Stop relying on motivation - TV's Orla Chennaoui offers her golden rule for mental and physical fitness

Most of us have busy lives, packing in cycling alongside work, family commitments and more - making 'quick wins' extremely inviting. But, do they work? In our weekly series we speak to cyclists of all kinds, to find out what one change they've made that's helped to make them a better bike rider - and ask - will it work for you?

Orla Chennaoui is a TV sports presenter and journalist, working across cycling, rugby, MotoGP and the Olympics. Away from the camera, Chennaoui hosts podcasts, and writes regular columns. In 2023, the 44-year-old launched her own personal venture, Ten Times Braver , a community to support and provide tips on how to overcome fears holding you back.

Chennaoui is a strong advocate for looking after your mental health, helping people overcome aversities and challenging all to live their best life. Asked for the one small tip for staying motivated when everything feels like a challenge, the mother of two's advice was to form the healthy habit before the going gets tough.

Just one small change: Start a habit when your up

Explaining why its important to form these habits, Chennaoui says : "Know that life is cyclical, with ups and downs, and that those 'up' times are when to prioritise your fitness, both mental and physical.

"It is important, when life is going well, that you don't rely on motivation for your mental and physical fitness, but rather turn your practices into habit.

"This takes the thinking out of it, giving less room for excuses or desire."

Chennaoui is a great believer that working on your mental fitness is just as important as your physical health.

"Meditation is your workout for the mind, and can be anything from traditional reflection, daily walks, hobbies you love or sitting still without screen time," she says.

Chennaoui is resolute the forming habits when they feel easier, rather than harder, is the best way forward. "If you have made your health practices a habit, be they exercise or meditation, then you will have them to fall back on during the times when life is tough.

"This is when you will be thankful for all the benefits they bring and grateful for the fact you don't have to think about it. Only in the dark times do you realise all the layers of resilience you have built by looking after yourself when you have been well".

Chennaoui presents a strong argument for creating structure and routine to help with looking after our health, but how does working hard to create these healthy habits when we're feeling positive help us for when we feel negative?  And how do we know when it's a habit, anyway?

Expert's view

To find some answers, I spoke to  Dr Pippa Lally, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Psychological Sciences and Co-Director of, among other things,  Habit Application and Theory Group at the University of Surrey.

Lally specialises in habits, behaviour change and health psychology as well as living with and beyond cancer - and has been instrumental in ground-breaking research.

My first questions was the most obvious one, how do we know if we have a habit in the first place?

"In order to form a habit, we need the same situation and behaviour over and over again, and, unless something stops that situation, it’s more than likely that we’ll carry out the behaviour.

"This of course can be any behaviour, which is why ones we don’t always want are so hard to break as we’ve created a cognitive link between them."

When asking Lally more this cognitive link creation, she tells me that it's allowing our brains to become sort of 'hardwired'.

While we’re capable of overriding existing habits, or forming new ones,  when it comes to consciously repeating a new wanted behaviour,  we need to have a relatively calm head in order to do so.

"A colleague of mine joked that if someone offered you a £1million not to do something all day, you could achieve that, but you would have to put a lot of effort into to thinking ‘don’t do that don’t do that’.

"This would clearly take up a lot of space in your mind. So in real life when we don’t have a million pounds to focus on, we get distracted, we’re busy, we’re stressed, our brains will just revert back to the old 'habit'".

According to Dr Lally "there’s no exact science to this answer."

However, we have some concrete numbers on how long it takes to form one: "In my own research, when participants self reported how automatic a behaviour had become, I found that it was, on average, 66 days, but that was from a huge range of between just 18 days to a huge 254 days.

"Ultimately there’s just the need to stay motivated to repeat the behaviour long enough to allow a healthy habit to form," she says.

As Chennaoui suggests, working towards forming a new habit - or changing one that is no longer serving us - when we have less mental load means we’ve got a much bigger chance of it becoming a successful habit.

"The less pressure we have in our lives, the more likely we are to change or create a new  behaviour we want to keep because our cognitive load is low" confirms Lally, adding that "hen life is easy and there’s no stress, habits are so much easier to form.

"The important thing to remember is that the easier, more simple you can make the habit, the more likely you are to stick to it."

This sounds like a vital part of the habit forming jigsaw.

"We have habits and intentions" Lally tells me, "when we are thinking about habit creation, for example riding your bike more, we don’t want to pile up what speed, time or distance we’re going to ride.

"We’re just wanting to work on the habit of leaving the house on time, so your wake up alarm eventually becomes the automatic cue which leads you to getting on the bike and riding.

"This is what my colleague Ben Gardner calls instigation Vs execution, the instigation is a cue to executing a behaviour, which is far more likely to lead to a habit creation."

This illustrates why - for example - I find getting up and doing my mobility stretches far easier than doing them later in the day, when I never find the time (or will) to complete them.

"This is why it’s so important to not to skip the days when you only have time to ride to the end of the road and back," advises Lally "even if you think it’s not worth it from an exercise perspective, these moments will pay dividends when it comes to helping habit formation.

"If you’re only motivated to ride when it’s over a certain distance or for a certain time, you’ll lose out on all the opportunities to imbed a habit.

"Besides, you might find that even just 10 minutes on the bike outside could help your mental health way better than you think."

Lally’s work on habit creation has revealed this cue association is just as consequential as how the actual behaviour we’re trying to imbed.

"One reason why it's harder to embed ‘healthy’ habits is that they will take longer for your body or mind to feel the reward" Lally reveals. "For example, if you were wanting to form a new habit of eating chocolate cake, you would be getting rewarded pretty swiftly with the taste of chocolate cake which, for most people, will taste great, causes our brains to release dopamine, making us feel happy and help to embed the habit quite swiftly.

"However, a new habit of doing sit ups every night won’t deliver quite the same dopamine hit that eating chocolate does, so it takes a lot longer and harder to become a habit," says Lally, before adding that one way of making a habit stick is to make it as fun as possible.

"Author Katy Milkman refers to this as ‘temptation bundling’" she says. "This is creating ‘rules’ for yourself where you link something you really enjoy, to something that requires a delayed reward.

"So you could say  ‘I’ll only listen to my audio book once I’ve gone for a ride’ for example."

So does the habit commitment always depend on this additional reward motivation? Apparently not.

"Once the habit is formed, there’s more chance of it working outside of our awareness, so think of something washing your hands after the loo, it’s just something you do without too much thought process.

"Obviously the whole ride isn’t going to become subconscious, but the getting out the door isn’t deliberated as much, and this makes it much more likely to take place.

"Once the cue becomes obvious to your brain, you’re then able to pay less attention to the extraneous issues, taking the decision making factor out of the way.

"It can take a long time to create a habit, but once it does even if you don’t show up one or two days, the cognitive link will still exist, making it much easier to fall back into the routine once you do pick it up again," Lally concludes.

Our view

I found the science behind forming habits fascinating. I've often made the error of waiting until I need the head space - or a movement routine - to try and start a new habit, and then wondered why I can't maintain the motivation to keep showing up.

Having just committed to the purchase of a cold water plunge pod, I'm especially invested with how I can ensure this become a daily ritual in order to reap the health giving rewards long after the exciting new toy motivation wears off.

Knowing that my new routine has a much better chance of becoming a habit if I starting from a good space, find a daily cue, and bundling it with a complimentary dopamine delivering reward feels really positive.

In my case I'm starting now, using my waking alarm as a cue, and just aiming to get in rather than a set time is helping. Also knowing that I have a warm coffee to look forward to as soon as I'm out seems to be enough to lure me to take the plunge. Now I just have to keep at it long enough to form the habit.