Episode 5: The power and science of building healthy habits

Jan. 27, 2023 | 29 mins

Join host Brent Bishop as he chats with Dr. Dayna Lee-Baggley, a registered clinical psychologist and author from Halifax, Nova Scotia. They will discuss the power and science of building healthy habits.

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You are listening to the Beyond Age podcast series.

Brent:

Hi and welcome to Beyond Age, a Manulife exclusive podcast where we get to chat with experts to uncover the truth about holistic health and aging to help keep you living healthier for longer no matter your age. I'm your host Brent Bishop, and today I'm joined by Dr. Dayna Lee-Baggley from Halifax, Nova Scotia. She's a registered clinical psychologist and assistant professor in the faculty of medicine at Dalhousie University and an adjunct professor in industrial organizational psychology at St. Mary's University. So today we'll be discussing the power of forming healthy habits. Welcome Dr. Lee-Baggley, how are you?

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm good.

Brent:

Thanks for joining us. This is an exciting topic and I know most of us, if not all of us at some point struggle with making these healthy habits and the consistency of keeping those habits. So I'm really curious to see where we get to with this conversation. But first maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this field.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

Sure. So I'm a registered psychologist but I have spent most of my career actually working on health units, so on medical, surgical and cancer care units at the hospital. So working with people with chronic disease or life-threatening disease, working on multidisciplinary teams in a hospital setting. And so this is really health psychology and that's about helping people be healthier. So a lot of my work is about trying to translate the science that we know helps people into practical, usable things that we can do in our everyday life so that we're not just trying harder, we're trying smarter. And there's a lot that once we understand how bodies and brains work, that we can do these things in a smarter way to be more successful with it. And that's not just like try harder. Everyone's plan is, just try harder. And we're trying to avoid that. How can we use the science of behaviour change psychological principles to be more effective at this?

Brent:

That's a good point. Smarter not harder. I think I find a lot of times people are forcing, you know, whatever they're trying to achieve, they're forcing it and not kind of seeing how they could perhaps take a different approach to not come to a standstill. I know when we form habits, they're things or processes that happen in the brain to allow that to happen. Maybe you can kind of expand a little bit on what's going on in the brain when we're actually working on forming habits.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

So it's helpful to understand how our brains work. There's an automatic part of our brain that is responsible for a lot of functions in our body. So that includes things like emotions, automatic thoughts, learning memory, appetite regulation, pain regulation. We can sometimes refer to this as our survival brain because it gives awesome advice if you're a cave person, and your life expectancy is 30, and the kinds of threats that you deal with are bear attacks <laugh>. It's also unconscious and automatic, meaning that we don't have direct control over anything that happens in that system. We can do things that influence it, but we don't have direct control. The other relevant part of our brain is our prefrontal cortex or our frontal lobe. And this is the location of executive functioning. And executive functioning is about starting behaviour, stopping behaviour, decision making planning. This is where willpower comes from.

It's the location of self-control. And unlike our survival mind that's always working, our frontal lobe is like a battery. And so we will wear out that battery of self-control as we use it up during the day. And that's why things like binge eating, are more likely to happen in the evenings compared to the mornings, because we've used up that battery of self-control. The thing about our survival brain is that it's well suited for an environment where we didn't have really accessible food, where we were engaged in a ton of exercise just to survive. We used to get the same amount of exercise as triathletes get nowadays just to survive. And so there's all these built-in systems into our survival kind of brain that are about conserving energy when there's food, eat as much as possible and basically ensuring that we don't starve to death, for example, which has been a threat to the human species forever and continues to be.

And so those systems are basically the opposite of what we have to do when we're building habits. The healthy habits we have to do in our modern world. There's a huge mismatch between that survival brain that has this wired built in aspects to it and the things we have to do to be healthy in our modern world. So in our modern world, in western culture, we have a lot of food, highly processed food. We don't have a lot of activity often built into our day. It means that anything you're trying to do to build a healthy habit requires your frontal lobe battery. It's not going to be something automatic, it's not going to be something that you can do without some intention. And the more you do it, the more you can build that neural network to make that choice more easily. Example I give is like, so if you have a wheelbarrow and you're pushing it over bumpy ground, eventually it makes a little groove and then it's easier to push the wheelbarrow in the little groove.

Now what you're doing when you're doing habit change is you're lifting the wheelbarrow up and putting it in a new direction and pushing it over bumpy ground. So initially that takes a lot of effort to lift it up and push it over bumpy ground. If you do it enough times, eventually you make a little groove in the new direction and it's easier to push the wheelbarrow in the new direction. But the old groove never goes away. Humans do not unlearn things. Those neural networks remain there. And so if you're tired, if your battery is low, if you're not being intentional, we can fall into old habits quite easily because again those are hardwired into us for survival. And so there is a lot of science that we know about how to do behaviour change more effectively to make sense of that survival brain that doesn't want us to do healthy habits and our frontal lobe battery, which is required to do healthy habits in our modern world.

Brent:

It sounds like we're climbing a hill with a default of past experiences and past habits that might not be the best habits.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

Yeah, again, they're totally well suited to a different environment, just not our modern world. But this is why most people struggle. Like if you look at rates of trying to change your behaviour like New Year's resolutions, 70% of it people are not doing them by the time you get to like April or June or something. This is why long-term weight loss is such a challenge. And when you look in medical settings, only 30% of people on average, are following their medical advice to manage their chronic disease, which requires a huge number of healthy behaviours. And so what that tells you is that like, yeah, this is normal human behaviour to not be consistent about these things. Like we were probably all dead by the time we were 30. You didn't have to worry about cardiovascular disease. Like because you were already dead by that point. And so we don't have any automatic systems to do that. You need to put intention into it.

Brent:

I like that. And I think knowing this perspective of our survival brain, how we were and that that's kind of the default. It gives you some, you know, if you're falling off the wagon, you're not a bad person. It happens to everybody. This is kind of how we're hardwired. So I do like that. I think that's a really important point for people to realize when they're trying to make habits, and not try so much harder, but try smarter as you said.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

Self-compassion is about recognizing our common humanity, which is partly, you know, and being kind to ourselves about that, which is everyone makes mistakes, everyone has setbacks, everyone has personal failings and recognizing that that is what it means to be human. And so when people talk about sticking to their healthy habits and I'm like what does that mean to you? People usually define that as like being consistent with it and never stopping. That's not how humans work.

Not realistic. So let's redefine success. Scientifically success is your willingness to get back at it again. How quickly can you get back on and can we shorten the amount of time you're off the wagon, not prevent you from falling off? Part of that is actually being kind to ourselves when we have a setback. I actually wrote a book that's called: "Healthy Habits Suck: How to Get Off the Couch and Live a Healthy Life... Even If You Don't Want to", which is about acknowledging they're actually really hard. And so let's be realistic about how hard it is so that we can put an appropriate amount of battery to making that change and doing it in an evidence-based way that increases your likelihood of being successful

Brent:

To not beat ourselves up because it's so easy to go that direction. For sure. So first of all, I love the title of your book: "Healthy Habits Suck : How to Get Off the Couch and Live a Healthy Life... Even If You Don't Want to" <laugh>. I love that. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about your book and how it came to be.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

So the book is really about science-based information to help start and stick to healthy habits. And it really sort of comprises all the things that I spent, you know, over a decade working with people with chronic disease or life-threatening disease about helping them build healthier habits. It's also the kinds of things that I have to apply to myself every day also to like manage my healthy habits. And so it's really universal about these are principles that would help basically all humans get better at healthy habits and it's all science-based. So that's part of my mission also is to try to increase access to science-based information. So this is the kind of skills that you would learn if you got to talk to a health psychologist, which you know are sometimes rare and difficult to access. And so each chapter goes over different skills and reviews, evidence-based tips so that you get those tips again about how to work smarter rather than harder. And you can order it online, it's available, you know, on any of the online websites. And there's also resources available on our website and through social media, which you can access at Dr. Lee-Baggley - so "D R L E E B A G G L E Y.com". That's the handle for all of our social media where we talk about these topics and we have more resources also available on our website.

Brent:

That's great to know. I was just about to ask you where can our listeners find more information about this? That's great. Yeah. I have a question, question for you as well. In terms of the battery that you're talking about. You mentioned it can be used up what happens when you age? Has that become used up and you have less available battery storage or power when you're older?

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

Right, so it's a great question. So here's some of what we do know about aging. So for example, it's about age 24 for females and about age 28 for males that your frontal lobe is like fully formed, which you know kind of explains sometimes like teenage behaviour. Like they don't have a fully formed frontal lobe yet.

Brent:

I know what you're talking about.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

<laugh>. Exactly right. So we know that it takes some time to build up that muscle or that battery basically. There are definitely individual differences in that battery. There are a lot of ways people use that battery in different ways. Meaning that if you have something like chronic pain or you have a chronic illness, some of that battery has to go to dealing with that chronic disease. And so there's less battery available for you. Conditions like depression, anxiety, ADHD. ADHD is like uh, condition that impacts your frontal lobe battery and how well it works and how well you can recharge it. As we age, two factors can happen. One, we can become more efficient because we figure out how to do things that work for us and so we get better, we get more efficient at doing some things. But you can also see decline in cognitive decline which can interfere with that frontal lo capacity. There are also several disorders, you know, brain injuries, these kinds of things that actually you know, impact the functioning of your frontal lobe and have dramatic impacts on people's ability to control their behaviour and their personalities and things like that. They have an injury or a stroke or forms of cancer for example. So yeah, we can become more efficient at it but there is a natural cognitive decline that happens as well.

Brent:

I can imagine that what we do earlier in our life is going to help with the habits that we form and that are going to help in the long run for sure. Speaking of that, if you have unhealthy habits as a younger person, what kind of consequences would you see when you are in your older ages?

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

So I mean we basically know these healthy habits do have an impact, you know, long-term basically when you're younger you can kind of get away with it better. I mean I remember being able to drink much better when I was younger and now I pay a price for it much more significantly Right. As I'm aging. And so we can get away with more things when we're younger. It is never too late to start investing in your health. Even if you were not doing a lot of things in your childhood or in your adolescence or when you're younger, it's never too late to invest in your health. Start now, start today, start in the next moment. Right. This doesn't have to be like, I'm going to give up sugar... Go drink a glass of water, go have an apple, go eat something green.

And so often people don't get motivated for that kind of change until like their forties because that's when you start to sort of feel it and realize the consequences of your choices. But that is still a wonderful time to get started and to invest in your health. It definitely like helps with not just our longevity but our quality of life. And that's also what health will allow you to do is your brain will function better. Right. Your body will function better, you'll be better able to do things and give you more good years of life that matter to you.

Brent:

Hmm. I love the perspectives here because I think this is what people need is all these great things we've talking about. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back after this message

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Brent:

Welcome back to Beyond Age. Let's loop back to the idea of habits. So I know like, you know, I always talk about goals and outcomes for example, they're not exactly the same thing and sometimes they get mixed up. What's the difference between a habit and a routine? Like does having a good routine develop that habit or does the habit actually come first? Or both maybe.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

So it's a good question. I mean, I think the way people think about habits is that it's an automatic thing you don't have to think about anymore, right? And in which case it's sort of under the control of your survival brain. And there are many things that are habits for us. So in that definition, if you've ever watched a two-year-old try to put their socks on, it takes an enormous amount of time and effort for a two-year-old to put their socks on. Like, and how about you? You know you have socks on your feet. Like do you even remember putting them on? They just somehow ended up on your feet. Right. Because we've turned that into an automatic process that we don't have to dedicate a lot of battery towards anymore. To me, a routine is something that you do deliberately, intentionally.

And the more you create a routine, the less battery it takes to choose a healthy habit. And so we often think about, you know, willpower as the only thing that you need or like what you need to do to like create a habit or a routine. And that's a in the moment kind of thing. People think about willpower in the moment. They're like, there's chocolate cake in front of me and I'm going to try to not eat it. But there's also a form of willpower, which is about creating an environment around you that has better cues, has healthier cues that is more conducive to healthy choices. And we want to acknowledge that most of us live in a world that has unhealthy cues. Most of us live in a world that actually is not neutral. It actually encourages unhealthy behaviour and people sometimes don't take that into account as much.

So if you structure your environment that also is requiring your willpower but then you don't need the willpower in the moment. If there is no chocolate cake there, it's much harder to be tempted by it. And one of the examples that I give about that is that if I, you know, work until 9:00 PM I'm going to come home and have a terrible dinner, I'm going to have ice cream for dinner. Probably if I stop at 8:00 PM I have maybe a 50/50 chance and I could have like a perfectly healthy meal sitting in the fridge. I'll still have ice cream for dinner because I'm just exhausted at that point. Right. <laugh>, if I stop work at 7:00 PM I have like a high likelihood of having a healthy dinner. My choice point isn't what happens at 9:00 PM, once I've worked till 9:00 PM it's kind of game over, there's not enough battery left.

My choice point is do I let myself work till 9:00 PM, that's the choice point. That's still willpower. But that's creating a routine that is much more likely for you to pick healthy habits, other forms of routine. So for example, in the pandemic, I changed my gym routine to go at the same time every single day. I also go to a gym where I have to sign up for a class. So there's like this public declaration that I'm going, it's social, I get to see other people and chat with other humans. And the trainers tell me what to do. So all of those things reduce how much energy it takes to make that choice to go. This is the same thing as having like reduced choice menus. This is like, where you would want to have like "meatless Mondays" or like "casserole Tuesdays". Like you're making the same meal on the same day because the question what's for dinner can use an enormous amount of battery and that's what the benefit of a routine is. That's this like battery management we want to think about.

Brent:

Of course, that's interesting. So there has to be some level of self-awareness and knowing your triggers probably is a good thing as well. But I really like that perspective of if you can decrease the amount of decision making or reduce the amount of decision making involved through some sort of routine as you're mentioning, then there's less thinking that has to happen and much greater likelihood of success. As you've mentioned. The next questions kind of leads into it quite nicely. I mean a lot of times we can start off with good intentions, start to develop a habit and then we fall off the bandwagon as people say, then we get back on, then we fall off and it's this continuous cycle or sort of habit loop. Do you have anything to speak about on how we can disrupt that habit loop in order to build healthier habits that can be a little bit more consistent.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

So some of the science of behaviour change was give us some tips about kind of goal setting, right? Building these habits. One is to pick a 90% goal, which means a goal you're 90% sure you can do. So often what people do is try to change everything all at once, but then you like fall off because there's not enough battery to keep that many changes going. So start small and work your way up from there. The other one is to pick a "do instead" goal. We often pick "don't do" goals. And there's a very well established phenomenon in psychology called "the thought suppression effect". Which is, if I were to tell you to not think about pink elephants...

Brent:

That's all I can think about!

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

<laugh>. Exactly. And were you thinking a lot about pink elephants before I told you not to? No. Exactly. The more you try to not think about something, the more you think about it. So when we make health goals that are don't eat chocolate, don't drink, don't have pop, don't eat fast food, you're making pink elephants. You're now thinking about the thing that you're not supposed to have. And so we want to find a "do instead" goal. What are you going to do instead of drinking? What are you going to do instead of eating, you know, fast food and think about adding healthy things in rather than taking unhealthy things out. It also helps us feel less deprived because you're focused on the things you can have, not the things you can't have. And then the third one is to pick a behavioural goal. So again, thoughts and feelings and motivation are controlled by our survival.

Brain behaviour is controlled by our frontal lobe. And so pick a goal that you actually have control over, which is behaviour. So going for a walk is a behaviour someone else can see. You do it enjoying the walk, not a behaviour. Feeling motivated to go to the walk, not a behaviour. So people often set goals like I want to enjoy my salads or I want to want to go to the gym. No, you don't have any control over those things. Pick a behavioural goal because that you do have direct control over and it'll make you feel much more successful because your efforts actually result in the behaviour. And then you know the last point is the source of long-term motivation is not about getting away from something bad when you want long-term motivation, it has to be about moving towards something that matters. And so many people start changing their health behaviours because they want to avoid a heart attack.

That can start behaviour but it will never sustain behaviour change because we can't stay in that state of distress. Linking it to something bad does not encourage change in the long term. Instead you want to link it to like that health of itself isn't the value, it's what does health allow you to do. That matters to you to show up for the people that you care about to do the things that are important to you. And we want to link it to moving towards something that matters. Now you can do a whole bunch of healthy behaviours and your body can still do different things. It doesn't mean your body is going to react the way you want it to. It is always worth investing in your health. Your body will always function better if you invest in your health. But it doesn't mean that you will forever avoid any illness or injury.

Right. So an example of that would be a woman that I saw who got breast cancer in her forties and she had just run the Boston Marathon and so she was so pissed like you know, she was like all this healthy stuff that I've done and I still got cancer. But she might have been genetically destined to have cancer in her twenties and all of her healthy habits prolonged that. And so she didn't get it into her forties or maybe they caught it earlier. She was most certainly going to get through like chemo and radiation much better because the rest of her body was healthier. So we also have to just respect that we don't have direct control over our bodies and you can do everything right and your body or an illness or a chronic disease can still progress. It doesn't mean that it's not worth it. It's always going to help you if the rest of your body is healthier. But we also just need to be kind to ourselves that we don't have direct control over our bodies.

Brent:

Interesting. Yeah. So it's about building a little bit of resilience through those healthy habits, whether they're social, physical.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

And that has often helped me guide dietary choices, right? If I have something important to do, I have to put good fuel into my brain. Our brain only takes up like 3% of our body weight, but it used something like 23% of the glucose in our systems. Meaning that the fuel you put into your brain really matters and it's going to impact your clarity and how well you can perform and how well you can show up. And whether that frontal lobe is like more charged or not. And so making dietary decisions about that, about oh I have something important I need to do later. So no I can't have ice cream for dinner because I won't do very well on that podcast or for that interviewer like putting my kid to bed. Those are immediate reasons to make those healthy choices. Which again have a cost in the short run, it feels better to eat the chocolate cake. So you need a really good reason to do it. It will always take more energy to go for a run than to lie on the couch. It doesn't matter if you're a triathlete. And so it's not about reducing the negative cost of those things, it's about enhancing the benefits of it and what you get out of it and why it matters to you. And that can tip the scales to getting people to do more sustained behaviour change.

Brent:

I like that. So these moments, these positive moments, and it depends on how you frame it. As you just mentioned, all those moments lead up to longevity, healthier as you get older as well. One question I want to ask, there may be myths in pretty much everything, right? But you know, you hear about 21 days, 30 days, there's, there's a certain number of days and all of a sudden that habit's formed. What type of myths may be including that? Can you talk about in terms of how we make and break habits?

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

So that's a really like commonly held myth, which is that it takes 21 days to build a habit that's not really based on science. So the actual study was with people who had had some kind of surgery and it took them 21 days to like recognize the change in their body that had happened. But that's not the same thing as building a habit. And it's certainly not the same thing as building a habit around something as complicated as like weight management. Or like dietary choices, which is a huge number of behaviours. The problem is that people get to day 22 and they think oh it's supposed to be easy and when it's not, they give up. Right? And so it doesn't actually help them maintain their habits. And you want to think about it almost like, you know, building muscle memory but building neural muscle memory.

Right? Think about it the same way for your brain making like neural nets and neural muscle memories. You want to repeat the behaviour again and again and again. And some of that you know is just be in the present moment. Be aware, turn on your frontal lobe, you know, to be conscious of where you are in this moment. Notice your toes, wiggle your fingers. Like those things actually bring you to the present moment and build a neural pathway towards your frontal lobe instead of to your survival brain. Think the 21 days, you know when we made that wheelbarrow analogy, it's like you could make somewhat of a groove in 21 days, but that doesn't mean that the new groove is stronger than the old groove. Right? You've probably been doing the old groove for a really long time. More likely behaviour change takes like, I would actually say like two to five years.

Because sometimes you actually need like a full calendar year to figure out if you can keep it going. Can you keep those things going during the holiday break, during the summer vacation? Like sometimes you don't even get till the second year where you even get a chance to try and manage that differently. And so the real message is that this is going to take some battery forever. You never get to stop. You never get to the point where you don't have to put some intention into it because your survival brain will take over and it will not tell you to eat broccoli. No one binge eat on broccoli.

Brent:

No one I know.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

Exactly. And so we want to think about it in that way. Not that like I'm going to get to a place where I'm done, you'll get to a place where it's easier, but we need to acknowledge you're going to have to use some battery forever to do these things.

Brent:

I like that. That's the true reality. And I think for some people that might sound <laugh>, you know, a little bit disheartening, but I think as you mentioned, the positive is it does get easier in terms of new research that's very current. Is there anything that you find really interesting that you can speak about that's like kind of hot off the press?

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

<laugh>? So what our program is about is one, applying the science of behaviour change so that again, we're trying smarter, not harder. So we're making use of all the science we know about behaviour change, but also understanding the biology of like what factors are already there and understanding what you need, what having some respect for your own body and how it shows up and how it functions and making the best out of what you've been given. Rather than thinking that anyone can just change if you just try hard enough.

Brent:

Nothing's a cookie cutter approach. A great perspective is don't force yourself in the direction where you got to push, push, push and work harder.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

Yeah. The other thing that we're working on is really trying to change our environments and like system level change. So for example, in the pandemic we got grant research funding to study burnout in frontline providers. And I was like, I'm not going to do a program that tells healthcare workers they just need to do more yoga or mindfulness and it would all be okay. I'm like, I'm not doing that. And so we actually chose to do a leadership intervention, which is a system level intervention. It's about changing the system that employees find themselves into rather than putting all the responsibility onto the individual. And so we did a leadership program on increasing psychological safety in the workplace. And so we're, you know, thinking about how do we leverage the workplace as a resource for health? How do we make use of that environment that we spend a lot of time in to actually make it somewhere where that is encouraging, you know, healthy behaviours and good mental health and like flourishing and not just the absence of illness.

And so that's the other part that we've been spending a lot of time on is, you know, system level change and how do you impact those things, which is where the workplace psychology, you know, connection that I have is really helpful because it's looking at those system level factors, right? The biggest change we had in smoking rates was when we made laws that you couldn't smoke indoors and you had to be outdoors to smoke. That was the biggest change we ever had in smoking rates. Now there is an individual responsibility there. Absolutely. But we've kind of focused a bit too much on the individual responsibility and not enough on the societal responsibility to help people make good choices. Right. And so this is some of how do we make system level change to help people so that they're not just relying on their frontal lobe battery. That they're in an environment that actually is fostering good choices for them.

Brent:

Would most of these system-based changes, would they be more associated with policy, like not smoking indoors? Or are there other things that you're also looking at?

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

So you want to look at like organizational level, leadership level, and team level. So at an organizational level that would be like what kind of policies do you have? What kind of programs are available at a leadership level? Your leaders, are they trained in skills for managing people <laugh>, right? And suddenly when you're a manager, you're in charge of people and a lot of leaders don't have the skills to manage people like remote work and hybrid offices. This is a whole new skillset that like leaders need to have, right? Teams, how well are the teams working together? Can we help with better team functioning? And then, you know, your environment, are you able to take a lunch break? Right? Are there donuts at your coffee station or is there a fruit basket? So how do you structure the environment to do those things? And so an example of this is like we've been working on trauma-informed workplaces, which is about how can we again, leverage the workplace as a resource that's not triggering, that's not making things worse. And that's actually like fostering a supportive environment so people can function better even if it had trauma. How do you create an environment that's helping everyone? It's preventative. And especially for like healthcare workers, you know, long-term care workers. This is like a major issue because many of them have experienced a lot of trauma going through the pandemic.

Brent:

Wow. Well, I know we're getting very close, but I do want to leave the audience with maybe one or two key points based off of our discussion today that you think are really important. That could be good takeaways.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

So I would say there is a version of working smarter, not harder, right? And so I wrote the book to help people who might never have the chance to talk to a health psychologist to gain access to some of those science-based principles, to work smarter, not harder. And so whatever your plan is, if it's just that I'm going to try harder next time, that's not a good plan. And it's not your fault. You're just a regular normal human doing like exactly what humans have been, you know, shaped to do over millions of years of evolution. And so let's be smarter about how you're doing this. And so you can make use of the science of behaviour change to increase your likelihood of success and always be working towards something that matters. Figure out, you know, in the bigger picture for you what matters about this so that it's linked to something positive and uplifting and empowering. Not some terrible thing that's going to happen to you if you don't do the behaviour right. What are you moving towards? Why does that matter? What's important? Those are the things that will help us in sustained behaviour change.

Brent:

I like it. I'm taking this on just as much as our listeners are. Work harder, not smarter, you know, have purpose in what you do and know that you're hardwired for certain things and just don't beat yourself up. Just get back up and keep trying. I love it. Thank you so much Dr. Lee-Baggley, I really appreciate your time. Great information. Thank you.

Dr. Lee-Baggley:

Thank you for having me.

Brent:

Well, that's it everyone. Thanks for tuning in to Beyond Age, an exclusive podcast from Manulife. Tune into the next episode where we talk to Professor S. Jay Olshansky, a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois about longevity and what it means to live a long, healthy life. Don't forget to visit our website manulife.ca/LiveHealthier for more tips, videos, and content from manual life that can help you live healthier for longer, no matter your age.

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