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.