How to break bad habits for a healthier life

Published January 2024 | 5 min read
Expert contributors Jeremy Cowden, psychologist, PSYCH2U; Professor Cassandra Szoeke, director of the Healthy Ageing Program at the University of Melbourne
Words by Angela Tufvesson

Bad health habits are easy to form and hard to break. Learn why habits are a powerful driver of behaviour and how to build healthy habits for lasting change.

Every new year brings new resolutions to adopt healthier habits – and actually stick to them. In his best-selling book, Atomic Habits, author James Clear argues that our habits are intrinsically linked to our identity and that "the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits".

Research suggests that as many as 40% of our daily actions are habits – behaviours we repeat without thinking. Do you eat the same breakfast every day, make your bed the usual way and travel a tried-and-tested route in the car or to the bus stop? This is the power of habits.

As we start a fresh orbit around the sun, understanding how habits form is a powerful tool for changing less healthy patterns of behaviour and replacing them with habits to change your life for the better.

Why are habits so powerful?

Habits help your brain to function more efficiently, explains psychologist Jeremy Cowden from PSYCH2U. Driving the usual route to work gives you more capacity to think about the day’s schedule, just as wearing an everyday ‘uniform’ of jeans and a T-shirt saves brainpower for other tasks.

"If we had to make a conscious decision about everything we did, it would be exhausting, so our brain looks to do a lot of things on autopilot," explains Jeremy. "The more steps we can condense in our brain into something that's automatic and a process, the less work our brain has to do to function."

Research by a team at University College London has shown that it takes 66 days on average before a new behaviour becomes automatic. Jeremy says repetition as well as situational cues help to accelerate the habit-formation process.

"Our brain looks for cues to decide what we're doing," he says. "If every morning you get up, go to the bathroom, put your exercise gear on, put your shoes on and walk out the door in the same order, it will become automatic pretty quickly – perhaps within a week or two."

How bad habits form

When it comes to health, bad habits are often more likely to stick. Why? It’s simple: they make us feel better in the short term. Sleeping in may feel better than getting up and going for a walk, just as eating dessert can be more satisfying than a second helping of vegies.

"The brain's first instinct is, ‘this feels familiar, I want more of this’," says Jeremy. "And it becomes easier to maintain the more we make it habitual."

Plus, our preference for staying sedentary or eating sweet foods has a lot to do with our evolution, explains Professor Cassandra Szoeke, director of the Healthy Ageing Program at the University of Melbourne.

"The body was designed to obtain nutrients as efficiently as possible – which means food with the greatest fat and sugar content – because food was scarce," says Prof Szoeke. "If we did lots of exercise, we'd need to access more food, so we were designed to be as sedentary as possible because our lives were so active in getting food.

"This has changed in just the last 100 years. We've only had two generations with the plenty that surrounds us, whereas the process of adaptation takes several generations."

How to break bad health habits

To break bad habits, it's important to use the very thing that makes them possible: our brain. "We have to intellectualise that readily available, highly processed foods are not good for us, that our activity has decreased and what we consider habits are in fact things our body was designed to do," says Prof Szoeke.

Jeremy adds that "as humans, we have developed the capacity to think about what might feel better later and let that drive us", explaining that this can involve imagining yourself fitter, stronger and healthier. "If our brain can harness that more, we're more likely to adopt healthier behaviours," he says.

You can then help stop bad habits by disrupting them and forming new, healthier and – crucially – conscious behaviours that you do until they become automatic.

For example, if you know that scrolling through your phone just before bedtime will lead to a disrupted sleep, focus on how a good night’s sleep will boost your energy levels and improve your concentration the next day.

Need help to build better sleep habits? Thanks to our partnership with Sleepfit Solutions, eligible HCF members^* can get a free 12-month subscription to the Sleepfit app designed to improve sleep and overall wellbeing.

Strategies that can help create change in your life

There are lots of strategies to help you begin forming healthier habits. You could try habit stacking or habit trackers. Or you could focus on a specific goal, like being able to walk up the stairs without feeling puffed or fitting into a favourite pair of jeans.

• How to reduce alcohol intake
  If you’re keen to cut back on alcohol, Jeremy recommends setting rules like actively counting each drink, alternating alcoholic drinks with water or setting an hourly timer on your phone and not having another drink until it goes off can be helpful. "It steps you out of that automatic pattern and you're acting on decisions," he says.
  
  For extra support, you could try Hello Sunday Morning’s online behaviour change app Daybreak that provides 24/7 digital support and connects you anonymously with a like-minded online community. Eligible HCF members^{^} can also access a free HealthyMinds Check-in, which connects you with psychologists and digital support services.
  
  
• How to eat less chocolate
  For diet-related habits, like curbing a sweet tooth, Jeremy says making simple rules can be a good starting point.
  
  "You could say: ‘If I'm going to open a block of chocolate, I'm going to eat one piece at a time. I'm going to stop and enjoy that process but be very deliberate in it’," he says. "It employs conscious thought and helps you think about the future, and eventually it can become automatic."
  
  
• How to build healthy fitness habits
  As for making more time to exercise, Jeremy suggests setting up situational cues like putting out your exercise gear the night before so it’s the first thing you see when your alarm goes off and placing your running shoes next to the front door. When you wake up, getting dressed and out the door is easier.
  
  "Do the same things in the same order at the same time, over and over again, and eventually they will become automatic," he says. "Willpower is a good way to get started, but if you require willpower to do it every day, you're not going to do it for very long. Getting the brain out of the way is the trick, so it’s not a decision – it’s just something you do."

Embrace the endorphins

Prof Szoeke recommends taking advantage of good feelings that come with new, healthy habits and encourages you to keep going.

"There are natural endorphins that get released whenever you do physical activity, and as we get better nutrition, we feel better overall," she says. "If you can take up these sorts of habits and then make them regular, you'll get the positive reinforcement of the health benefits that come not just in physical health, but in mental health as well."

Jeremy says positive self-talk and a dose of willpower can help you overcome temporary slip-ups. Likewise, Prof Szoeke says, if your circumstances shift, so too can your habits – especially as we age.

"Be adaptive and not too addicted to one type of activity," she says. "Life throws curveballs and if your usual activity is not possible, adapt to a new one."

Lose weight and keep it off

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