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Starting a healthier routine can feel easy when motivation is high, but keeping it going alongside work, school runs, family commitments and everyday life is another story. New Australian research suggests struggling to make a habit stick is incredibly common, and habit change expert Dr Gina Cleo says the answer may have less to do with willpower than we think.
There’s a familiar cycle many of us fall into when we decide it’s time to make a healthier change.
We decide that from Monday we’re going to exercise every day, completely overhaul the family meals, cut out the afternoon treats, get everyone to bed earlier and somehow become a brand new household overnight.
And for a little while, motivation can carry us. Then work gets busy, the kids have activities, someone gets sick, dinner is late or it’s just a long tiring day, and suddenly the new routine starts to unravel.
But struggling to maintain a new behaviour is incredibly common. New research from Equal found that 62 per cent of Australians have stopped or given up on a health or wellbeing change earlier than intended. Including more than one in four who say it has happened several times.
For parents in particular, this is important to remember. Family life is rarely predictable, so a health goal that only works when everything goes perfectly is probably going to be difficult to maintain.
According to habit change and wellbeing expert Dr Gina Cleo, the finding challenges a common assumption about why our good intentions don’t always last.
“Australians aren’t simply lacking willpower; they’re mistiming their expectations and choosing all-or-nothing paths that were never built to last.
“The ones making it stick aren’t cutting things out, they’re making changes small enough to fit the routine they already have,” Dr Gina said.
For busy families, that idea is particularly useful. A healthier routine doesn’t necessarily need to involve changing everything at once. It may be more realistic to start with one existing part of the family’s day and make a small adjustment around it.
We may be doing more on autopilot than we realise
Some of our everyday choices also happen with surprisingly little conscious thought.
The report found 46 per cent of Australians agree they consume sugar without thinking, while 39 per cent say they can start consuming it before realising they are doing it.
For parents, the behaviour itself might be familiar: reaching for something sweet during the afternoon slump, automatically having a snack after dinner or adding sugar to the same tea or coffee every morning.
Dr Gina describes this as a habit loop.
“For many Australians, sugar is as much a habit-loop problem as a craving problem,” Dr Gina said.
“It’s a cue, like the 3pm slump, the after-dinner routine or the cup of tea. It triggers the behaviour automatically, before conscious decision-making even gets involved.
“You can’t ‘willpower’ your way out of a behaviour you’re not consciously choosing in the first place. The fix isn’t more restriction, it’s interrupting or redesigning the cue,” Dr Gina said.
So rather than immediately deciding a behaviour has to disappear altogether, the first step can simply be noticing when it tends to happen.
Small changes can be easier to accommodate
The research also points towards a preference for more manageable approaches to health changes.
According to Equal’s report, 51% of Australians say making small changes and cutting back is more successful for them than giving something up completely.
Dr Gina says changes that work within an existing lifestyle can be easier to maintain than trying to completely overhaul a routine.
“Small, incremental changes are far more resilient because they don’t rely on a single moment of perfect discipline; they get absorbed into a routine until they stop requiring conscious effort at all.
“All-or-nothing change is fragile, one bad day feels like total failure, so people quit,” Dr Gina said.
For families, that might mean choosing one area to focus on rather than announcing an entirely new household health regime.
The goal is to make the new behaviour easy enough that it can continue even when family life gets busy.
Dr Gina’s four tips for redirecting an everyday habit
Equal’s No Compromise report includes four practical strategies from Dr Gina for recognising and redirecting an automatic sugar habit.
1. Spot the cue
Pay attention to when reaching for something sweet becomes automatic, whether it’s the mid-afternoon slump, after dinner or alongside a regular tea or coffee.
2. Keep the ritual, change the response
Instead of cutting out a familiar routine altogether, change one part of it. For example, someone who automatically adds sugar to their daily tea or coffee could keep the ritual but swap the sugar for an alternative or simply use less.
3. Make the new choice easy
Keep the alternative in the same place you would normally reach for sugar, reducing the extra thought or effort required to make a different choice.
4. Start with one habit
Rather than trying to change every source of sugar at once, focus on one regular cue and practise a different response consistently.
Progress doesn’t require perfection
Perhaps the most useful takeaway for families is that a healthier routine does not need to work perfectly every dat to be worthwhile.
Changes have to survive school mornings, busy work weeks, social occasions, tired evenings and all the other unpredictability that comes with family life.
So when it comes to building habits that last, making the behaviour easier to repeat may ultimately be much more useful than trying to make every day perfect.
