ZOE Science & Nutrition
Recap: How to maintain new habits in the New Year | Tara Swart & Sarah Berry
20 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: 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?
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: 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. If it is going from eating a bar of chocolate to one square of chocolate every night, you could do that in probably two weeks.
You could create that habit in two weeks. If it's something like improving your emotional intelligence or your intuition, that's going to take at least nine months. I mean, I actually talk about the neuroplasticity process for a profound change as literally like the gestation period of a baby.
So the amount of time it takes from fertilization for a baby to be born, because you are literally becoming a new person if you change something that fundamental about yourself. It's like going through the birth process. And then, you know, let's use the analogy of language because it's a very tangible one.
Jonathan, if you and I both decided to learn Spanish and I used the Duolingo app and kind of just did it myself in my spare time, but you went for Spanish lessons once a week and you had an exam at the end of six months and then you had a trip planned to Mexico, right? You would be much better at Spanish than me.
So it's also the intensity of the effort that you put into learning something new or changing a habit. And those are the same things. Changing a habit is basically learning something new for your brain.
So I often wonder, Tara, whether also the time of year is really putting... are setting us up to fail as well. You know, January, it's a bit dreary. Christmas is over, New Year's is over, particularly for women who might be in the summer thinking about getting into that bikini, dare I say it, that in January, what is their motivation?
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