward.
Is that just me? Am I making all of that? Is there anything sort of real in the differences between those?
Yeah, so there's actually two questions there, and I'm going to come back to the how long does it take to change a habit, but I'll pick up on your example because it's so real for people. So you're absolutely right that overindulging for one day isn't going to change the thoughtful behaviors that you have set up already. I kind of mentioned this already, but one of the pitfalls is that let's say you did overindulge for a week and you have noticed that you've put on weight. The normal default for the brain is to say, well, you've messed this up now, so basically you've failed.
By the way, I do that totally full of guilt and self-loathing as soon as I've done something I feel I shouldn't have done.
But then that also kind of, in a way, unfortunately, allows you to keep doing it because you think, well, I failed at that, so I might as well not bother. But it's so important to not beat yourself up and start again. That's a really big learning that I've had over the last decade or so.
It's really interesting because I have a three-year-old as well as a 14-year-old, and I see the three-year-old do this. If somehow she's told she's done something wrong, she literally throws her toys out of the pram, as it were, incredibly upset. And then when you look at the three-year-old, it's sort of obviously like, you know what? Don't give up. Everything's fine. You should just go and do it again. So in a way, it's so obvious with a three-year-old. And what I'm hearing you say is it's sort of the same for me, but maybe I'm not so good at saying, don't give up and throw your toys at the pram. It's all right. Just go back and do it again. And that's as relevant for me as an adult as it is when you're trying to bring up a small child.
Exactly. We're obviously much kinder to our children and our pets than we are to ourselves. We don't give ourselves that same break that we might give to our children. And so the thing with three-year-olds is that it's very physical. So when something goes wrong, they will literally throw their toys, they will throw themselves to the ground so you can see what's going on. Inside your brain, have you seen that movie Inside Out?
How long does it actually take to form a new habit?
No.
Oh, you must watch it. It's a Disney film. It's about a child who you can see the little characters in their brain that are their emotions. And so basically your three-year-old's behavior is going on inside your head, but you're not demonstrating that to the world because you've learned to regulate your emotions.
I try not to throw myself on the floor and hammer my feet, however much I may occasionally feel like doing it. Yes.
Before we forget, let's get back to the, how long does it take to create or change a habit? There are so many things out there, like it takes two weeks or 42 days or 66 days or whatever, but none of those are true because basically it depends what it is.
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