What I Didn’t Expect to Learn While Trialling a 15-Minute Health Habit
- emmanuelr131
- Jan 9
- 4 min read
The following article was originally published by Emmanuel Richards on LinkedIn and has been adapted for the Greenbank Family Dental blog. As a healthcare innovation advocate and the practice growth leader behind Perio Protect AU, Emmanuel shares a personal reflection on time, compliance, and health habits — themes that resonate with the way we approach care here at GFD.
I’ve been trialling Perio Protect trays as part of an evaluation process. They require around 15 minutes of daily use.
That’s it. Nothing complicated. Nothing dramatic.
And yet, that small requirement unexpectedly surfaced something far more interesting than I anticipated — not about dentistry, but about human behaviour, time, and why some health habits stick while others quietly fail.
We already struggle with the basics
Before getting into my own experience, it’s worth asking a simple question:
How compliant are we really with the most basic oral health behaviours?
Almost everyone knows they should brush twice a day. Far fewer do it consistently, properly, for long enough. Flossing is even more confronting — despite decades of education, true daily compliance remains low.
This isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s not even a motivation problem.
It’s a behavioural reality.
Which made me reflect on something uncomfortable:if we struggle to comply with habits we’ve known about since childhood, why do we assume new health behaviours will be any different?
My friction wasn’t belief — it was time
When I started the trial, I didn’t doubt the rationale.I wasn’t sceptical of the concept.
The resistance showed up somewhere else entirely.
It was subtle, but familiar:
Where does this fit?
When do I actually do it?
What has to move to make space for it?
Not effort.Not discipline.
Time.
The moment of clarity (and discomfort)
The turning point came in an unremarkable way.
Scrolling.
That default behaviour most of us fall into when there’s a pause in the day — first thing in the morning, last thing at night, or in between tasks.
At some point, there was a very clear, almost uncomfortable thought:
This isn’t rest. This is just time disappearing.
What struck me wasn’t guilt — it was awareness.That the time already existed. It was just being spent unconsciously.
And that’s when something shifted.
I didn’t add time — I reassigned it
Instead of trying to “find” 15 minutes, I reclaimed the same finite window that had been disappearing into scrolling.
I began using that time intentionally:
Reading
Scripture study
Journaling — something I had been genuinely eager to bring back into my life, but had never quite managed to protect space for
A short, focused weight session
What surprised me most was how obvious it suddenly felt. The time had always been there — it simply hadn’t been claimed with intention.
What shifted was the quality of the time. It transitioned from a background distraction in my morning routine into an almost exciting, dedicated space — a protected window where something meaningful could actually get done, while compliance took care of itself.
The common thread wasn’t the activity itself. It was the state: quiet, focused, time-bound, and free from consumption or conversation.
The trays didn’t feel like an interruption. They became the boundary that protected the time.
What actually changed
I didn’t suddenly become more disciplined.I didn’t discover willpower.
What changed was the framing.
The 15 minutes stopped being a cost and became a return.
Instead of:
“This is something I have to do”
It became:
“This is a better use of time I already had.”
That distinction matters more than it sounds.
The psychology hiding in plain sight
Most health habits fail not because they’re difficult, but because they’re framed as additions.
Add another task. Add another obligation. Add another demand on already-fragmented time.
But habits seem to stick when they do the opposite — when they upgrade an existing moment rather than compete with life.
In my case, the tray wasn’t the breakthrough.
Time reclamation was.
A broader question worth sitting with
If reclaiming 15 minutes can change compliance for one small daily health behaviour, it raises a bigger question:
What might happen if we stopped asking people to find more time for health — and instead helped them become conscious of the time they’re already losing?
Not just for oral health, but for:
preventative care
movement
reflection
chronic disease management
mental wellbeing
The implications are quietly significant.
A closing thought
We often tell ourselves we’re too busy for the things that matter.
But in many cases, the time is already there — just unclaimed.
I didn’t gain more hours. I didn’t optimise my schedule.
I simply became aware of a finite window and chose to use it differently.
And that may be the most transferable health insight I’ve come across in a long time.
We don’t need more time. We need fewer unconscious minutes.
This article was originally written by Emmanuel Richards and published on LinkedIn on January 7, 2026. Shared here with permission for the Greenbank Family Dental community.
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