Oh hello, welcome to healthy Ish and a happy new year. Thank you for joining us on the podcast from Body and Soul. I am your host, Felicity Halle. Yes, the healthy Ish team is ooo out of office. So to celebrate the new year, we're dropping our top Healthish episodes from last year. Now, this one we did drop a long time ago, well, the beginning of last year. And here's the scenario. You've got two people, same health goal,
so why does one hit it and the other doesn't? Well, joining me was doctor Amantha Imba to tell us why. The organizational psychologist, author and podcaster joined us from Melbourne now listening to our sister podcast Extra healthy Ish, where she talked about how to make health habits a little bit easier, perfect for this time of year. You can grab that one where we get your podcasts now the
perfect book to kickstart and year making habits stick. Before we get to that, talk us through how habits work, exactly what's going on with us in our brains.
Well, it's pretty simple.
I mean, a habit is simply where a behavior becomes automatic. But why it becomes automatic is the easiest way to think about it is.
There's some kind of a queue or a trigger in your environment.
Like let's just say you're in the middle of a workday, it's got to three o'clock and you're starting to feel that three o'clock slump of energy.
So that might be the trigger out for the habit for me.
Then there is the behavior, or is some people say, there's a craving for the behavior, and then the response to the craving, which might be reaching for.
The chocolate at three o'clock.
And the reason why that becomes a habit is because there's a reward for doing that behavior, and in the case of chocolate, the reward is about a twenty minute boost of energy, and then of course youre slump again. But we don't think about that when we're feeling really exhausted in the middle of the afternoon.
No, So, in terms of New Year health goals, you've got two different people. I mean, let's say me and you we've got the same health goal. Let's carry on with that great example of three pm reaching for the chocolate, which happens to be me, although I'm not chocolate and I'm more sugar. You know, you kind of get that deep, don't you. I want some sugar. We have this health goal that we want to achieve. Stop eating so much sugar at three pm. You achieve it. I don't what's going on here?
Well, this is the thing because there are a lot of books about.
Habit change and the kind of assume that there's this formula to change a habit. But what I discovered when I was doing my research for the health habit is that there are actually four different barriers that can get in the way of when we're trying to change a habit or form something new. And one of the things that happened to me when I was going through the Melbourne lockdown, which were I think. I think we took the prize for worst in the world.
We I think. So I had a.
Couple of friends and they were both trying to adopt a new healthy habit of walking walking for an hour a day. And you know that that seemed pretty realistic and achievable as a goal given that as Melbourne and we were allowed outside for one hour a day. I thinks, right, exactly, yes, but within our five k radius, So you know, achievable. And you know, both of my friends they started off strong, like in that first week they both walked for one
hour a day, every single day. But then in the second week they both began to encounter problems where their habit basically got broken. So, for one of my friends, what happened is that a major project hit at work and she had timed her walk for something that she did in the evening at about six or seven o'clock.
But what was happening in her life is that she was she was on Zoom meetings all day and then by the time six or seven o'clock was coming around, she was still working and trying to feed the family, and the walk just went by the wayside. Then I had another friend who was also doing this walk, and she had decided to do her walk in the morning.
But what happened with her is that in the second week, her partner was getting a bit aggravated at her because she would wake up early for her walk, but in the process of getting ready for the walk, she would also inadvertently wake.
Up her partners. Yes, yeah, so he got grumpy and the walks stopped. And you know, when you're locked down with someone, you kind of want to keep the peace.
So very like the same habit, but very different reasons as to why they stopped. One stopped really because of like complete exhaustion, and the other stopped because of the social relationships in her environment.
So what were the how did they then? How would they work with that and make it more okay? So that is obviously the barrier right to the habit. How do we overcome this? How do different barriers? How do we identify our barriers and then overcome it?
So firstly, it's a matter of identifying which of the four main barriers or habit hijackers as I refer to them, is going on.
So there are four types.
One is motivational, where we kind of feel like we should do something, but we don't want to do something, like we know it's good for us, but we're not really feeling that pull.
The second hijacker is relational.
How I described in that story, the partner of the person that was trying to form this habit, it just wasn't working well in the relationships in her life and that's why it inevitably stopped. Then there are environmental hijackers, where something in our environment is making it really hard to change a habit, Like if we're trying to eat less chocolate, for example, but our pantry is full of chocolatey.
Goodness or not goodness. In the case of chocolate, it's going to be hard.
And the fourth hijacker is cognitive hijackers, where we're just feeling so tired and exhausted it becomes really hard to have any mental reserves to have the energy to create a change. So we need to identify that hijacker. And then in the book, I talk about different habit heroes that you can apply depending on your specific barrier.
And really what it is is it's like changing a habit. It's not a one size fits all thing.
It's about identifying this is my barrier and so for therefore this is how I need to change it. So in the case of motivational, we need to make the habit desirable something that we want to do. In the case of relation or we need to make it social, you know, engage to people around us to.
Help us make that out of the bed and then okay, let's go together and walk.
That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah.
In the case of environmental things, we want toe our physical environment so that it's just natural to perform the habit. And in the case of cognitive barriers, like my friend that was overworked, we just need to make it easy to engage in that habit.
So do you have a habit that you're hoping to implement this year and how are you going to stick to it?
I do, I do.
So something I learned when I was researching the book is the importance of probiotics. And when we think of probiotics, we think of going to the chemist, and we think of that special exclusive fridge that sits behind the desk and getting some really expensive tablets that are apparently going to transform our gut But when I interviewed professor Tim Specter, who's at King's College London, he's amazing, so he's one
of the world's experts on gut health. And when I interviewed him, he said, eat your probiotics.
I thought, what is it? What does he mean like crush up the tablets and.
He said, no, fermented foods. If you can eat small amounts of fermented foods throughout your day, So this might be things like yogurt or kefer or fermented vegetables or kimchi, that is going to do wonders for your gut health. So for me, I don't have many of those things in my diet, but one of the things that I'm trying to do this year is to regularly have fermented foods in my diet. So that is a habit that I am trying to change.
Oh, good luck with that. Well, we'll check in perhaps in a couple of months and see how you're going me that. Thank you for coming on healthy Ish thgs. Amantha's new book is called The Health Habit and it is out now, perfect for January reading. If you did enjoy this chat, make sure you rate and review it or New Year's resolution. You must subscribe to this a podcast or share it with a friend. For more info, head to body and sooul dot com dot you follow
us on socials. Grab our print edition, which is out in your local Sunday paper and until tomorrowtay healthy Ish