New Study: Why You Can’t Get Healthy Habits To Stick (+ How To Fix It)

The Liz Moody Podcast

Liz Moody

Health & Fitness, Self-improvement, Education, Mental Health

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Are you finding it difficult to stick to new habits, no matter how badly you want to? New research from Health Psychology on habit forming provides new answers as to why this might be the case. From this research, there are four main reasons why people fail to stick to the habits they want to build. I’m going over all four, and providing tips and tricks to help you avoid the common pitfalls. When we try to build habits, how badly we want to have new habits has very little to do with whether we tend to pick up new habits successfully. This is because of something called the Intention-Behavior Gap, and understanding exactly why we have this gap can help us fix it. Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now! Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome. To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. Check out the previous episodes of The Liz Moody Podcast discussed today: The Secret To Making Soul-Satisfying Friends As An Adult (Avoid the Mistake Everyone Makes!) The Secret to Getting in Shape, Sleeping Better, Saving Money, and Being More Confident & Productive (Yes, Really!) with Katie Milkman This episode is sponsored by: Puori: Go to puori.com/LIZMOODY and use promo code LIZMOODY for up to 20% sitewide. ZocDoc: Go to ZocDoc.com/LizMoody and download the Zocdoc app for FREE and book a top-rated doctor today. Pique: Go to piquelife.com/LIZMOODY for up to 20% off plus a special gift. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast. This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 334. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Liz Moody podcast. Today, we're going to talk about something
0:04.4	that I know a lot of us struggle with. We talk all the time about habits to live our best lives on
0:09.9	this podcast, things to eat, the best workouts to do, how to incorporate things like awe and
0:14.8	breathwork to decrease our stress and increase our happiness. And we listen to the episodes
0:20.6	or I do the interviews and we're
0:22.0	like, yes, that sounds amazing. I'm going to start that immediately. And then crickets. We may try
0:29.8	things once or even a few times, but within weeks or months, we are back to our same old life.
0:36.7	It is not that you are lazy. It is not that you are
0:40.0	foundationally worse than everybody else or broken in some way. New research came out that's all
0:46.6	about exactly why we fail to stick to the new habits that we want to create. So today, we are
0:52.6	going to dive into that research. and I'm going to share some
0:55.5	easy science-backed ways that you can overcome the problems that this study identified so you can
1:01.3	implement the habits that you want in your life. Also, I want to be clear, by no means do I think
1:08.7	that you should do everything that we talk about on the podcast. I certainly do not.
1:15.2	First of all, podcasts can just be motivating. They can help you identify as a healthy person, a
1:21.0	productive person, a happy person, and science shows that taking on that identity will shape
1:26.3	your choices, whether you like it or not.
1:28.9	So just listening, even if you think that you're doing nothing, will change your life and also hopefully just like entertain you and make you feel not alone in the world.
1:38.7	And I view the podcast as a toolbox.
1:42.0	Just by listening, your brain knows that all of these tools exist so you can
1:45.5	pull them out if and when you need them. But I just want to start with by no means is this
1:50.5	episode like, you should be doing all of these habits right now. It's about how you can
	...

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