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A chance to change things

Slavea Chankova: health-care correspondent, The Economist

The crisis has up-ended people’s lives. What does it take to make a new habit stick?

If you do something once a day for two weeks, it turns into a habit

BARELY 8% OF new-year’s resolutions survive until the end of January. Some

people set goals that are too ambitious; others simply set too many goals. Yet

perhaps the biggest reason why people fail so miserably is that changing a

particular behaviour is difficult if the routines that are tightly woven around it

remain the same. Resisting the lure of a calorie-laden caramel latte in the

morning is easier if you switch to a route that doesn’t take you past the coffee

shop.

In a survey of nearly 70,000 people in Britain, carried out in August 2020, about a
quarter of people said their lives had changed completely or a lot since covid-19 came
along, and a third said (with characteristic British understatement) they had made
“quite a few changes”. Many of these changes will stick, because the pandemic has up-