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

habit so hard? Neuroscientist Dr Tara Swore 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 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, you know, the thoughtful behaviours 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've put on weight, the normal default

for the brain is to say, well, you've messed this up now, so basically you failed. 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 have a three-year-old 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 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, 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, you know, throw your toys out of the prime. 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

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