Recap: How to maintain new habits in the New Year | Tara Swart & Sarah Berry

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? Neuroscientist, Doctor. Tara Swar 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, you know, anecdote for myself, I could totally overindulge on Christmas day or, you know, 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 I'm generally quite thoughtful. I definitely find that if I go for a whole week with some 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. Yeah. So there's actually two questions there, and I'm gonna come back to the how long does it take to change a habit, but I'll 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 gonna change, you know, the thoughtful behaviors that you have, you know, 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 put on weight. The normal default for the brain is to say, well, you've messed this up now, so basically you failed. I by the way, I do that totally full of, like, guilt and self loathing as soon as I've, like, 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, you know, decade or so. It's really interesting because I I have a a three year old as as well as a 14 year old, and I see the three year old do this. Like, if somehow she's told she's done something wrong, she literally throws her toys, you know, out of the premise, it were incredibly upset. And then when you look …