We’ve all experienced trying to start a new routine, only to be derailed by old habits. Habits can be both a powerful tool for starting new behaviours as well as a limiting behaviour that holds us back. And no one knows that better than Dr Gina Cleo
As a trained dietitian, Gina noticed that her clients struggled to maintain their progress over time, much like those elusive New Year’s resolutions.
Driven by the desire to find lasting solutions, Dr. Gina Cleo pressed pause on her clinic and completed a Ph.D. at Bond University. It was there that she uncovered the transformative power of habit change and its potential to impact every facet of life.
Now, Dr. Gina Cleo specialises in guiding people to transform their habits, whether it’s for their health, technology usage, sleep routines, work and money-related behaviours, or relationship dynamics.
In this episode Gina shares:
- Why she got into the habit change space
- What exactly is a habit?
- Why do we form habits?
- The 3 stages of the habit formation framework
- How is a habit triggered in a person
- What is the process of forming a habit
- How do we as people form habits
- Popular myths around forming habits and whether or not they are true
Key Quotes
“A lot of people have heard it takes 21 days to create a new habit. The research is actually that it is from 21 days and it can take up to a year or 10 months to create a new habit.”
“The simpler the habit you are trying to create, the quicker its going to be to develop.”
“We don’t want our goals to look anything like our shopping list.”
“Every habit has a trigger. If we remove the trigger then the habit no longer takes place.”
Episode Resources
More about Gina
Website: https://www.drginacleo.com/
Free Habit Course: https://habitchangeinstitute.mykajabi.com/masterclass
Book: https://www.drginacleo.com/book
IG: https://www.instagram.com/drginacleo/
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/?hl=en
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
Jess 0:01
Welcome to another episode of stay at the top today I am joined by Dr. Gina Cleo, who is one of the world’s leading experts in habits and is passionate about translating scientific evidence into simple, actionable strategies to improve health, wellness mindset and lifestyle related habit for good. Gina has a PhD in habit change is an adjunct professor at Bond University and is also an accredited dietitian Gina has also recently released her first book the habit revolution, which is an absolute must for all of you. In today’s conversation, we dive deep on what is a habit? Why do we form habits How is a habit triggered? What is the process of forming a habit how do we break old habits, we bust some myths around how long it actually takes to form a habit and how many habits you can form at the one time. It’s packed full of tactical, practical, actionable, evidence based scientific strategies that you can walk away and implement with ease. I can’t wait for you to listen to today’s episode Jean are welcome to stay at the top.
Gina Cleo 1:17
Ah so good Jess, so good to be here. Thanks for that intro.
Jess 1:20
You know, we’ve known each other for a few years now first connecting on the previous podcast and then spending quite a bit of time together at PwC is the outside and you know your superpower I believe is science and expertise blended with just good vibes positivity real world application and you know for me that’s what stay at the top is about it’s about sustained success, enhance longevity, but how do we actually put it into practice to get results now and also consider future us as well?
Gina Cleo 1:54
Oh, thanks, Jess. That means so much and I’ve been very intentional about being practical with my work because I’ve been to so many like medical conferences around the world where you know, they present all this awesome research and the latest science. And I’ve walked away going, Oh, that’s amazing, but what do I do with it? And it was so frustrating. So I remember a few years ago, just setting this mission to myself that every time someone read something that I’ve written or heard something I’ve said I want it to be applicable and like have meaningful change in someone’s life. I love that
Jess 2:29
and you know, you’re definitely doing that. And the book I know is the next step for you to really get that message out there. But before we get into, I guess the book and habits and what is a habit and all of that goodness. What sparked your interest in diving deep in this topic?
Gina Cleo 2:48
You know, I stumbled into the habit space. Like you said I was a dietician and I was able to help people only short term I personally found in the work that I was doing, and I found that people were just coming back wanting to work on the same things I’d already worked on before and I started calling them frequent fliers, and I just thought I was a terrible dietician. But then when I looked at the research around sustainable change, I found that it wasn’t just me, you know, 97% of our New Year’s resolutions forgotten by the end of January. Most our goals are not achieved or at least not maintained if we want to maintain them long term. I also was struggling with my own I guess disordered eating you could say or just like unhealthy patterns that I found. I couldn’t just talk my way out of changing it’s like I would say to myself, I’m not going to do that and then I would do the exact same thing I just told myself I wouldn’t do so I was frustrated with myself as well. So I had questions and I wanted answered I had frustrations that I wanted to fix or find solutions for which is what led me to doing a bit of research initially in this, like neuroscience psychology, understanding what motivates us to do what we do and then you know, fell into my PhD into all things habit change. Amazing
Jess 4:07
and, you know, that is exactly the work that health professionals do at the crux of its behavior change. And I find definitely and resonate with what you just said it’s not always the disconnect in the knowing it’s in the doing and not only in the doing but then rinse and repeating and ultimately embedding something that then becomes autopilot. It’s not something you force, it’s something that you just do. Yeah, and I guess with that in terms of if we were to actually I guess start at the start and define what is a habit? How can we summarize that really succinctly?
Gina Cleo 4:48
We often use the words habits, behaviors, routines, rituals interchangeably, but they’re actually all very different things. A habit is a triggered behavior or action that has become it’s part of your memory and it’s a learned behavior. So your brains associated some sort of trigger in your external or internal environment with a behavior. And so every time you encounter this trigger, your brain is like, Oh, I know what happens next, and it automatically does the behavior which is the habit. So habits are essentially automatic behaviors that we do subconsciously mindlessly and they’re there because we’ve repeated them consistently over time. And our brain has moved them from our prefrontal cortex, which is that logical thinking brain into back into the sort of the midbrain, which is where our word is such a weird word. It’s a basal ganglia. That’s where our habits are, and it’s essentially the autopilot system of our brain.
Jess 5:47
Amazing and the key word you just use there is that autopilot, and I know that is something and not a lot of people. I don’t think that they’re aiming for that. I think when people have kickstarting a goal or a New Year’s resolution, and then not necessarily thinking about how can I create something which becomes what I do, and I just put it on autopilot. I don’t think that way. It’s
Gina Cleo 6:12
so true. And I find that when I had that mental switch of thinking, I don’t want to keep using motivation or willpower. I don’t want to use self control because it’s fleeting, it’s up and down. It’s unreliable. I want to just be one of those people that just gets up and works out or has a good breakfast and not have to grind through it. When I had that mental shift and that’s when everything changed in terms of what goals I set, how I set them how I went about trying to achieve them. And honestly, like, I think the greatest gift I could give someone is the freedom of living a life filled with healthy habits. Because it’s easy, it’s seamless, it becomes not just feel like it becomes your identity. And I think there’s a real the word I keep coming to with it is freedom and it’s really nice to not have to you know, use up all your cognitive resources to do things that just you want to put on autopilot.
Jess 7:08
100% And you know, I know what in your book you talk about, there are five main factors or five key triggers that help us form a habit. Maybe that’s whether it’s a good or a bad which we’ll dive into, but can you take us through what they are? Yeah,
Gina Cleo 7:24
so every single habit we have is triggered by something. So that’s going to the five habit triggers that either internal or external. They are time location, what you’ve just done beforehand, so that preceding action or event, how you’re feeling emotionally and the people that you’re around, so time is probably one of the most common habit triggers. So it could be like 7am I go for a walk or 12pm or midday I have lunch. And we’ll notice these these patterns happen when for example, it’s midday and you’re eating lunch even though you’re not necessarily hungry. The other one is location. So location could be when I’m sitting on my couch, I want to have a snack or when I get into bed at night, I want to scroll on my phone. So that’s going to be your location triggers. The next one is proceeding event or action. So when we think about habits, we often think of them as just isolated things that we do like we exercise or we drink a glass of wine at the end of the day or we check our emails first thing in the morning. But actually our habits form in a web and one habit feeds off another and it creates sort of a cascade of habits which is essentially becomes our routine so preceding event is what you’ve just done beforehand will trigger the next thing that you do. So take like making a cup of some coffee. Say you’re making a coffee, the sequence in which you make a coffee is very habitual and every single one of those steps is triggering the next step. So turning on the coffee machine might trigger you to grab a mug grabbing a mug might trigger you to do the next thing and it’s there’s a flow on effect. There’s also bigger like if you took a step back it could also be you know when I have my breakfast, I will feed my dog so it could be a preceding event that way. The fourth habit trigger is your emotional state. So how you’re feeling emotionally it could be like emotional eating, for example. It could also be when I feel lonely I scroll on my phone or when I feel sad I eat a tub of ice cream. So those are our emotions. Could also be happy emotions. And then finally your social situation, the people that you’re around form part of your environment. Sometimes we will do things around certain people that we wouldn’t do around others, whether it’s drinking more smoking, swearing, you know, staying at work later, or whatever it is a social environment essentially dictates the social acceptability and the culture that we’re in. And that can trigger parts of our habits as well.
Jess 10:04
That’s really interesting and I mean out of curiosity is any one of those more influential in general, or is it just really circumstantial, really individual as to the person and it’s just understanding that there are those five, I guess, main buckets of triggers for people? Yeah,
Gina Cleo 10:23
it’s very individualized. Having said that, as well, you know, it’s going to have the most impact on your life, the more you encounter it. So although social situation may be something that triggers significant habits for you, or big habits for you, you might not encounter it as often as the time of day which happens everyday consistently. Or, you know, the place you’re in say it’s your bedroom or your kitchen or your front door. That’s going to happen every day of the week. So that’s going to have a bigger impact on your life than the social situation. And
Jess 10:55
I guess if we come into wanting to form a new habit, I know in the book you reference I love a framework. I love a protocol I love and a framework as make it succeed a few steps. And I know you’ve got a lot of great steps and frameworks in there, but one of them is around the habit formation framework. So tell us about that. So
Gina Cleo 11:19
if you think of every habit that we’re trying to create, break it down into three steps. And it’s really nice to have this in mind. Because I think when we think of, you know, wanting to create a habit, we sort of want to wake up the next day and have the habit already embedded in our life. I mean, I certainly do. Yes, yesterday, thank you very much. But when we understand there’s a framework we can place ourselves in where we’re at in the framework and know that you know, the next sequence is coming and it’s really just with consistency, we’ll get there. So the three, I guess stages of the habit formation framework, initiation, training, and then maintenance, that initiations when we’re starting the habit, this is the most uncomfortable stage because our brains like oh, this is change. It takes energy and effort and time for me to do something different. I’m very comfortable in my routines. I’m already making like 35,000 decisions a day. I don’t want to make more decisions to do things differently. So initiation is uncomfortable, and we’ve all felt it. It’s that thing where we say that we’re going to do a goal and we haven’t done it before. Or say you’re playing a new instrument or learning a new language or a new skill. We’re clumsy, it’s clunky it sounds terrible. It feels weird, and our body’s not in the rhythm of it. That’s initiation, because we are so comfortable in our routines. Even if our routines aren’t serving us, they still give us that comfort of those rhythms that we have in our life. Initiation is all about you know, planning when and where you’re going to do your habit, actually taking action towards that habit. It’s that first step of making change. Then we move into training, training is all it’s sort of like the messy middle, it’s the body of creating a habit. And that’s the part where you’re turning your habit into something that starts to be part of your lifestyle. It’s more automatic, it’s starting to feel natural. This is the part that is all about consistency, repetition, keep on keeping on this is the training part. And then finally, maintenance. The best part is when you have it really starts to feel like second nature, it becomes part of your life. And you’re now using more your sort of your impulsive brain or that emotional basal ganglia rather than your reflective brain or your prefrontal cortex to get the habit done. So you don’t even need to have a goal to do it anymore. Your brains like this is just what I do. It’s a habit like putting on your seatbelt in the car. That is the maintenance stage of the habit formation framework.
Jess 13:56
That is the goal that is just what we want living our best life with ease and that literally means I’ve got all of these habits that are serving me that I have implemented, but so many people we want it yesterday and also you know if we think of it as a traffic light system, it’s people’s perceive these habit formations or whatever behavior they’re trying to change is red or green. I’m not doing it around. I’m I’m 100% doing it. And what you’ve just explained there is there are steps and there’s a process there’s three steps. And I can imagine depending on the significance of the habit change, maybe the number of micro steps involved the time that it takes, which I know would come up a lot for you and I’ve heard you busting meats on this. Talk to us about a realistic timeframe of creating a new habit and breaking an old habit and does that differ it
Gina Cleo 14:54
definitely differs a lot. So a lot of people have heard that it takes 21 days to create a new habit. And this is a myth. I love fasting because there is no evidence at all to show that it takes 21 days the research is actually it’s from 21 days, and it can take up to a year or 10 months to create a new habit. It’s a huge range. There’s an average time of sort of roughly 10 weeks or 66 days. There’s a very brand new research that’s come out recently that actually showed that people who asked to like wash their hands took about two weeks to develop that habit. And people who were asked to do something a bit more complex, which was getting to the gym took anywhere between four to seven months to create that habit. And when you think about it exactly spot on what you said yes, there are more micro steps to getting to the gym. You need much more motivation. You need more time. You need more resources. You need so much more to get to the gym compared with washing your hands. So of course it’s going to take much longer to develop to that state of maintenance where it’s automatic, it’s natural as part of your life. The lesson here is really the simpler the habit that you’re trying to create, the quicker it’s going to be to develop. And we only really need to start the development of a habit. We don’t have to make the whole thing habitual. I always say to people, you don’t have to create an exercise habit. You just need to create a habit of getting to the gym, literally of putting on your active way of getting in the car and getting to the gym. Once you’re there. The rest is going to flow. You don’t have to do the whole thing habitually. Now how long it takes to break a habit. It’s really hard to get the evidence around this because, again, so many factors contribute to it. The biggest factor is how much you want to break the habit. I’ve worked with people who have broken their habits overnight, like nail biting habits, for example, because they really wanted to break it, they were ready to break it. And it meant more to them to break the habit than the indulgence of maintaining that habit. And I’ve worked with other people who have taken weeks to break their habits because they were sort of ambivalent about it at the time and like Oh, I like I want to but I also really love doing this so I’m just not sure. So the time it takes a break a habit is going to be up to you. That’s so
Jess 17:14
interesting, Gina and I think you know, with all of these self awareness and having a realistic approach and even just knowing if I’m forming a habit, give myself 10 weeks, you know, give myself a quarter a season of the year like it’s we need to be patient and if depending on the complexity, we need to break it down and I know for a lot of my clients when it is wanting to move more regularly, having those shoes or that you know the gym gear out in the morning is often that first micro step that they just need to do. And once they’ve done that, the rest kind of rolls on and there is that momentum. Absolutely.
Gina Cleo 17:54
And you know, there’s actually research that shows that if we expect our habits to develop in 21 days and they don’t, we end up throwing in the towel and giving up. But if we expect our habits to take that bit longer, then we’re going to persevere because we know that with every repetition. The habit is getting stronger and stronger and stronger and eventually it will feel like second nature. But we’re not there yet and we’re not meant to be there yet. You know, the brain isn’t like you can’t just switch a button if only and you know doesn’t make it happen. So I think I love that you say that. You know I think it’s really important to be sober to the idea that it will likely take a few more weeks for 21 days and just keep on keeping on with it. And
Jess 18:36
what about in terms of you know, and this question probably comes from seeing so many people doing 75 hard on social media at the moment which is quite an intensive you know personal development. For those unaware it involves eating a certain way moving said a number of times a day reading some some pages of a personal development book and a few other things but with that it’s if you miss a day you start again and you see you’ve got to do it 75 days in a row. 75 days in a row. Yeah, no rest day. No rest days. Yeah, it’s brutal. I know there’s a lot we could unpack there in terms of what it’s even asking of the body. But I guess the philosophy was that is trying to just set the standard created. Don’t miss a day keep going. But in reality, that approach isn’t going to work for a lot of people. And I think that I think that approach can be disheartening. If people think if I skip something, then I’m back to square one which talk to us about the science or the research around that on what a more realistic approach to creating a habit can be.
Gina Cleo 19:42
I feel like something like this works really well for people who are all or nothing but that’s also not an approach we’re trying to encourage Because changing any sort of behavior is going to be a process of two steps forward one step back. You know, I heard Brene Brown say once, and I sort of challenged it at the time, but she said it’s not a matter of if you fall it’s a matter of when you fall and I was like Congo you don’t know me like I’m not gonna do that. But no, she’s right. And every single process of change means we’re either going to forget our habit one day, we’re going to have a crappy night’s sleep and we’re going to, you know, fall back a little bit or we’re going to have a stressful period of work or the kids are going to get sick like life happens. And I think actually allowing that grace to go okay, I can’t do that today. Instead of my 30 minute walk. I can do a five minute walk or I can just put my activewear on a walk around the house or clean a window or whatever it is. It’s still moving. That process is that self compassion is actually where the greatest transformations happen. It’s allowing ourselves the space to fall down to not be rigid with our goals. And actually, a recent study that I was reading was showing that there so there’s two groups of people one group they asked to do like this gym workout at a specific time of day for an X number of minutes a day. And then the other group, they encourage them to go to the gym for the same number of times every week, but they were like you can go anytime you want to. And you get to pick whatever days you go. And what they found is the people that were in that rigid group, that first group stopped going to the gym once the study had finished compared to the people that were more flexible in their plan. They continue to go because they were able to create this gym habit around their lifestyle. They were able to make it work. It didn’t have to be at a specific time or specific day. And there’s such a huge lesson in that and the habits that we’re trying to create have to fit into our lifestyle and they have to be sustainable and I don’t know I just think taking breaks is also important. Mix things up and do things differently. 100%
Jess 21:53
the people that hold on all the time trying to be your robot is going to result in crashing and burning sooner or later and how you just described or what the study has shown something I often talk about is you know find your non negotiables be consistent, but find a way to be consistent in the inconsistency, meaning, life and days and never the same particularly in 2024 Some people are in the office, some people are at home. Some people travel for work, there’s just variables upon variables. So having a mindset and an approach, which is this is the box that I operate and live in isn’t going to serve for these these outliers or they’re not even outliers. They’re just life now. So that really sounds like that approach of let’s work on your non negotiables. Let’s work out what’s important. Let’s create that habit. But let’s find a way to integrate it into our lives, which is actually what being a high performer is all about.
Gina Cleo 22:56
Yeah, completely. And look if someone wants to do the 75 Day Challenge and you’re not necessarily wanting to make those things habitual, like you’re happy just to do the challenge to push yourself to do it with some mates and you know that you may just fall off the wagon afterwards. Do it like that’s fine. Just don’t expect it to be your lifestyle at the end.
Jess 23:18
100% and even. I haven’t done a post on this yet because I feel it’s a little bit controversial because there’s some people that you know that they’re passionate about it but I often think if social media was an athlete, and would anyone even be subscribing to something as intensive as that,
Gina Cleo 23:35
that’s a juicy question I want you to I think he should do that. Post I love controversial.
Speaker 3 23:42
I get the courage up and do that. Do it.
Jess 23:45
We’ve talked a lot about forming a habit which I love them all about the positive and what we want to achieve, but let’s spend some time talking about habits we may want to want to break and some tips or some strategies that we can have. You have a framework so that and similarly. Is it a matter of history? One habit we’re trying to change at a time or can we look at a few do we have capacity to handle that?
Gina Cleo 24:11
So our brain is capable of only making up to three changes at one time. So we don’t want our goals are the things we want to create or break to look anything like our shopping list, it needs to be up to three. And actually if we just work on one thing at a time, we’re much more likely to achieve it than if we do more. So just work on one habit that you want to break really focus all your energy your love your attention on that. And once that starts to leave your life then you can work on something else that’s going to be much more effective and much more enjoyable because breaking habits, although is totally possible, takes effort. It’s not the most like pleasant time and I think this is why habits, I think is a sexy topic. But you know, there’s not a lot of have. There’s only two habit researchers in Australia. And it’s because I think I can’t promise you that you’re going to change your life overnight or lose 10 kilograms in the first week like a lot of the fads do but with breaking habits, there are two proven methods that we can do that and I call them reprogramming or restructuring. So if you think of every habit has a habit loop, and that is the trigger that we talked about before. Then there’s the habit itself and then there’s some kind of reward that you get from your habit. It could be a hit of dopamine, it could just be comfort in the routine, doing something that’s familiar. So every habit gives us a reward. With the RE programming it’s all about replacing not erasing. It’s pointless saying I’m just not going to do that. anymore. It doesn’t work at brains don’t like it. We have this slight rebellious teenager inside us. He’s like, Oh, yes, I am gonna do that again. So we want to replace that unwanted habit with something else it could be when I get in bed instead of scrolling on my phone. I’m going to pick up a book. Now to do that. You don’t want to have your phone sitting next to your bed and be like that phone is dead to me. I’m not going to pick it up because it’s gonna like there is a lot more dopamine you know it’s there. Yeah, you know, it’s there’s a lot more dopamine you’re gonna get from your phone, and the colors or sounds or vibrations or comments or likes than you are from this black and white book. There’s no match. So you want to put your phone where you can’t reach it and have your book. Now you’re reflexively going to go and grab your phone and when it’s not there. You’ve just got that book there. So that’s about reprogramming a new habit in place. Of your old habit. The second method is restructuring. And this is all about restructuring environment. So every habit starts with a trigger. If we remove the trigger, then the habit no longer takes place because without triggers, we don’t have habits. Restructuring is all about looking at the things that trigger unwanted habits and if we can eliminate them, eliminate them. So the story that I share in the book was, I think it was from a client that I called Sam, who had a habit of going through like the drive thru, and he would go through the drive thru every time like every day on his way home from work, he’d go to this fast food chain. And he would say to himself, I’m going to see the golden arches and I’m going to just drive straight past and it wouldn’t happen like he would just go straight in. So I asked him if he could just drive a different way home and it only took him an extra minute or two to do that. And he did that and he broke the habit instantly because he was no longer triggered by the golden arches. Now, it takes 30 days of abstinence from something that we feel addicted to, for our brain to I guess reduce the amount of reward we get from it. So after 30 days, I was like Sam you can go back to driving the way that you were before and you know, you’re not going to try to have 30 Big Macs like to make up for the time that you haven’t been eating. And that’s exactly what happened. So restructuring is removed the trigger for whatever the habit is that you don’t want to be doing anymore if possible.
Jess 28:11
Yeah, fantastic. And you know, I think with all of this well first of all, everybody go and buy the book and get the audio book and you know, I have it here in front of me and yeah, I just love that. It’s perfectly represents you and everything I said at the start it’s evidence based. It’s science based, it’s best practice, but they’re relatively short chapters. Some are longer than others. It tells people what they need to know. But it gives great examples. There’s some really great exercises and graphics in there. And at the end of each section, there’s a summary you know, and there’s also a summary often an activity so it’s an opportunity to read it, digest it, have some key takeaways and put it into practice. And it’s not a scary giant, like overly scientific book which it blends. As I said, for me, it blends the balance of the science, the evidence, it does justice to like your work and your research, but it considers human beings and actually the most important thing is is walking away and doing the thing and having a roadmap to do that.
Gina Cleo 29:24
Thanks. Cheers. That means so much. All right, teaming better get your hands on the habit revolution. It really is. It’s my life’s work that I’ve put into it and I’ve put so much love and heart and vulnerability in the book. You know, I’ve shared my own stories in it my own struggles, my triumphs, and then stories from hundreds of people that I’ve worked with over the years. And of course, distilling all the very complex neuroscience out there into that digestible practical language so that we can apply it and truly you know, really change our lives in a very meaningful way. So Thanks, Jess. I appreciate it.