THE POWER OF HABIT

“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” Mark Twain

You know the power of habit, do you not? The power is this—repeat anything often enough and before long it becomes the way you operate. If a behavioral habit, it becomes what you default to doing even when you try not to default to it. If a mental habit, it becomes your seemingly inherent and innate way of thinking. You just think that way. It happens faster than the speed of light—it occurs at the speed of thought! If an emotional habit, then before you can blink, off goes the emotion and the emotional state and if it is an unresourceful state, you are caught up in that emotion, hijacked by it and at its mercy. Habits are powerful, are they not?

We not only have habits of behavior, thought, and emotion, we have habits of talk, linguistic habits, non- verbal habits, habits of our gestures and movements and posture. We have habits of eating, drinking, exercising, not-exercising, reading, studying, not-studying; we have all kinds of habits. And once established, it’s the nature of habits to have a life of their own, or at least it seems that way.

It seems that way because, as we say, whatever was consciously intentional now “drops out of conscious awareness into our unconscious mind.” Now it is run by “the unconscious.” That is, our larger mind or our mind that is outside-of-consciousness now accepts the “habit” as if it were a computer “program.” And so it seems that by our repeated and habituated habits— we “program” ourselves to think, feel, speak, act, relate, etc. in certain standardized ways.

And overall, this is good; it is a positive value. Gregory Bateson described this as one of the “ecologies of the mind” (Bateson, 1972, Steps to an Ecology of Mind). The ecology is that you can save the energy and effort of conscious thought by “programming” into you a dependable and regular way of thinking, feeling, acting, relating, etc. Then you don’t have to think about it. And, in fact, after awhile, you can’t think about it. It drops outside of your conscious awareness. And so it has a life of its own so to speak.

When we look up definitions of habits, we find that a habit is any succession of single acts which follow each other automatically. Ah, that’s the key, isn’t it— automatically. When you repeat something over and over, you thereby establish it as a habitual way of operating. And so you create a “habit.” At a neurological level, you are activating the same neuro-pathways and so with each repetition, it becomes easier and easier for you to do the same thing. And this is great if what you are repeating is empowering you, making your mind and body healthier and more robust. It is great if it is an accurate and productive process that is unleashing more of your potentials.

But then there is the other side. It is not great, but terrible and destructive and even toxic if the habit you are establishing is undermining your mind and body, if it is enslaving you to your emotions, if it is dis- empowering you, making you more and more addicted to destructive forces and making you feel helpless, hopeless, and powerless. If your habitual way of operating is doing that, then you are creating a psychological gravitational pull that will automatically keep bringing you down.

Now regarding the power of habit, everything habituates. This wonderful and frightening power generates both our most excellent and our most problematic states. The difference lies in the content of what we habituate. Yet here’s another facet of this power. We can intentionally plan and develop new habits. What habit would you like to create? Where and when would that habit occur? What set of actions do you need to do to begin forming that habit? Are you willing to repeat it until it becomes automatic?

If you find problems doing that, then you probably need to undo (deframe) your current habit so that you get it out of the way so it doesn’t interfere with learning the new habit. How do you do this? First, by making your current automatic unconscious habit conscious. Bring it into consciousness by noticing when and where it occurs, what sets it off, etc. Tease the habit back into consciousness so that you can have choice again.

Then begin to practice the new steps, mindfully, consciously, and intentionally. Walk through them and attach reward or pleasure to them so that they are reinforced. A long time ago, psychologist William James wrote about this: “When a resolve or a fine glow of a feeling is allowed to evaporate without bearing practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder the discharge of future resolutions and emotions. ... Never should we suffer ourselves to have an emotion at a play, concert, or upon reading a book, without expressing it afterward in some active way. Let the expression be the least thing in the world— speaking genially to one’s grandmother ... but let it not fail to take place.” (Psychology: A Briefer Course).

The power of habits— first to integrate and, as it were, “program” an efficient response-pattern into ourselves and then, once a habit has run its course, to un-install it so that a new and more effective one can replace it. So what set of responses would you like to turn into a habit? To turn into an unconscious competence? You can, you know.