The Habit Expert: You Need To Find Your “Keystone” Habits

0:00Dr Karan: From exercising more to spending less time on our phones, our lives are shaped by habits. So why are they so hard to make and even harder to break? That's what we're finding out today with my guest, Professor Ben Gardner. I don't think there is a single best way. What we've done in our research is kind of map out four different strategies for breaking a habit. I'm Dr Karan, and in this podcast, I speak to the world's most foremost experts in science and medicine to cut through the BS of modern health advice. Thanks as always to Throne Science for sponsoring the show. It's the world's first continuous tracker for getting personalized insight about gut health, hydration, and prostate health with every flush.

0:34Dr Karan: And thanks to Loam Science, the world's first invisible fiber blend with clinical trials. Well, first of all, welcome to the podcast, Professor Ben. I think the topic of habits is it's evergreen, but at the start of the year, people always take on new habits. But first of I think it's worth people understanding what a habit actually is, because I think there's a bit of confusion between, you know, routines, which people voluntarily enforce themselves and then a habit, which is somewhat automated. Yeah. So, I mean, in everyday language, the term habit can just be used to mean something that people do repeatedly, frequently.

1:13but to a psychologist we define a habit as something well we define a habit as an association that people have between a situation that they commonly find themselves in and what they normally do in that situation so for example it may be on your way to work you get off the tube and you go to a cafe that you always go to and get get your coffee or whatever it is or maybe at lunchtime during your lunch break you go to the gym now so from this perspective a habit is an association that we've learned and those associations are all important because they determine what we do and they can help us to do things quite quickly and quite automatically and quite efficiently so a habit as we see it is an association a routine is more like a chain of events in a kind of bigger sequence but yeah talking about habits we're talking more about associations really

2:01Dr Karan: so when we talk about associations the environment plays a huge role in those associations so you know, the environment can be a trigger or a cue for that habit. So if you walk into a certain room in the house that is associated with a habit, so, you know, for most people, a bedroom is associated with sleep, but, you know, even more specifically, going to the kitchen and going to a specific area in a kitchen may be associated with a certain cooking habit or a certain, you know, you eat that cereal or that breakfast bar in that place so that's a huge trigger can people also be triggers for habits yeah so people can be triggers to habits i mean i think you're right in that it's environments that trigger habits and it's also i think it's not just specific you know it's not just one cue it's often a kind of bundle of cues so it may be that you go into your kitchen in the morning and you're triggered to kind of enact your breakfast habit you go in the you know in the afternoon or you know in the evening and you're triggered to do your cooking habit your your evening meal habit so yes environments have a role to play but i think it's more than just one aspect of the environment there's multiple parts but yeah it's not just the physical environment that can cue people's habits other people can cue habits the time of day can cue habits the thing that you were doing immediately beforehand can cue habits and that in particular is a really you know this is how a lot of our habits work that we have sequences of things that we do you know part of your morning routine maybe you get out of the shower and then that triggers you to, you know, dry yourself off with a towel, which then triggers you to go and get dressed and so on.

3:33So yeah, there can be multiple triggers to habits.

3:35Dr Karan: So there's a lot of research suggesting that it's mostly subconscious and sort of automatic, you know, 50 % is what it says, but you were involved in research suggesting it could be up to two thirds of our habits could be just this automatic subconscious process. Yeah, we did a study where we followed 105 people who allowed us to send them text messages at six random intervals for a seven day period where we asked them what had they just done and how automatic did it was it kind of initiated and also did they intend to do it or not and we found that two-thirds of all the things that people said that they were doing they said that they had started doing habitually so they've been automatically triggered so yeah we think it's more like about two-thirds of what people do that is habitual but I think the other thing that was interesting there is for many of those habitual behaviors people also said they intended to do it so we think about habits as being things that we do without thinking and yes that is the main kind of vehicle by which our habits work like you know we're triggered to do them without thinking but the reason that we have habits is at some point in the past at least they served our goals so we do them because they're helpful ways of achieving our goals or enacting our intentions so i guess the reason a habit exists in humans is to minimize the amount of actual conscious thinking that needs to happen.

4:59Dr Karan: So it's almost reflexive in a way that you're not wasting time. And that may have been somewhat contributing to some survival mechanism before, where you just do something automatically, and you don't take effort or brain space thinking about doing something. But now, obviously, you know, with devices and modern life, you've got good and bad habits, which is more than just about survival, It's about pleasure as well. You know, people have now, well, actually on this point, you know, what is the line that we can draw between a habit that is formed because of psychology initially, right? So like drinking a cup of coffee, but then it's driven more by physiology where something habitual becomes addictive.

5:43Dr Karan: nicotine vaping coffee all of those things where actually it starts off as a psychological fixation or driven by something you know they want to have something around their mouth or drink something hot in the morning but then actually there are certain active ingredients in those habits they may do like nicotine or caffeine which actually overrides physiology and makes it addictive yeah so i think the best way to think about that is that the habit is just an association that prompts you to start doing something. But there are certain properties of certain behaviors that make them, you know, addictive.

6:17And in theory, at least, it could be the case that we could remove some of the habits that support the addictions, but still people would carry on doing that behavior. So for example, with smokers, a lot of smokers will smoke as soon as they wake up or as soon as they finish a meal. Now, it could be that you could work with someone to break those particular habits so that, you know, when they wake up, they don't have a cigarette first thing, And when they finish their meal, they don't have a cigarette. But nonetheless, they've done the behavior so many times that they've become addicted to it.

6:44So it wouldn't actually stop the behavior in a broader sense. It would just stop particular instances of enacting that behavior out of habit.

6:52Dr Karan: On that topic of smoking, over the last few years, we've seen the rise of people vaping. And, you know, there's a lot of media coverage and even, you know, the NHS health organizations promote vaping as a safer alternative to smoking, which, you know, for the vast majority of health reasons, it may be a safer alternative, but it's not safe in and of itself. And a lot of people are vaping instead of smoking, but there's a lot of people now vaping who would never have smoked at all. When we're talking about breaking a habit and changing that initial root psychological association, is that really the best thing we can do from a psychological perspective?

7:33Dr Karan: Because the core mechanism of fixating on oral fixation, having that fixation and using it as a crutch to offset any stress or nervousness or anxiety. That's why maybe a lot of people smoke. They have a cigarette to get some calmness and then the nicotine provides that energy or focus. The vaping is doing the same thing, but it's still harmful for health overall. We also have other tools which are non nicotine based to break that habit nicotine replacement therapies, but other tools as well, which act on the brain to, you know, like kill that sort of addictive behavior. What is your take on like, you know, this sort of over marketing on vaping as like a tool to get off smoking propel fitness water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self.

8:29Dr Karan: What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. Brussels clean up nicely at Sweetgreen. Maple glazed, roasted and edges perfectly caramelized. Sweetgreen's fall harvest is back on the menu. And the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured. You know what to do. Order on the Sweetgreen app. Well, I mean, it's a big question, but I think from a habit perspective, I think it's important to recognize, you know, changing habits isn't the answer to everything. And the way to think of it is, is that think of addiction as being like a, you know, like a Jenga tower, for example, you've got all those bricks in there and you could build that tower by kind of constructing multiple habits.

9:13But there are also other influences or other bricks within that, which kind of feed into that. So, yes, the habit forming that habit may get you to the point where you're kind of physiologically addicted. Well, there are other kind of pushes and pulls that, you know, push you towards doing that behavior. but yeah it may be that you can disrupt the habit but by taking that habit brick out the structure is still there so i think from a habit perspective it's it's it's about thinking beyond habit and i think we need to recognize that some behaviors are just inherently kind of i mean i'm reluctant to say this about vaping but it's you know it's rewarding for people the reason that they do it is it gives them something you know it kind of delivers that dopamine as well as as the other kind of hits from it and that's what sustains the behavior so habit is just one part of a kind of structure that supports these behaviors.

9:58Dr Karan: That's interesting because what vaping is doing, that's targeting the downstream consequence of the habit. So you're just replacing one mechanism of nicotine delivery, which is driving the habit with something else. So that's not really solving the problem. It's just maybe reducing the negative health consequences. But actually you're saying in terms of your Jenga tower of habit formation, why is someone smoking in the first place? Is it because of stress? Is it because of, you know, they want something to go in the mouth? Can that be replaced with coffee or something that's kind of health neutral?

10:35Dr Karan: So actually it's looking further upstream of what's leading you to smoke in the first place, which I don't think most people think about when they're trying to stop a bad habit. They're just trying to solve the actual problem itself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, certainly. I mean, if we think of these associations, we, we form these associations between situations and actions because those actions serve our purposes in in that situation and you're right so what is the upstream cause of the need for that kind of itch to be scratched and yeah i think that's that's a very good point that you know we could say for someone wanting to stop smoking i mean vaping is one option but you can also chew gum you could also use a stress ball you could also go for a walk now not all of those things will be equally effective and possibly the reason why vaping is so popular is so prevalent is because it did start off as a highly effective alternative to smoking in that it you know it scratches the same itch in a way that um you know going for a walk or using a stress ball doesn't it's just we're now in a situation where as you said i think people are vaping and it's just it's become its own health concern it's not just harm reduction anymore it's a new form of harm i i totally agree because actually you're seeing now who are, you know, dual habits of both smoking and vaping, because it's the same thing.

11:49Dr Karan: So why wouldn't you do both? Because it provides the same relief, and, you know, sort of addictive pathways, the brain circuitry is virtually the same across both. And it's something which seems synergistic with smoking rather than something which, you know, you do in place of, there's certainly people who do it in place of smoking, but also people who are doing it in combination. So it's kind of worse than ever. And I think, You know, when we're talking about all this kind of Jenga tower of problems, you know, vaping seems to be the most branded or well marketed alternative to smoking. But it's not, I don't think, the best one based on the data we have.

12:26Dr Karan: You know, when it comes to like, you know, again, just looking at that smoking as an example, because I think that's relatable to a lot of people. Why is it so hard? And why is it so that the rates of successfully quitting smoking or any bad habit by just going cold turkey on a habit and just restricting not the best approach? because you see that with diets where there's some short-term win a week, a month, but then it relapses and it's even worse than before. You know, it's the same with, you know, whether it's like exercise, you force yourself to do something or you force a restriction and it ends up working, but then not working and even worse longer term.

13:06Dr Karan: Why is that? Well, I think to understand that we've really got to kind of delve into the psychology of how habits work. So let's take the example of say, I don't know, getting a coffee when you get off the tube in the morning so you have this association between the situation getting off the tube and your response which is to have a coffee and this doesn't i mean some people have argued that this directly activates they're going to get a coffee but my colleagues and i have argued that actually it's better to think of this as kind of generating an impulse to go and get that coffee so you can stop yourself from acting on that impulse if you want but the point is that that habit association it kind of brings to mind the coffee that's the first thing that comes to mind so it becomes your default response and so this generates this impulse and a lot of the time we don't notice this impulse we just find ourselves going to get the coffee or whatever it is that we're doing the problem then becomes that if you try and go cold turkey then in these situations in which you do have a habitual response if you just frustrate the impulse in other words you stop yourself from acting on it i mean well done for being able to do that but there's no alternative in place and what happens is when you frustrate these non-conscious impulses because they are non-conscious we're not aware of them but when you do that that impulse starts to kind of bubble up into into kind of conscious awareness and you really start to feel like i'd really like to have that coffee or you know i'd really like to do the thing that i'm stopping myself from doing and when that happens you just find that you know you're still feeling that urge to do something so what you really need to do is what we call habit substitution where you think about an alternative thing that you'll do in response to that particular trigger and you make sure you do that instead and this is where doing something like chewing gum if you have the urge to smoke is much more useful than just thinking i won't smoke because if you just stop yourself from doing something in a particular situation in a way in the short term yes it may work but that underlying habit association is still there and it's still telling you to do the thing that you normally do and it takes a lot of willpower to resist that over the long term so yeah ultimately you you have to feed the beast to some degree where you know if you think about humans beyond personalities and emotions as a purely hormone and neurotransmitter driven organism, which we are, you've got to play along and play nice with that sequence of neurotransmitters where there's this urge that's being, you know, rising upon that restriction.

15:28Dr Karan: And just to kind of like subdue it a little bit, that habit substitution, whether it's chewing gum to abate the urge to smoke, whether it's having a low calorie substitution for a cookie that you wanted, and you're trying to avoid cookies you have to just kind of like feed it a little bit to suppress that bad habit yeah and i think this is the problem when people think about stopping doing a behavior they don't think enough about what else are you going to do instead so yeah i think it's all about try and find a substitute behavior that you can do in place of the old one and this is where it's best to think about why was it that you were doing that old habit in the first place you know what was what was the need what was the because we know that habits form when people repeatedly do something and people only repeatedly do something when it's kind of rewarding in some way.

16:12So what was the reward? Why did you find it appealing in the first place? And if you can find an alternative that will kind of address that initial reward, that should be something that becomes a feasible long-term substitute.

16:24Dr Karan: I want to talk about something that's quite personal to me and about some medical conditions that I suffered from. I used to have high cholesterol and fatty liver disease and that primarily stemmed from a severe lack of fibre in my diet. And on my quest for finding the perfect fiber supplement over the last few years that could help me add more fiber into my diet, I couldn't find one. That ticked all the boxes that I wanted and the high bar that I set for myself. So it built Loam Science. What I'm most proud of is not the product. I know that's great, but it's the fact that we've run two clinical trials on it, two randomized controlled trials, which is far more than the vast majority of supplements on the market will ever do.

16:59Dr Karan: And we've got even more coming because I'm a doctor first and foremost and a scientist. and I wanted to build something that I could actually stand behind with data and not just rely on good branding. So if you want to understand what's inside Loam Science and why, the science is all on the website and the link is in the show notes. I want to dial back in and focus on this multiple factors that lead into habits. You spoke about the Jenga Tower. I think that's like a very nice analogy that it's not just the habit on top or the roof, which is held up on its own. It's this entire, you know, colonnade of different pillars that hold it up.

17:37Dr Karan: And, you know, I think about that in terms of all these habits in your life, driving one habits. And in my own life, if I'm thinking about cleaning up my diet, which, you know, I recently had a new baby and when me and my wife were trying, I wanted to clean up my life before we tried. I wanted to sort of get healthier, go to the gym and, you know, fix my health first before we tried for a baby because of all the evidence available that, you know, even the man's sperm can drive the health of the future baby. And even, you know, the sort of health risks of the pregnant mother during pregnancy. So that was like top of mind for me.

18:15Dr Karan: And part of that obviously was diet. I wanted to clean up my nutrition, eat more fiber, eat more protein, but there was all these other habits which drive that. If you just tell yourself, I'm going to eat clean. That's actually not so easy on its own. But other habits I was doing, for example, I was sleeping better. And we know that sleep deprivation can lead you to make poor choices, you know, choose higher calorie options, higher sugar, fat, salt. So sleeping is like a hormonal driver going to the gym. So doing those other associated behaviors made it so that I wanted to eat better because I was doing other things in my life, which were health promoting yeah no i think um i mean this taps into what some people have called like the kind of systems-based approach to understanding behaviors and behavior change we need to recognize all of the behaviors that we do sit within a system um and so it may be that you know you do want to have a better diet but actually that doesn't mean that you need to the kind of changes that you need to make may not be to the ultimate target behavior which is eating it may be to you know a behavior that comes before that or something else that surrounds it in the system So it may be that, you know, you want to change the way that you shop.

19:26You may want to change the places that you shop so that when you when you feel hungry, the options that you have available to you are different. So I think, yeah, this is this is really important because it's been shown that if people can kind of make small changes to what are sometimes called keystone habits. You know, these are things which are in this kind of system or network of behaviors. if you can make a change to one of these behaviors it can have a kind of spillover effect or knock-on effect on other behaviors as well so i think this is what's really important about this is to kind of do a stock take before you're doing before you're trying to make any kind of large changes and think what's my way into this system what's the behavior that i think i can do um and that will have some effects on other behaviors and of course there's also a benefit if you can make successful changes to your behavior whatever that behavior is it gives you that confidence to feel like actually i can go on and do other behaviors and of course with health because we cluster a lot of these behaviors together as health behaviors if you do feel like you're making progress in being physically active for example that may filter through to a change in your diet as well you start to feel like i'm becoming more of a healthy person so you start to kind of form an identity which then from that identity flows a set of rules that tell you what you should and shouldn't do so i think i think it's all about finding that way into changing this whole network

20:44Dr Karan: of behaviors you know for me obviously sort of a huge turning point was the fact that you know we we wanted to have a baby and that was like my watershed moment to be like okay i'm really going to do this now so this was like a huge psychological driver in a sense that was a fresh start and you know people talk about the fresh start effect in psychology of habit formation or you know breaking a bad habit, typically, you know, at the start of the year, start of a month, people want to make a change, whether that's quitting something negative, cleaning their diet, losing weight, starting a new regime, going to the gym, I think, you know, gym memberships always spike in January and February, and then, you know, Peter off throughout the rest of the year.

21:27What is it about that time, like,

21:31Dr Karan: you know, the beginning of something, which allows someone psychologically to actually start to make a change whereas in the middle of a month or in the middle of the year they wouldn't what's changing purely because of the time of year well i mean it's purely psychological in that we identify certain periods as like right i've turned over a new leaf so for a lot of people the start of the year is you know it's a brand new year it's a brand new me and it feels like you're starting afresh so the way to think of it is we have kind of different mental accounting periods and at the start of the year we feel like right the last period has now finished i'm on to a new chapter in my life or you know a new year or whatever it is um but the point is there's nothing inherently you know there's nothing inherent in january the first that makes it a good time to change your behavior it's just that psychologically people feel like right it's a it's a it's a new year um but the same applies to the start of the month you know you could think it's a new month so i'm going to start making a change other for other people it's a new week so i'm going to start making a change i think the kind of the underlying point is here when people feel like they're at the start of a new period a kind of what is a meaningful new period for them that can be the time to make change and i think in the with the example that you're talking about i think those periods can start from when you think right from this moment i am going to for example try for a baby or you know whatever it is maybe i'm going to try and achieve something at work so that starts off this new accounting period so yeah it's purely psychological i would say i guess there's uh you know that's a bit of a double-edged sword where you know that is part of our psychology where we're looking for something new and this kind of you see a lot of people use that psychology to take almost like an all or nothing approach uh you know if i bring it back to diet for example someone may be on a diet and you know they've eaten a donut which is not part of their diet and they feel god that donut has now ruined the day i'll start tomorrow as a fresh start clean and now this day's already ruined whatever i'm just going to ignore it and then eat whatever the junk I want for this day, because I know tomorrow I'm, you know, clean slate again.

23:29Dr Karan: And I see this time and time again with other things as well, where someone sets an arbitrary target of, okay, I'm going to hit 10 ,000 steps. And if I don't hit the 10 ,000 step, there's no point and whatever. So I guess there is some detriment to having that all or nothing approach, because even a small change, whether it's positive is good, and it's all cumulative. And one small negative should not, you know, kind of spoil what you're trying to build. Yeah, there's been really interesting research from researchers in the Netherlands looking at this. It's called the setback effect, where one kind of small setback, it's thought can kind of lead to a cascade of negative emotions.

24:07It makes you start to doubt yourself. You lose your confidence in being able to change. And so people will say, it's OK, I'll try again next time. But actually, they're going into that next attempt with weakened kind of confidence that they'll actually be able to make that change. So it can get worse and worse and worse. but i think the the key point here is the way to make changes is i think you have to have you have to have a goal in mind but i think you also have to have some flexibility to that because otherwise there is this risk of the all or nothing you know effect whereby if you haven't hit 10 000 steps then you haven't made progress but maybe it's more useful to think you're going to aim for 10 000 steps but what's the acceptable lower bound on that and this is something i've done in my own life actually for years i've i've been doing a daily exercise habit and it began with 20 minute HIIT workouts first thing in the morning in summer and it was it was great but when it came to autumn it got harder and harder to do and actually the way that i've negotiated this kind of with myself is to think about you know what's the minimum amount of exercise that i can do to convince myself that i'm still going i've actually narrowed it down to like doing a two minute plank or you know at least if i can't do that then i've broken my streak and so i think we need to have that flexibility somewhere because otherwise there is this real risk that if you don't hit that one target we hit the setback effects you start to think it's fine i'll try again tomorrow but you've you're already on a downward spiral so i think it's having a goal but being flexible but also i think starting small and then building up your goal can be useful because one of the reasons why people don't make long-lasting changes is well one of the reasons why people don't even start to make the change that they want to make is they're wildly unrealistic in what they can do so start small and build it up and then you're less likely to have these setbacks yeah i guess people want

25:50Dr Karan: to make sweeping changes um and really sort of take the biggest possible change they can make which you know often is insurmountable for someone who you know has never done that before and then the setback effect kicks in and then they're even worse than before where they're not even doing that and you know if we're all talking about walking there's abundant data that even a thousand extra steps beyond your baseline improves mortality outcomes, you know, and I think this kind of 10 ,000 step idea, if you look at all the data, there's a large meta-analysis done on daily step counts and what the health benefits were.

26:26Dr Karan: It looks like the optimal dose, if you want to reduce your all-cause mortality and improve cardiovascular outcomes, it's around 7 ,000 to 8 ,000 steps. So, you know, the curve flattens out around 7 ,000 to 8 ,000 steps for getting most of the benefits that you'd get from 10 ,000. So not to say that 10 ,000 isn't better than seven or eight, it is because it's more, more walking, more exercise. But in terms of beating yourself up because you didn't hit 10 ,000, actually, if you want to sit a more realistic target, 7 ,000 is not a bad place to start. Same with fiber intake. You know, if you don't hit 30 grams a day target, sure, that's not ideal.

27:01Dr Karan: But even an extra five or 10 beyond what you were doing is still going to have some meaningful benefits. So I guess it's that the antidote to the setback effect would be you know just getting that psychological win from just doing something yeah yeah yeah certainly i think having some kind of some people have called them like backup habits whereby if you're not able to achieve the goal that you wanted to achieve what's the the minimum that you could do what's the alternative that you could do so you still feel like you're on track and i think that's what's really important it's psychological it's about do you feel like you're on track or not and the setback effect is all about things go downhill hill because people start to feel like they're not able to achieve what they want to achieve.

27:39And of course, if you, you know, things that you're unable to achieve, you will shy away from, so you'll disengage. So yeah, having these fallback habits or these plan Bs, I

27:47Dr Karan: think is really important. If you want to form a habit, people often say online that you need 21 days of consistency to do that, but that seems like a pretty arbitrary number. Is there any truth or merit behind that? No, there's not. And in fact, a few years ago, I looked into this and it seems that it all originates in a book that was published in the 1960s by an american plastic surgeon where he said among his patients it seemed to take them three weeks to get used to their new appearance and then he said and it takes me three weeks to get used to living in a new house therefore three weeks is you know how long it takes to get used to something now to a psychologist that's not even habit formation that's habituation which confusingly is about becoming desensitized to something but that just seemed to snowball and become this thing of do do something once a day every day for 21 days and it will stick there has been research that's looked at this more scientifically um a paper that was published in 2010 by researchers at university college london looked at a group of volunteers who were asked well they were chosen on the basis that they wanted to make changes to their behavior to their diet or their physical activity and they were asked to find or think of one thing that occurs in their day every day and only once a day and to plan exactly what it was they were going to do in response to that.

29:02So the participants went away and they were tracked for 12 weeks and every day they had to report back on had they done the behavior on the previous day and if they had how automatic or how habitual did it seem. And what the researchers found was that the kind of shape of the habit formation curve is kind of asymptotic. Essentially you can think of it like the letter R. So it kind of goes up and then kind of plateaus and they found that the average amount of time it took for people to reach their peak their own personal peak was 66 days so if we are to try and put a figure on it we'd say 66 rather than 21 but it's it's really problematic because within that study that was an average there was one person who reached their peak in 18 days another person didn't reach their peak at all in 12 weeks but it was forecast if they kept going they'd reach it in 254 days and there's also variation in there was variation in what level people peaked in their habit strength so some people kind of went up slightly so their their plateau was still quite low on the scale and other people kind of their their automaticity went you know really high and actually what this tells us is it's problematic to try and put a number on how long it takes to form a habit because it means different things for different people and actually i think part of the problem with this idea of how long does it take a hat to form a habit is that habit is not dichotomous you know it's not the case that you have a habit and then you have sorry you don't have a habit and then you suddenly have a habit you know it's not the case on day 20 you're doing it and it's really mindful the next day it's become automatic actually habit strength we should think of it on a continuum it builds over time and things start to feel more automatic or over time if you stop doing them they become less automatic but yeah our best guess is roughly about two months but but i've been involved in research where people have tried doing something once a day, every day.

30:54And within a couple of weeks, they are telling us that it starts to feel like it's becoming part of their routine. And I think that's all important when it feels like it's part of what you do. That's when we can say habits really starting to kind of, you know, crystallize.

31:06Dr Karan: Yeah. I think putting numbers on how long it's going to take to form just seems, you know, a bit fluffy just because there are so many different habits. it depends on the exposure the individual you know their own you know degree of willpower and how they're sort of wired in their brain uh you know the dose what kind of habit it is i mean you know quitting smoking versus starting a gym routine are two wildly different things and are dictated by different environments as well so yeah i think that's probably true i mean it's so variable but also on the point of if you've got a habit or you're starting to form that habit after a few weeks, what's the best way to maintain it beyond just reinforcing it by doing it?

31:47Dr Karan: Because for example, if I'm going to the gym every single day, but I know that I'm in the early phases of building this gym habit and I've done it really well for a month, every day for a month, but I know that I've got a three week holiday coming up and I'm probably not going to go to the gym for the three weeks. How do I make sure that when I come back, it's still going to be somewhat habitualized well i mean what i'd say in that instance is we know that when people go on holiday they go into new contexts and so you know they may no longer do those habits but we'd expect that when you come back you should kind of fall back into that pattern quite well but that's when there is a bit of a kind of vulnerability so i think i think you're right to say what exactly can we do to make sure people keep doing it and i think it is just you know the kind of things that you had to do to get the habit formed in the first place you will need to redo when you come back from that holiday so you know maybe it's putting reminders in your phone maybe it's you know whatever it was that got you to to keep repeating it in the first place you've got to redo but crucially i think if you have formed this habit and then you go on holiday when you come back yes you'll need to put effort back into kind of getting it back up and running but the crucial point is because you have that habit it shouldn't take long to get it back up and running so maybe for the first couple of days if we're talking about i don't know going to the gym for the first couple of days when you come back, you will need to put reminders on your phone or you will need to ask people to remind you or, you know, put your gym kit by the door or whatever it is.

33:10But once you've done it a couple of times or, you know, again, we can't really put figures on it, but after a few times, you should find that you very quickly recover it. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel Hydrates Better Than Water to help you get the most out of your workout

33:27Dr Karan: and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. Brussels clean up nicely at Sweetgreen. Maple glazed, roasted, and edges perfectly caramelized. Sweetgreen's fall harvest is back on the menu, and the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured. You know what to do. Order on the Sweetgreen app. Quick one before we continue, and something I've been genuinely nerding out on in my chief of science role at Throne Science is poop and pee. You see, most of us are completely blind to what's happening in our guts and urinary health day to day.

34:06Dr Karan: We often wait until something is wrong. But your body's actually constantly churning out data in your urine, in your bowel habits, in those patterns that most people never track. I'm proud to say that at Throne Science, we're building technology that captures exactly that. passive, consistent biomarker monitoring of your gut health, your hydration status, your prostate health markers, without you even having to think about it. From a clinical standpoint, the shift from reactive to continuous monitoring is really important because that is where the early signal detection happens and that's when you can change your habits and hopefully outcomes as well.

34:40Dr Karan: I've been deeply involved from the science side because I think the research here is serious and with rising rates of colon cancer, poop talk is no laughing matter. So if you're curious about what that data could tell you, the links in the show notes. Now, when it comes to sort of on the other flip side, breaking bad habits, people, you know, often have a hard time doing that because of how long they've done it for the exposure time is so long. So it's kind of a reflex at this point. Something would be that I've struggled with, I know a lot of people have is checking their phone. You know, you'd be watching TV and you're reflexively checking your phone.

35:13Dr Karan: Some people every few seconds, maybe every a few minutes or you know whether it's boredom or anxiety or the need for you know getting updates and involved with things i think you know the average person checks their phone 58 times a day or more potentially how is the best way to sort of you know counter that i don't think there is a single best way but um what we've done in our research is kind of map out four different strategies for breaking a habit so again if we think of a habit as being an association that once you're in a situation that association triggers an impulse the impulse generates the behavior there are four kind of sites within that process where you can intervene um one of them is what we call habit inhibition so this is where you kind of say to yourself i know i'm going to be triggered to do this but at that crucial moment i'm going to you know like flick my willpower switch and tell myself not to do it and there was a study published in 2010 which to me surprisingly suggested that for a lot of people that is effective that if they know the situation in which they're going to be tempted by their habits, they tell themselves not to do it.

36:13And actually a lot of people said that that was quite effective for them. Another thing that you could do is you try and avoid the trigger if possible, because if you avoid the trigger, you shouldn't have your habit queued in the first place. Um, but an interesting, uh, third option is what we call kind of, well, adding friction. So you make it harder to do the behavior. So this is where you think, okay, I know I'm going to be tempted to do it, but can I make it harder to do it? so with something like checking your phone if you're you know let's say you're watching a family film if you leave your phone in the other room you know you've then got to get up and go to the other room now it's perfectly possible to do that but because it's harder you have to stop and think do i really want to do that do i want to put in that amount of effort and often that will mean that people don't do these kind of you know really small habits that we do like checking our phone and the fourth option is what we call habit substitution where you think when i am tempted to do this behavior i will do something else instead now going back to your phone example well actually i think i think of any example it's just a case of which of those four strategies is most feasible so you're not going to be able to avoid the trigger probably it may be the case that you think this it's so automatic it's going to be hard to inhibit it um could you do something else instead possibly or maybe your best option is leave the phone in the other room or turn it off so that you'd have to turn it on and it takes time.

37:33So yeah, it's more the case of think of those four tools as your kind of key toolkit and then think for the habit that you're trying to break, which of these do you want to use and is most feasible for you?

37:43Dr Karan: Yeah, I think fundamentally technology has changed the way humans form habits, but also break habits. There are many great apps and tools which can help people quit smoking or stop other addictions. We've got health trackers, we've got wearables which encourage health promoting behaviors. steps, calorie tracking. There are so many data points available to us now, so many digital tools. What is your take overall in how technology has influenced habits in general for humans? Well, technology comes into everything these days. I mean, technology has certainly been helpful for, you know, helping people form habits because, you know, in order to get habit association set up, fundamentally, you need to repeat a behavior in a particular situation.

38:29and if you've got anything that will help you remember to do that then that's going to be useful so you know if you have triggers on your you know alerts on your phone which tell you remember to go to the gym at a certain time that's going to be helpful although that does come with the caveat that actually you'd need to make sure that you do form the association between you know the time of day and going to the gym rather than you know the phone telling you to go to the gym but yeah it can certainly be useful as a kind of reminder to do the behavior i think also it can be useful for for breaking habits in much the same way you know we get the information we need from it which can actually motivate us to change our behavior you know every time every morning when i wake up i'm told how well i've slept so that tells me about okay what might i need to do differently so if i think well if i start to realize maybe i've got some bad sleeping habits then that kind of information gives me the you know the motivation to think about changing them but i think one thing that technology has kind of really hasn't been great for is it distracts us.

39:33It kind of imposes a cognitive load on us at all times. Um, and I think this is a problem because habits, especially with bad habits, we act on bad habits. The reason that we act on them is because we know we don't want to do them, but something is distracting us from putting the effort in to actually overcoming those bad habits. And the reason that bad habits are bad by definition is that we don't want to do them anymore. but there's something coming up in the in the environment which is kind of sucking our self control away and makes us act in line with these habits and this is a problem with technology that a lot of the time we're distracted we're thinking about other things just because we have this kind of device with us you know if we're thinking about phones or whatever it is it's just adding to the kind of bombardment of information that comes at us and we know that when people get cognitively overloaded that's when they're most likely to act in line with their habits yeah i

40:21Dr Karan: I think the whole concept of habits is fascinating because traditionally, a lot of people think, you know, you can brute force something and it's just about willpower, which obviously is a component, but there's so many different roots and tangents from habits. And I think my biggest takeaway is that a habit is something downstream of so many different factors you feed into your life into that habit. So don't just try to change the actual habit you are trying to change, but all the other lifestyle factors around it. And I think that's a helpful model to think about it, both for breaking bad habits, but also trying to initiate good ones is kind of my main thing.

41:00Yeah, no, I agree. I think for a lot of the behaviors that we're trying to change, actually habit change is the tip of the iceberg. And there's a lot more that's going on underneath that. nonetheless i think it can be useful to think about which one habit can i break that may then be your way into actually dismantling that iceberg um but yes the reason that we form habits is those habits help us or they they're rewarding in some way even if they're bad habits you know behaviors that that society tells us is bad or you know we know that they're unhealthy for us nonetheless there's been some reward in in the past there for us so yeah we need to think about can we find those keystone habits that if we change those it will have knock-on effects in

41:41Dr Karan: terms of dismantling the whole structure yeah i always try to tell people to cut down on their usage of phones and screens but i'm going to ask them to make an exception for this specific episode so ben thank you so much pleasure