Researching the power of healthy habits

Up to 45% of dementia risk is potentially modifiable with some healthy lifestyle changes. If this is the case, why might these healthy behaviours continue to be suboptimal amongst older Australians?

Research has endorsed that one way to promote healthy behaviours is to make them automatic, routine “habits”. But little is known about how these approaches apply amongst an older demographic.

Our research aims to better understand this.

To help people age well and productively, we're investigating how people form, then change, a new habit and which brain regions are involved. We want to better understand how the brain is involved in performing habits and identify any age-related differences to help guide effective support for healthy brain ageing.

The ageing brain prefers autopilot

We first explored habitual behaviours during ageing behaviourally, finding that older adults tend to stick with familiar habits, while younger adults more easily shift gears to new behaviour when needed.

And we like to see this preference for habits as a “superpower” for maintaining and preserving functioning during ageing: rather than asking older adults to constantly make conscious choices about healthy behaviours, we might focus on helping them establish positive routines that eventually become automatic and easier.

Read the full article 

What's next?

Now that we're starting to understand the behaviour of habits during ageing, we want to explore the related neurobiology to develop a comprehensive, evidence-based approach to optimising healthy ageing outcomes.

So, recently we had 77 younger and older adults attend the Thompson Institute to participate in a cognitive assessment and MRI brain scan where we collected data to help us understand what’s happening in our brain when we perform these habits.

If you’re interested in understanding the methodology of this research more, you can check out our detailed pre-registration plan.

We are now in the data evaluation phase of this study and look forward to sharing more published results.