Program: The four steps you need to form a habit

Tegan Taylor: Happy New Year, Norman.

Norman Swan: Thank you very much, Happy New Year to you.

Tegan Taylor: And Happy New Year to all who observe the Gregorian calendar.

Norman Swan: That's a bit deep. 

Tegan Taylor: Now feels as good a time as any to talk about habits, and I have heard that you have a fridge habit.

Norman Swan: I do. I think it's attached to the Y chromosome, but…

Tegan Taylor: You blame a lot of stuff on your Y chromosome, and unless you're talking about an actual chromosomal abnormality, I don't know if I want to hear about it. 

Norman Swan: Well, you know, is there a man who has ever passed a fridge without opening it? 

Tegan Taylor: Surely that's not gendered. Like, I love opening a fridge.

Norman Swan: I'll take that on the chin. But the classic example of my fridge habit was I was house hunting and there was a house on show on Saturday afternoon, and I'm wandering around, and my partner wondered where I was, and found me in the kitchen, staring into the fridge.

Tegan Taylor: I have done this too. I like opening things, you want to see what's in there. Looking at someone's fridge tells you a lot about that person.

Norman Swan: No, I was just doing it to see what was in there to eat. And it was most disappointing.

Tegan Taylor: Were you snacking…?

Norman Swan: Yeah, it's like a deep and intimate invasion of privacy in terms of the other person. The estate agent didn't know what to say, I don't think she'd ever seen that before.

Tegan Taylor: Okay, if we're going to have estate agent stories, we might need to save it for another chat. We are talking about habits today, obviously the things that we do without thinking.

Norman Swan: And that's the question that we've been asked on today's What's That Rash?.

Tegan Taylor: I'm calling this out as a question that everyone truly is asking at the moment, which is how possible is it to shape your own habits? We can talk about New Year's resolutions, but just in general, I think people sort of come into the new year with a feeling of intention, of wanting to do things the best that they can do. And there's a lot of, I don't know, pop psychology around about habit formation, so I wanted to go back to the science today. Yes, it's me, it's me that's asking the question—hi, it's me—but it's everyone as well, so we're going to go with it.

Norman Swan: I mean, I think the first question is, what is a habit? 

Tegan Taylor: We've talked about nail biting before on What's That Rash? And I absolutely refer people to go back and listen to that episode on the podcast. But I think in January the sorts of habits that people are often thinking about wanting to shape are less of a very simple habitual thing, like putting their fingers in their mouth, and more of a complicated thing like wanting to go running a couple of times a week. 

Norman Swan: Now, I think the first thing to say is habits merge into several different kinds of behaviours, but really what we're talking about is an automated response that sometimes we don't think about, we just do.

Tegan Taylor: Like opening the fridge at an open house. 

Norman Swan: Like opening the fridge, you see a fridge, you open it up. And what they talk about in terms of habits is context. So you're in the kitchen, you might be hungry, and then the cue is the fridge, and you open the door and sometimes there's a reward for opening the door because there's yummy cheesecake in there or something like that. Sometimes there's no reward, but if you do it a lot, that gets reinforced.

Tegan Taylor: I'm just hungry now, so that's my context cue. 

Norman Swan: That's right. And if you read all the books, including some of the bestsellers on habits and breaking habits, it's all about context, the situation you're in, the cue, which could be the fridge, and the reward, which may be what you eat, but the reward is probably the least important part of habit formation. And if you come back to some of the other science in this area of behavioural economics, the work done by the late Dan Kahneman, for which he won the Nobel Prize, is that we have two ways of thinking about the world. One is that we have deliberate thinking, we plan action, we're careful, we calculate and so on. And then there's heuristic thinking, which is rapid thinking, rapid decision making. And we would not be able to survive as a species if every time we have to do an action we've got to think about it. 

Tegan Taylor: Yeah, think about the number of decisions you're making as you just walk along a street, you're deciding not to step on an obstacle in your way, or you're thinking about where you're going to go next. You're not thinking about the act of walking, it's habitual.

Norman Swan: Well, walking itself is a learned behaviour and probably a natural behaviour for human beings, that (unless there's something wrong) you will learn to walk. But where you walk, how you get to the shops each day, if you drive your car to work, the way you go to work is probably a habit. In other words, it's an automated response. I get into the car, I turn right, and I'm going to go that way. Now, if I used the map on the phone, I might be able to have a faster way, but I'm damned if I'm going to do it because I'm going to go the way I always go.

Tegan Taylor: Well, when I'm on my way to work, if I've got to drop my kids off at school, for example, I will forget to turn to the school because I'm just in the zone of going to work. 

Norman Swan: That's right, it's an automated response that helps us get through life, and we don't think about these habits. The habits we think about are the habits we don't like or get us into strife. So, for example, opening the fridge in friends' houses when I shouldn't be doing that.

Tegan Taylor: A social problem.

Norman Swan: Yeah. But it does merge into other behaviours too, which are a bit more dysfunctional. So a habit is not an obsessive compulsive disorder, but obsessive compulsive disorders do have habitual behaviours such as going to check multiple times whether the door is locked or whether the tap has been turned off, or whether the oven is still on, and those are almost ritualistic behaviours which could be described as habits, but they're actually more dysfunctional than that. 

Tegan Taylor: I do want to come back to that, but first sort of thinking really big-picture about the kinds of habits that people are often thinking about this time of year. There's obviously a market for this because the number of books that have been published that are about how to change your habits…the really big one that I think most people have heard about at the moment is Atomic Habits, which came out some years ago now but has really found a place in the market, but there's lots and lots: Atomic Habits, The Power of Habit, Breaking the Habit, Daily Rituals, Tiny Habits. Did I already say that? High Performance Habits…

Norman Swan: Wasn't there one, Habits of a Good Leader and some things like that? 

Tegan Taylor: Oh gosh, Habit Stacking. There's a lot of, I think, desire for people to figure out ways of making virtuous behaviours automated, like what you were saying before. And really I cannot claim to have read all of these books, but I've done some reading around them, and what it seems to me is that there's actually a fairly similar core process at play in all of these books that's really what you were saying before, this idea of context, cues, frequency and rewards.

Norman Swan: And understanding those elements…and each one of those books deals with it. They might disguise it under different names or complexity, to make it look as if they're giving you something fresh…

Tegan Taylor: It's got to be at least 200 or 300 pages or people feel shortchanged if it's not.

Norman Swan: Well, that's right. And effectively most of these books are based on the science, and a lot of this comes from animal experiments, but also human experiments too. If you train an animal, you can create habits in animals, but the more you train them, the more you give them this routine, the more ingrained it becomes. And when I say ingrained, I mean ingrained in their brains and how nervous structures develop. And it's probably true in us as well.

Tegan Taylor: There's been heaps and heaps of rat and mouse studies about this, so what's the commonality?

Norman Swan: There's a series of rat studies where rats are encouraged to…just to oversimplify the studies, they're encouraged to go to the left for a reward. So there's a context, they're in a certain environment, there's a cue for them to turn to the left, and then they might get a reward at that point. And if they do it often enough and they remove the reward, the context and the cue to turn left, they'll do it without the reward at the end, and they'll keep on doing it. Then they can try and break that habit, which is create a different cue or a similar cue, say, on the right-hand side and a reward on that side, and try and break the habit by pushing the rat towards the right. And the rat will then reliably go to the right. But if you actually stop doing that, the habit of going to the left will return. 

Tegan Taylor: Oh really?

Norman Swan: Yes, it's imprinted in the rat's brain, and it's presumably imprinted in our brains too. When you've done an action often enough with context, cue and frequency, then that becomes hard-wired, established in your brain, and it takes a lot of effort to break that.

Tegan Taylor: That is so interesting. And so I do want to get to practical tips soon, but I think it'd be really interesting to understand the brain side of things, because there has actually been quite a lot of research here. What is happening in our actual brains?

Norman Swan: Well, the key structures in the brain that are involved in this are called the basal ganglia. These are buried deep inside the brain, often towards the front of the brain. And basal ganglia are involved in lots of different things. They're involved in movement, they're involved in executive function, which means making decisions and planning, and they're also involved in learning. And they believe that things like Tourette syndrome is a problem of the basal ganglia, obsessive compulsive disorder (coming back to an earlier discussion we had), that's almost certainly a disorder of the basal ganglia. Parkinson's disease is where the basal ganglia are partly destroyed by the disease process and that affects movement, but also habit formation. And so one of the problems with Parkinson's is that they lose automated behaviours, and sometimes they've got to re-learn functional habits. So habit formation is almost certainly in the basal ganglia as well. So these are really important structures, and networks are set up, and once you've got a neural network set up, it's hard to change it. So it changes in Parkinson's disease because the disease process disrupts it, but it's hard to change, particularly if you've got habits that have formed earlier in life with high frequency cues.

Tegan Taylor: What you could end up have happen then, though, is that you just feel like you're a victim of your own biology. If it's hard-wired into your brain, what do you do about it? 

Norman Swan: Well, this is where plasticity comes in. It is possible to change the brain, and you can set up alternate habits and rewire or create new networks. And that's where changing habits comes in. So you can get rid of habits. The biological research would say that you can't get rid of the habit completely, and you can return to that habit, but you can create alternate pathways. And that's about saying, well, the core of this habit is context, the situation you're in, the cue, whether it's food or opening the fridge, and the frequency, how frequently you're reinforcing that in the brain.

Tegan Taylor: And that frequency is literally strengthening those neural pathways, which I think we could talk about that as if it's an analogy, but it's literally like connections in the brain.

Norman Swan: Yeah, and it means that if you want to get exercise, and the context is you're lying in bed, and the cue is the alarm clock going off…

Tegan Taylor: And the reward is dragging yourself out of bed. 

Norman Swan: That's right, every morning you get out of bed and you get your running gear on, or you go to the gym, or you go for a swim, or whatever the story might be, and you get a high from that, that's for your reward. But if you do it every morning, then it starts to become a habit, it starts to become wired into your brain through these basal ganglia.

Tegan Taylor: So I think especially when we're looking at rat studies, the reward is often literally sugar water, or we talk about in humans the dopamine hit of something that's instantly pleasurable…

Norman Swan: That's going out for the exercise or what have you.

Tegan Taylor: Yeah. But there's also in the research, especially in humans, of talking about the reward being something that aligns with your values. So if being healthy is important to you, then eating the vegetable, in a sense, is a reward because it's reinforcing what you are hoping to get for yourself. And so now I'd like to come to one of the things in pop psychology that I've heard a lot, and have heard for years and years, is about how it takes X number of days to form a habit, and the number of days varies, but the idea that there's a set number of days to form a habit is really pervasive. And it can't possibly be true, because…this is just me monologuing now, but surely quitting biting your fingernails versus getting into a rhythm where you've organised your running gear the night before and you've set your alarm and you've gotten up and you've gone out for a run, those are so different in terms of complexity, surely they're different in terms of habit formation. 

Norman Swan: I think it's so variable in terms of how long it takes to create a habit, and then it does merge into the whole addiction story, which also happens in the basal ganglia, how much have you got to use a drug for you to become addicted to it? So it becomes a habit, then an addiction. And that's a controversial area, and you've got the pharmacology of the drug involved in that as well.

Tegan Taylor: As well as the behaviours.  So the number of days thing, I think it comes from the 1960s, there was Dr Maxwell Maltz (a great name) who was a cosmetic surgeon, who found that it took a minimum of 21 days for patients to get used to their new features. So if they'd had plastic surgery or cosmetic surgery, it took that long for them to get used to the new features, and that seems to be like the patient zero of that factoid. But in 2009 there was a really big study on habit creation that found that habits developed in a range of 18 to 254 days, which is a pretty big range. 

Norman Swan: So sometimes you've got to work pretty hard to create that habit. It could be an unhealthy habit or a healthy habit.

Tegan Taylor: And the study that I'm talking to basically on average is around 66 days for something like incorporating eating a piece of fruit before a meal. So that is relatively simple, but kind of complicated, you've got to have shopped for it, you've got to be sort of thinking about it. But yeah, even then, 66 days to really lock in that new habit, which is two months, which is a bit more of a long game than I think a lot of people are expecting.

Norman Swan: It comes to this neuroplasticity thing, which is that if you've had a stroke, nobody would be surprised by a long-term prospect of stroke rehabilitation returning function. It's the same problem which is dealing with brain plasticity, changing the way the brain is structured, and it taking a long time. If you learn a new instrument, the evidence is when you look at brain structure, brain structure does change, but it changes over a fairly long period of time. So the idea that you can break a habit immediately is just false. You've got to work at it. 

Tegan Taylor: And I think that's a really nice way of thinking about it, because then you're not beating yourself up about it if in February you're not there yet, because I think we have this idea sort of sold to us through popular culture that it is going to be a relatively quick thing, if you can just stick to it for 21 days or six weeks or whatever, but knowing that it's happening in your brain, it is changing, you've just got to give it time. 

Norman Swan: And also, by the way, keep up the reinforcement, because if you stop it, you could revert to the previous habit, which is still there wired in your brain, according to the animal studies. 

Tegan Taylor: Well, this is what I wanted to say, like, can we talk about some practical tips for people who do want to start the year with some changes? 

Norman Swan: So you've got a habit you want to change, you've got to look at the situation in which that habit occurs, which is the context. You've got to look at what cues you to start that behaviour. Is it the fridge? Is it the alarm clock making you want to go back to sleep? What's the change of behaviour? What might be the reward? And then doing it a lot and just thinking that through, that you're building a new neural network, and that takes time and effort, and you've got to keep at it. 

Tegan Taylor: Like I said before, there are dozens, probably hundreds of books on this. There are podcasts, including this one. I mean, it sounds like a long-term thing, but it also sounds quite simple.

Norman Swan: Yeah, and you haven't had to buy a book, you just had to subscribe to What's That Rash?. 

Tegan Taylor: We got the job done for you in 15 minutes. '15 minutes to change a habit'. that's what we should call this episode. 

Norman Swan: That's right. Context: Wednesday mornings when we drop. Cue…

Tegan Taylor: Your podcast feed.

Norman Swan: Yes, your mobile phone and your ear pods, whatever you use to listen to your phone. And the reward is just being able to talk to your friends about the fantastic stuff we've told you all week, and then they become subscribers too. So it's probably the best habit you could have in your life.

Tegan Taylor: 2025 New Year's resolution: What's That Rash?.

Norman Swan: And one of the habits we've induced in our audience is feedback, and we get some fantastic feedback.

Tegan Taylor: We have had some lovely feedback through the YouTube comment sections. Lulu Mayhem says…

Norman Swan: 'Lulu Mayhem'? 

Tegan Taylor: Lulu Mayhem, this is a username, it's probably not her actual…

Norman Swan: Nobody writes to us on the YouTube channel with their real name, have you noticed that?

Tegan Taylor: Do I have to explain how usernames and handles work, Norman?

Norman Swan: No. 

Tegan Taylor: Lulu Mayhem says, 'Love that this is now on YouTube to watch. The question now is, will we ever get to see Dr Swan's home set-up with a towel on his head?' I feel like we might need to explain this one to some newbies.

Norman Swan: Yeah, that's right. So, Lulu Mayhem was clearly a listener to Coronacast. 

Tegan Taylor: You're one of the real ones, Lulu.

Norman Swan: I mean, because we were on lockdown a lot of the time, we were doing them from home, and to make the room sound like a studio and stop reverberating, you had to put (well, I did) a towel over my head. And the problem was if it went on too long, I was suffocating and almost dying from lack of oxygen. 

Tegan Taylor: You also revealed to us at about six months in that you hadn't ever washed the towel. 

Norman Swan: It was revolting, yes.

Tegan Taylor: You were like, 'Oh, this towel smells.' I'm like, 'Put it in the wash.' Anyway. Those are the pandemic days that we don't need to talk about anymore. There's other feedback that we've gotten. Some people saying that nobody puts their phone up to their ear anymore. So that's in reference to the 5G radiation chat that we had a few weeks ago. 

Norman Swan: The 'do mobile phones cause cancer' episode, yep.

Tegan Taylor: People were saying, well, no one holds their phone to their ear anymore.

Norman Swan: No, I think they do. 

Tegan Taylor: I think they do. But also, even if you're not holding it to your ear, we're still close…like, we are within an arm's reach of our phone almost constantly, we would still be seeing cancer rates going up across the board, and they're not. 

Norman Swan: I think there's a sufficient number of people still using the phone to their ear that if there was an effect, we'd still see it. 

Tegan Taylor: And one person has said, 'I'm so sorry that you're now exposed to the wonderful world of YouTube comments. I hope you have nerves of steel.' Well, I have a cool trick; don't read the comments, although I'm obviously reading some of them out now.

Norman Swan: Overwhelmingly positive, which is a refreshing change from some of the other social channels. 

Tegan Taylor: So it's actually not us that has to read the comments on YouTube, it is our producer, Shelby. So, send your thoughts and prayers to Shelby Traynor, and send your questions to thatrash@abc.net.au.

Norman Swan: And in fact both will get to Shelby. And for those of you watching us on YouTube, this has been by way of an experiment, so we'd love your feedback on it. And this is the last YouTube for a while, and we might come back on again if the demand is there. 

Tegan Taylor: But of course, the show is and always will be on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Norman Swan: And we'll see you there. 

Tegan Taylor: You'll hear us there.

Norman Swan: Oh, of course, six senses, they always just get me in the end.