The Big Idea

Given that you can’t open a paper or magazine in January without a mention of New Year Resolutions, you might be surprised to know that most of us have given up on giving things up for New Year. 75% of adults reported that they didn’t make a resolution last year. This is more prevalent in the over 55’s than the under 24’s. The research also found that for those who did make a resolution, only 5% of people were continuing with the new habit, almost a year later. So maybe those over 55’s tried and failed so many times that they think there is no point promising themselves they will take up more exercise or cut back on the cake…

Regardless of your views on dry January, another study makes sobering reading. When doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don’t change their lifestyle habits, only 1 in 7 were able to make the change needed to live. Literally, even when it is a matter of life and death, being motivated to make a change isn’t enough – and that is because it is very easy to want to change something, but in fact our brains are hard wired to hold onto habits – even if they are not good for us and might lead to an early demise…

Whilst January and the start of a new decade is a great time to take stock, the research says that however motivated we are to make positive changes in our lives, most of us simply won’t be able to follow through. We will fail.  

Some clients tell me they can’t change – they have tried, failed and therefore accepted as true what they sang badly but boldly via a karaoke machine over the festive period – “I Am What I Am”. What I help people to understand is that the science doesn’t say we can’t change. It says we choose not to.

Recent research into ageing and the human brain says that it is a myth that all of our key mental development has happened by our mid-20s. Due to something called “neural plasticity” it is still perfectly possible to change and adapt – even in our 60s and 70s. The research proves that, if we choose to, we can develop our thinking to achieve more than we thought possible. There is also growing evidence that people who do adapt and change tend to earn higher salaries and live longer.

This single fact is how I can make a living as a coach – I ABSOLUTELY KNOW, with NO DOUBT WHATSOEVER that the person in front of me is DEFINITELY CAPABLE of more than they currently believe. Science puts that beyond doubt. So, once I have shared that science with my clients, we work hard – identifying opportunities and exploring barriers so we explicitly understand what the individual needs to do more or less of – and then crack on with it.

But as Shakespeare said: “Aye, there’s the rub”. Because the key word/s in that last sentence aren’t the sexy or motivating ones like “identifying opportunities”, “exploring barriers” or even “crack on”. Sadly, it is “work hard”.  

That is a key part of the problem with a New Year Resolution or change at any time of the year. It sounds easy. Your clothes feel tight so you tell yourself “I’ll just cut back on the cakes.” You know you are drinking too much wine so you tell yourself, “It will be easy to cut back, I’ll not drink in the week.” But “I’ll just” and “It will be easy” are poisonous lies we tell ourselves. It sounds easy. So that fact that it is really, really, hard to change comes as a bit of a shock.

We have perhaps come to think that giving something up is like so much else in our lives – an “on-demand” activity. But breaking habits isn’t like that. Your brain is a pattern machine. It loves collecting experiences, conversations and memories and finding existing patterns that it can fit them into. This means that every time you do or hear something, your brain holds onto the things that fit established thought patterns that you have already. The unfortunate thing is that it modifies beyond usefulness or even discards things you see or hear that don’t currently fit the pattern you know and love.

This is the simple reason why new habits that are good for us are so hard to get established. It would be great if getting into a new exercise routine is as simple as joining a gym or buying a bike but it is not ( as those of us with a gym membership direct debit but very few actual gym visits will know) We like the idea of a new pattern – that’s why we get excited about the idea of a New Year and a New You, but our brains are not very effective at the implementation part.

Remember that going to the gym or cycling on a weekend morning would be a new pattern. Implementing new patterns require will-power, resisting the urge to do something you want to do or doing something you really don’t want to do, requires deliberate thought. Deliberate thought requires mental energy and your brain is a Scrooge-like miser – it doesn’t like spending that energy.

This is particularly true if getting on the bike or going to the gym is likely to change or remove an existing pattern – perhaps if you are going cycling on a Saturday morning you will have to trade some Friday night beer? Or in going to the gym after work, you will have to leave work early or be home later. This might easily give you an attack of the guilts.

Remembering the science here can come in very handy. Because our brains hold onto existing  habits and patterns for all they are worth to save energy, one of the tactics that your brain will use is to tell you “lies” Your brain is fabulous at coming up with some very convincing reasons as to why you should not change the pattern today. Your guilt or your FOMO could actually be lies that your brain has invented because it simply doesn’t want to invest the energy required to create the new thought pattern.

This trick your brain plays on you is perfectly normal and is part of a condition we all experience called cognitive dissonance. Every day it is part of being human to look for evidence that what we believe to be true is actually true and to dismiss anything we see, hear or tell ourselves that doesn’t fit our current patterns. Because change is hard work and requires will-power and effort, when the going gets tough your cognitive dissonance really kicks in.

Cognitive Dissonance and the miser-like quality of resisting new patterns to save energy does have a purpose – your brain does everything for a reason – even if it gets in the way of change! The cognitive part of our brain – the bit responsible for remembering things, making decisions and so on, is actually quite small. This is why we are rubbish at some types of multi-tasking – our brain simply doesn’t have the room or the power to process two conscious thoughts at the same time.

All is not lost though. The great thing about patterns and habits is that if you persist, when the new habit is established to the extent that you are doing it, almost without thinking it moves out of the conscious part of your brain to our unconscious  (the limbic brain if you want the technical term). When this happens we can multi-task and the new habit doesn’t feel like so much of an effort – because we are not doing two conscious activities at the same time – we are doing an unconscious one and a conscious one.

Think about learning to drive. When you first got behind the wheel of a car you could think of nothing but mirror, signal, manoeuvre. Chances are , you now drive mostly unconsciously –  leaving you free to talk hands free, listen to an audiobook or imagine your future It’s why even if you have a break from driving/cycling etc, you never forget how to do it – you don’t need to remember how to remember something if it has moved into your limbic brain. Imagine learning how to forget to drive?!

In summary, the truth about creating new productive habits and breaking old unhelpful ones is simple but a bit depressing, because there is usually no quick fix. Most of us are well intentioned and are genuinely motivated to make changes in our lives but science proves good intentions are not enough. Particularly on days when you are tired, feeling a bit unloved and super busy, your brain will actively find evidence that making the change doesn’t really matter. That you don’t have time. Or that you aren’t the most unfit/overweight/disorganised/bored of all your friends…so if it’s not really broken, why go to all this horrible effort to fix it?

Before you settle for the status quo though, remember the good news – the research into neural plasticity and the other side of the cognitive dissonance coin. If you get to grips with the tricks that you brain is playing on you, you can absolutely change things. Expect to work hard on thinking about your thinking and you can achieve things beyond what you currently imagine (or ditch a small but irritating habit!) 

Change requires clear sighted thinking about your thinking. It requires you to develop the ability to assess the way you are currently filtering what you see, hear and tell yourself. And to see if those filters need adjustment.

So, take heart, prepare to work hard and start to think about your thinking.

Got It – What Now?

Avoid “don’t” or “mustn’t”

Ever told yourself to stop worrying and get to sleep and been unable to? Or wondered why a child touches a hot plate when you have told them not to? Our brains are not very good at recognising the “don’t” or “stop” in a sentence. One study found that insomniacs actually sleep better when they are told to try to stay awake.

If we did a quick experiment and I told you NOT to think about something, even for a split second you would find it harder than you think. Try now.

Absolutely DON’T think about a blue double decker bus.

However, every time we have a brain glitch, we also have an opportunity to use it to our advantage.  Try re-framing your commitment or resolution. If you tell yourself “I won’t have that cake”, sadly all your brain has heard is CAKE. You can’t help but think about cake. Frame it instead as “I’m going to find ways to make heathier eating choices” Another option is when you think CAKE, find something else quickly that you can focus on instead. Choose something that requires your full attention remembering that our brain is rubbish at multi-tasking – so it can’t think about CAKE if it is trying to learn a new language on an app or writing a thank you note to someone.  

Fold Your Arms

Yes honestly! Fold your arms right now. Now fold them the other way. How does that feel? I’ve done this activity with over 10,000 people and the results are always the same. Folding your arms one way feels normal, you don’t think about it. Folding them the “other way” feels weird. You have to think about it. It takes effort.

It is unlikely that you were taught to fold your arms one way over the other. There is no right or wrong way to do it and no danger to you in doing it the opposite way. Your brain simply prefers one way over the other because it has a pattern or a neural pathway to fold them that way and your unconscious brain now folds your arms for you so that you don’t have to think about it.  Asked to fold your arms the other way, it becomes a conscious task that requires conscious thought because there isn’t an established neural pathway for that alternative.

Think about any change you want to make using the arm folding trick. Chances are what you are doing now has become normal. The opposite will feel like folding your arms the wrong way. However, if you persist both will start to feel quite normal – after 10,000 goes at folding my arms the wrong way, I promise you this is true!

Listen for Your Lies

If you are going to try to break a habit, actively start to listen out for the excuses that you tell yourself as to why it is OK to “Do it tomorrow”. I have unashamedly stolen Cordelia Fine’s term for these excuses – “lies”. Her book A Mind Of It’s Own is one I recommend at least weekly to clients. Actively listen out for the lies you are telling yourself, and call yourself out on them. Maybe give other people who you are close to permission to call them out too. Remember they won’t sound like lies – they will sound like really plausible reasons that it is OK to have a lapse. That is because they have been invented by your very individual brain. The lies will perfectly suit you. Your brain is literally designed to tell you the very best personalised lie possible so that it can hold onto an established pattern.  When you hear your brain inventing an excuse like “I really don’t have time today” or “I should really stay and finish this work rather than go to the gym tonight” you brain has intended to convince you absolutely and completely to believe the lie. Some of my clients have reported that noticing the lies makes them feel like they are making progress. Feeling positive about yourself is linked to better success with breaking habits and making better judgements. This means noticing your lies can have a double benefit – you start to think about your thinking and you get the feel-good factor.

Practical Reminders Can Help the Shame Factor  

When you fall off the wagon or start to listen out for your excuses/lies it can be a bit disconcerting. Cordelia Fine goes as far as to say that the only truly self-aware people are often the clinically depressed. There is truth in that because your lies and excuses aren’t exclusively a bad thing – they are actually there to protect you from feeling the full shame of your failure. This gives us a classic catch 22.

• Your brain wants you to avoid feeling ashamed of yourself for not going to the gym, so it tells you a lie to justify not going to make you feel better.
• Calling out the lie is the only way to start to change, but if you do call out the lie you probably will feel ashamed of yourself.
• Feeling ashamed doesn’t help us to think and change so we are more likely than ever to persist with the unhelpful habit.

Psychologists did some research where they got people to imagine they had done something really bad (it was kill a child in a road accident, so it was pretty horrific.) They got a comparator group to imagine they had done something really good. They then asked both groups to do a maths test, with an option for a period of practise first.  Biscuits were available for all participants. The people feeling low did worse on the test because they didn’t practise. They mooched around the room instead, flicking through magazines and opening drawers. And they ate double the amount of biscuits. This experiment was with imagined events. So, think about what happens when you have real life issues going on that you feel bad about. Is it really any surprise you can’t hold off the pies or get to the gym? 

We know that where there is a brain flaw, there is also a way we can exploit it to our advantage. The researchers also found that where they put up a sign to tell people that eating the biscuits wouldn’t make them feel any better, people didn’t eat the biscuits. When people were made aware of the facts, they performed just as well as those with happy thoughts.  

So, the top tip here is simple tricks work. That post-it note on your fridge that says “remember extra treats won’t actually make you feel better in an hour” might work. A note on your desk that says “remember, if the first thing you do is check your emails, you won’t make a start on your actual priorities” could help.

Replace Judgement with Curiosity

Try not to avoid feeling the shame of failure. Rather, when you are feeling ashamed of yourself change the language that you are using to talk to yourself about your lapses. When you find yourself avoiding the gym using sentences to berate yourself, or catch yourself saying “you are useless – how hard can it be to resist a piece of cake?” the change will get harder. Instead, deliberately use what I call “Curious and Interesting” questions – “Ok, so it’s interesting that I’ve avoided the gym tonight. Has today has been particularly stressful?”  Or “OK so I feel a bit rubbish about myself for eating that cake but if I took the time to be curious instead what would I notice about today – has it been particularly tiring or upsetting? What was my best lie?”

Expect to Fail

The drop in self-esteem from the “failure” makes us feel worse and means we are even more likely to resort to the cake-tin and the corkscrew for comfort. I help my clients to understand that failure is totally normal and something to learn from and build upon, rather than use as a sign that you will never succeed

There is a psychology study I love to quote because it is memorably about radishes and biscuits. Volunteers were sent into a room. Some were told to resist the biscuits and just eat radishes. A second group were told to eat whichever they wanted. They then tackled a puzzle afterwards. Those who hadn’t had to spend mental energy resisting the biscuits, persevered for twice as long as those poor souls who had been on the radishes…Resistance is hard work.

Remember, resisting something or doing something new takes conscious brain energy. Because we only have a finite amount of conscious energy, if we are using that energy to make decisions in the day job and resist the biscuits, we will get pretty tired. Make decisions – your day job!

It’s not weak to find you don’t seem to have the energy to resist the biscuits after a busy day, it’s inevitable that you find it hard. You simply don’t have the resources to resist.

Your brain will want to use that as an excuse/lie of course – “Come on, there’s no point in going the gym, you’re shattered”, but a quick rest of your mental resources can work wonders. Allow your brain to recharge. Stop thinking for a minute. Shut your eyes, use a calm app but otherwise don’t look at your phone or just take a walk outside. You will be amazed at what 3 minutes of not thinking can do.

Failure doesn’t have to mean that the effort is wasted – quite the contrary. Using the Curious and Interesting test about what caused you to fail on that particular occasion can be enlightening and game changing. Imagine finding through your thinking that you fail most spectacularly when you have had 6 hours rather than 7 hours sleep the night before. Maybe you will find you are working on fixing the wrong habit?

Practise Matters

Imagine that the part of your brain that deals with change is like a muscle – psychologists sometimes refer to it as the moral muscle. There is a great study that showed that where people used conscious energy to make a small everyday change that this strengthens this moral muscle. If you imagine your brain being like a real muscle it helps. Doing a particular exercise every day without fail will strengthen the relevant muscle you are working on. You wouldn’t consider exercising that muscle just twice a week as wasted energy. You would expect it to have some effect – just maybe not as impactful as quickly.

Scientists think that the important thing about changing habits is to keep trying. Forgetting is normal – you are battling your own established brain circuitry after all! But remembering to remember and persisting with thinking about your thinking, particularly when you fail, does work. It’s just hard work and your brain would rather give up.

Expect More Failure When You Feel Tired or Unloved…

Another study asked two groups of people to work at a task for a full day. One group had work that involved a lot of mental stimulation. Another group had a simple repetitive task. In the evening the researchers put them in front of a TV screen with a still picture and waited to see who would turn off the TV first. In every case it was the people that had done the simple work that acted first. They simply had more mental reserves left to go “this is boring”. Those whose brains had worked hard were slower.

A different group of researchers also found that when we feel socially excluded we are also more likely to reach for our cake/biscuits/wine. Dropping going for an after work pint or a calorie loaded coffee with a friend might sounds like a practical solution to cutting out wine or cake but actually may not help you as much as you think. Finding other ways to stay connected with your friends and work colleagues will be important.

Remembering that your brain is going to have a field day with it’s lies and make it much harder work for you to stick to a resolution if you have a day at work or home that makes you feel a bit bruised and unloved, can help. So be hyper-alert and appreciate you might have to work really hard to get to the gym or resist the wine in the fridge after a bad day.

Plan for the Long Haul

You might have heard that “it takes a month to make a new habit” but unfortunately recent research says it takes most of us a lot longer. The “month myth” did come from a doctor – a book called ‘Psycho-cybernetics’ written in the 60s by Dr Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon turned psychologist who noticed that after plastic surgery it took about 21 days for the average patient to get used to his new face or lose “phantom limb” syndrome after an amputation. Unfortunately, Malz looked for correlations with other habits that don’t stand up to modern scientific scrutiny.

Our YouGov findings echoed a previous study that UCL did in 2010. To succeed you will have to persist with a new habit for on average 66 days (or until about March 6 for those who are doing a New Year Resolution) before you have created a neural pathway strong enough to withstand your excuses/lies and allow your unconscious to take over the task. Most of the people in our study who kept going with a change for over 3 months also made it to the full year.

It is worth planning for feeling more tired than usual for probably 3 months when you make a change – even if you are “just” resisting cake or trying to remember not to bite your nails. The UCL average also contains some depressing news for some people – for one person it took 254 days of persistence. Given that willpower to resist is very energy sapping, this poor person must have been physically and mentally exhausted by the effort. You might decide that the thing you want to achieve is simply not worth 3 months hard work. If so, be honest with yourself about that now. Certainly, having a long list of resolutions or things you want to change about yourself is not likely to succeed if you tackle them all at once. With my clients we take time to find the most important things to work on and then tackle them one at a time. Maximum two at a time if the two are closely intertwined with each other.

Help Yourself and Others

You might well be exception to the rule – the UCL average of 66 days to break a habit, had one person succeed in just 18 days. However, imagine the lucky 18 day person saying to the 254 day person, “Come on mate, it’s easy. Just do it. If I can you can. It’s a simple case of mind over matter” etc.

Comments like that are likely to be well intentioned, but make it even harder for the person to succeed. So sometimes it’s no surprise that well-meaning advice from our super-fit, successful friends can be more a hinderance than a help! Be specific with your friends and family about what they can do to be helpful. Maybe share the science and give them permission to help you spot your lies. Be clear that jokes about you “eating all the pies” definitely won’t help. The right sort of support works wonders. Feeling like a failure or an “outcast” in comparison to your colleagues or friends does the opposite. It makes breaking the habit even harder given the science we have talked about above. 

Be Specific

Scientist have found that you have much more chance of changing something if you use something called Implementation Intentions. Telling yourself not just “I am going to do more exercise” probably won’t cut the mustard. However, telling yourself “I am going to do more exercise by taking a spin class on a Tuesday and going for a 2 hour walk on a Sunday” works much better. A simple trick, but hey, given this is such hard work, why wouldn’t we grab some simple things that research shows does make a difference?!

Make Brain Patterns Work For You

Something called ‘context-dependent repetition’ can really help you to have more good days than bad days whilst you are waiting for your unconscious brain to kick in. Let’s take a work example. Say you decided that you want to spend less time on emails. First, take the advice about being specific from above – “I want to reduce the time I spend on email so I am going to resist looking at email before I have written down my priority for the day”. The next step is to give that specific action some context and to make it dependent on something else. So, each time you close your laptop at night, put a plain post it on the screen. When you open up your laptop the next morning, you will need to get the post-it out of your way. You can do this by writing down a single achievement that you want for yourself that day first and sticking it up next to you.

Doing this means that when you first open your laptop and write on your post it, a mental link is formed between the context (opening your laptop) and your response to that context (writing your post-it). Each time you do a post-it in response to opening your laptop, this mental link gets stronger. When you open your laptop and this prompts you to think about your objective for the day automatically without giving it much thought, a habit has formed. You have simply replaced the habit you probably have now (opening up your laptop and opening email first) with another habit, opening up the laptop and creating your priority for the day.

I trialled content dependent repetition after a recommendation from a coach I know who works all over the world with senior executives – helping them to stay healthy and resilient. I used his recommendations for a couple of simple things – to drink more water and take more exercise. At night I would place a pint of water by my bed and choose an uplifting song for the next morning. When I awoke I would drink the pint of water, click play on my phone and get straight down on the bedroom floor to exercise for the length of my chosen track. More often, I carried on for 2 tracks. Those 4-6 minutes of exercise a day adds up usually to about 25 minutes a week. It’s not as much as I would like but what I was finding was that even that 25 minutes was at risk if I was looking for a “window” in which to do it all at once (“I’ll do it on Sunday…” was my usual lie) What I have learnt though, thinking about my thinking, is that if I start to potter downstairs for a cuppa, that exercise never happens. I have to do it before my clever brains starts making excuses – so just as I wake up and am a bit bleary is perfect!

What’s In It for You

Our brain likes habits because they are mentally efficient It can be helpful to think about what fantastic use you could put your “spare” energy to if you just created a new habit (say defining your daily objective) and removed  a bad habit (wasting hours recycling email) . One way to start to invest your time wisely and to start to use your energy better is to notice you are doing your bad habit, stop immediately and do something else instead, straight away – even if it is for just 1 minute.

This has really worked for me. I wrote sections of my first book and learnt to play the guitar by doing 5 minutes of writing or 1 minute of chord practise as a distraction activity for 2 particularly bad habits – biting my nails and over-dwelling on a particular frustration in my life that was out of my control. The writing was relatively easy. I’d do a paragraph on my phone if that is all I had to hand. In the case of the guitar, I got a stand and put the guitar by my kitchen table where I spent most of my working life as well as my home life. When I noticed myself doing one or the other, I would pick up the guitar for 5 minutes, thus breaking my thought pattern for a moment. Remember we can’t multi-task so doing something you aren’t good at immediately takes your full attention.

Think About Your Thinking

I’ve left the big one until last. If you are still reading, stay with me. This could change your life. There is a fantastic book called Immunity to Change by Harvard Professor Robert Keegan and Harvard Director Lisa Laskow that I recommend to clients all the time.

Keegan and Laskow write with experience and knowledge about how our brains are actually immune to change. How our very wiring and nature sabotages even those who are most enthusiastic and motivated about making changes.

In a nutshell they talk about the difference between technical changes and mindset changes. Technical changes are relatively easy to make. So, let’s assume for a moment that you didn’t know much about the research into calorie intake and intermittent fasting, or the life-threatening dangers of not getting enough sleep. It might be that finding out that a change is needed might be all it takes to get you to think about your eating patterns or turn off your screen at night. This would be a technical change. For me, as it turns out, some of the exercises that I was spending time on were not that efficient. A great personal trainer later (thank you Hedge Haigh) and bingo, I’ve made a technical change which has meant I spend less time on muscle based exercises, have indulged horribly over Christmas but am starting the New Year without a muffin top. Don’t diss technical changes. They can be brilliant.

However, for most of us, the persistent things we have tried to change are harder. This is often because it involves mindset change, rather than technical or structural change. It requires us to think about what we really really want, to quote the Spice Girls. This is because sometimes the change that we want to make, that on the face of it seems really simple, is not that simple at all. Sometimes a different priority that we have, another thing that is important to us, is in direct competition with the thing we want to change. If we are not aware of these competing priorities we might not realise that some of the things we are trying to achieve are bound to fail, because they are a direct contradiction to something else that we hold dear.

A practical example can work best here. Try drawing 4 columns on a piece of paper. Keegan and Laskow call this an “Immunity Map” – and it’s available free on the web.

Title the first column “New Behaviour (they call it “Visible Commitment”). In that column, write down the new behaviour that you want to create. Let’s assume it is “Drink less Alcohol” for our purposes.

Title the second column “Doing/Not doing Instead” and under that heading, list all of the things that you are doing instead of that behaviour that you want to change. So, in our case that might be “over-indulging at weekends with friends” and “always having wine with dinner” and “reaching for a G&T after a hard day to wind down”

Now for the tricky third column. Keegan and Laskow call this “Hidden Competing Commitments”. Have a look at each line in column 2 and have a think about what things you like about yourself or things that are important to you that those habits in column 2 are actually supporting. So, for example you might realise that your “over-indulging at weekends” from column 2 is because you are “love being the life and soul of the party” or are committed to “Having a reputation for being able to take my drink and be the last man standing”. You might realise that “always having wine with dinner” is actually supporting something really important to you such as “Making evening meals a real event with my partner or friends”. You might think long and hard a realise that “reaching for a G&T after a hard day to wind down” is connected to “Rewarding myself after a long day” or “Living every day as it it is my last”.

Once you start to think about your thinking, you start to realise that you have next to no chance of achieving the things in column 1, because you have some competing priorities that require column 2 in order to survive. Or at least that is what you tell yourself. Onto hard-thinking column 4. What big assumptions are you making? Our brains love an either/or. The either/or is simple. So a big assumption you might be making is “I can’t be the life and soul of the party if I am sober” or “meals don’t feel like an event without wine” or “If I can’t reward myself after a long day with a G&T then what is the world coming to…” The problem with these assumptions is that we don’t test them. What your brain is less good at is answering this brilliant question “What would you do if it didn’t have to be either/or and you could have both.”

So, as we have often come across in this chapter. Where there is a brain glitch, there is also an opportunity to use it to your advantage. Instead of allowing those big assumptions to live on and squash any chance you have of drinking or eating less or getting the job of your dreams, thinking about your thinking can work. You can have both. Sometimes just knowing these assumptions are there can help because they make you realise that some of your “doing instead” from column 2 are choices, not necessities. I recommend people experiment. Pick a party and have just 3 drinks to prove to yourself what could be possible. Book a massage for an evening where you know in advance you have a tough day to get through. Get in from that hard day and do 5 minutes dancing and singing in the kitchen to your favourite song – then see if you still need the G&T to feel good.

To download both the article and workbook , visit our bonus material section:

Immunity to Change: Robert Keegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

A Mind of It’s Own: Cordelia Fine

Research on Time taken to Break Habits: (Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts, & Wardle, UCL. 2010