The Winding Path

Recently Jenny and Erin, in their ongoing quest for understanding, announced a contest aimed at growing the personal development community. I think that growth will happen in at least two ways, both by increasing our awareness of just who is in the community (and encouraging discussion), but also by helping each of us to grow individually. And I suspect the questions they posed were designed to do exactly that. Here are my responses:

“How big of a role do habits play in your daily life?”

Some people may think of habits as simply something like smoking, or drinking; those bad habits which we want to change but don’t seem to be able to.

But as Bill mentioned, habits are a massive part of our daily lives. As I sit here typing these are the habits I’ve identified in the last five minutes or so:

1. My typing. The actions of my fingers are habitual.
2. My posture. I sit in my seat as I always do without much thought to what I’m doing.
3. Shifting my posture slightly once in a while
4. Gazing briefly out the window. I do this whenever I stop to think, mainly for the sake of my eyes’ health.
5. Clasping my hands when I pause to think for a longer period.
6. My gaze following the cursor as I type.
7. My slow, restful breathing.
8. Tuning out the conversation around me. I habitually don’t pay much attention to conversation that doesn’t include me, but I habitually do remain alert to any mention of my name.
9. Taking a sip of tea (green tea with vanilla. Delicious!)

Nine easily identified habits. Five minutes. You do the math.

And that’s without going into the habits involved in actually doing the work, which, if it were paid work that I had trouble with, I have no doubt I’d find aid in Michelle’s steps, or in some of the tools Jean mentioned.

“Do your habits typically form intentionally or unconsciously?”

On the surface it seems a simple question with a simple answer. Both. We do some things repeatedly by choice or because we have to (which, in effect, is a choice to abide by the rules). We might choose to smoke cigarettes and eventually it becomes a habit. Or we might have to answer emails every day as part of our job, and over time they also become habitual.

But we might also have some habits which seem unconscious, and which we don’t really think of as forming intentionally either. This is most obvious with activities which seem instinctive. Take catching a ball as an example. Most people wouldn’t have to think about what to do if they see a ball flying towards their head. They get out of the way (or if you’re a sportsperson involved in ball games you might catch the ball instead. Or if you’re a martial arts expert you might pull off a spinning backflip, with your foot connecting with the ball right at the apex of your flip, sending the ball flying right back from whence it came).

But as we’re forming that habit we do need to make a conscious decision to act. When you’re a child if you were at all like me you probably got hit by a ball many times before you learnt to either catch it or get out of the way.

In other words, even if we’re unaware that our actions are forming habits, through our repeated, conscious choices that’s exactly what we’re doing.

“What approaches have you found successful in shaping them?”

My greatest successes in shaping habits have been through motivated repetition. This is similar to what John said about having power behind your efforts at making a change. Quite simply this involves doing whatever I can to make a repeated action enjoyable. This could even include disrupting part of the routine, such as varying the specific exercises during a daily yoga set. This means it takes longer for specific exercises/postures to becoming habitual, but it also means the habit of actually doing yoga on a daily basis is formed more easily, because the variety keeps it interesting (incidentally, going back to uni has caused the big changes in my daily routine, and that has still managed to disrupt that particular habit, much to my annoyance. Thankfully with my major assignments out of the way I can allow the habit to re-establish itself).

Motivated repetition is also helpful in changing a habit. I’m not much of a chef so I used to eat whatever was easiest. It got to the point where I’d stop trying to decide what to eat, I’d simply choose the same thing again and again. This would invariably mean pasta and a jar of pre-made sauce. Good quality sauce, but nonetheless pre-made and full of preservatives and nothing fresh.

Eventually I decided, for a variety of reasons, that this just wasn’t good enough. Yet since I didn’t have any interest in cooking it was difficult to make myself learn about what was good and what wasn’t, even though I was already aware of the impact poor diet could have. I used variety again to try to help motivate myself a little, and it did help, but I stumbled upon a greater motivating factor when I started cooking with a couple of housemates after moving into their house a couple of years ago. Cooking with others, and seeing them enjoy eating it, really made the whole thing fun. (incidentally I still like pasta, just with many more fresh ingredients)

Unfortunately now that I’m on my own again I don’t care so much, but I still prefer cooking for others, and I still like to try new recipes, and I still buy healthful foods.

As Jason pointed out, removing a habit is hard because whatever prompts us to perform a habit will continue to prompt us despite our efforts to stop it. It’s far more effective to redirect the stimulus towards a more desirable behaviour. Jason covers this fantastically, so I’ll leave it that after mentioning that neuroscience, particularly the work of Ann Graybiel, is showing what’s happening within the brain when we form habits, and why those neural changes make it so difficult to change those habits.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Awareness, Challenges, Habits, Learning, Personal Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.