What exactly are habits? Why are they so important? And how long does it take to create them? Ash Ranpura’s wife starts by explaining what she’d like Ash to change about himself. He realises there is a lot he could change – he wants to exercise more, smoke less, drink more water, meditate more, even eat more healthily.

Alongside him is the comedian Alice Fraser who actually has loads of really good behaviours. She runs, she meditates, she doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink. She explains to Ash a lot of this is because she has developed good habits that are automatic. She talks to the founding father of habit science, Larry Squire, about how his ground-breaking experiments on a patient called Eugene changed how we think about habits and memory.

Then she talks to Pippa Lally, a habit expert at UCL, about how long it takes to create automatic habits and what this means for behaviour change.

How important is willpower? And how can we strengthen our self-control? Ash talks to Martin, a drug addict, now trying to kick a really bad habit. One thing Martin has trouble with is self-control. And it turns out that self-control is key to this whole conversation about behaviour change.

Ash talks to Terrie Moffit, a professor at Duke University. Terrie explains how her pioneering work on a thousand children in Dunedin, New Zealand, shows how self-control is just as important as intelligence when determining life outcomes. Does this mean we’re all doomed? Not according to John Tierney, the author of Willpower. He says willpower is like a muscle and can be strengthened like a muscle. To explain this he tells the story of the 19th century explorer Henry Stanley. Stanley developed a series of tricks and techniques to help build his willpower in the face of the hardships he found on his travels through Africa. These are the kinds of techniques we can apply to our own lives today.

This episode is all about the hacks and tricks you can use to form new habits and behaviours. Ash is ready to try and start a new habit. He decides he wants to exercise every day by bicycling. So Alice sets him up with the behavioural scientist and habit expert Katy Milkman. She’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and she’s come up with a specific technique for starting a new habit. It’s called temptation bundling.

Basically, you have to combine a pleasurable thing like listening to a really suspenseful audiobook with something that requires a bit of willpower like exercise. Katy helps Ash make a plan for his bicycling habit. Ash tries it out at his home in Somerset.

Can techniques like CBT and hypnotism help us change our behavior? Ash starts the episode by hypnotising Alice. He trained in hypnosis when he was practicing as a medical doctor. This episode is all about tricking the brain to overcome your issues with willpower. Ash explains how often the big issue with behaviour change is just getting started. We all know what we want to change about ourselves but there is often a barrier to that change. Alice feels like she has a barrier when it comes to writing more often. Hypnosis helps us reframe that barrier.

Alice then explains that actually sometimes we aren’t aware of the things we want to change. She tells the story of Roy Smalls, an ex-offender in South Carolina, who is trying to change his habitual behaviours through a technique called cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT helps people reframe their thoughts in order to help them change. If CBT can work for someone like Roy it is likely a really useful way to start changing our behaviour.

Ash and Alice have talked a lot about the actions we can take to change our behaviour but what about the impact of the environment around us? So Ash takes a trip to Paris where in a little lair in the middle of the city there is a secretive government department trying to change public behaviours. They are doing it through a technique called nudging, which tries to make little changes in the environment to help people behave better.

Ash talks to his friend Mariam Chammat who runs the department about her background in neuroscience and how understanding the brain helps with understanding how people behave. Then Alice talks to the writer Gretchen Rubin, who gives us tips on how we can use nudging to make our own lives a little easier.

OK, so you’ve successfully introduced a new habit, or lost an old one, but how can you make it stick? In this episode Ash and Alice will try to work out what factors make change last. They’ll talk to Katy Milkman about her new project ‘Making Behaviour Change Stick’. She says the next step in the science of behaviour change is working out how you can make change that lasts forever.

Ash also talks to the habit expert Nir Eyal who explains that to make change last you need to make your new habit small, manageable and fun.