Habits

A habit is anything that psychology broadly classifies as “conditioned response”. Unless we’re making a conscious choice, we’re using habits to dictate our behaviors.

Habits are a type of neurological story with a relatively simple mechanism:

  1. A trigger starts the habit as a burst of dopamine in the brain, and we regard it as a perceived fact. It’s either completely environmental (e.g., sight, sound or sentence) or in our perceptions (e.g, memory, feeling, a simple thought).
  2. A method of thinking/doing. That method is a series of programmed steps. That method works to attain a reward.
  3. A reward as another dopamine flow that sits at the end of a method. The reward could be anything real or imagined, including a feeling or sense of duty. That reward comes through a belief that the current incident will play out the same way memory had encoded.

Habits include any response to our environment, but are also how our conscious decisions become subconscious.

Habits are more powerful than mere decisions because they bypass our conscious mind, which removes our internal negotiation from the decision-making process and simply creates cravings for certain things. We don’t usually need to learn how habits work because they work automatically, though awareness of our habits can be useful for diagnosing.

We chemically experience pleasure when we create the results we expected, but it’s diminished when we don’t. While it gets complicated with addictions, it’s how we change ourselves to fit the situation.

When you examine habit methods closer, each method is built from other smaller habits. Starting with infancy, we build habits into ever-increasing structures:

  1. Before people can talk, they attempt to imitate their guardians. They build associations between sounds and ideas (“baby talk”) and try basic activities (“grab”).
  2. With routine use, those sounds become clearer and compound into elaborate expressions (“toddler speak”) and complex maneuvers (“using a fork”).
  3. Through rote memorization, they learn and can reproduce representations of familiar sounds and ideas (“language“) and develop fine motor skills (“writing”).
  4. After enough experience, they chunk their habits together to understand and communicate complex ideas (“words/sentences/paragraphs”) and increase their motor skills even further (“cursive writing”).
  5. If you’re reading this, you’ve done it without paying attention. You’re so reliable at it that you’ll fix the typos as you red automatically (as you may have just noticed).

Automation

Everything with a routine or pattern can (and will) become a habit. Habits simplify life because it removes the need to think about mundane matters by using information in the environment instead. In fact, they do such a good job that they prevent self-awareness when left alone.

By adulthood, 90% of our lives’ decisions are automated into habits:

Mathematically, habits have an exponential curve. The first month may produce 4 of something, the second produces 12, the third 40, and so on.

Living “in the moment” is the only way to fight habits’ eventual takeover. Anytime we feel an impulse or urge, a habit is triggering.

As we age, habits become notoriously difficult to change, mostly because our brains have run huge swathes of neural pathways down time-tested paths. While it’s possible to change, we tend to fear it more as we become old because we’ve grown accustomed to the way we had done things.

We’re not conscious of habits, and time passes much more quickly when we let them run our lives. People will remember the events of their first 20 years (especially adolescence) much more than the next 30 because there are comparatively few new events that require new decisions.

Part of a habit’s tenacity comes from how it has two dopamine bumps:

  1. We can often perform a task that has no more reward to it, but starting it made us feel good.
  2. We can do things we don’t want to do at all, but prior experience at the end makes us expect it will feel good.
  3. Even when a task is no longer rewarding in any tangible way, the familiarity of it can still provide a rewarding experience.

Adaptations

Humans are the only creatures on this planet that can stop mid-habit and question their actions and thoughts. That knowledge gives us the profound power to change our flow of behavior with new decisions.

Whenever the pleasure of a reward lasts for more than 8 seconds, it’s hitting far more than mere animal stimuli. At that point, it affects our souls.

The pleasurable reward for habits diminishes as we do it more frequently. While the good life requires desiring to grow, addicts often focus on intensifying pleasure instead of finding meaning in growth.

We can develop pleasure from the habit of not doing a habit, which is often how addicts can often create a routine of relapse and recovery. Since our experiences are so relative, abstinence can actually intensify our pleasure.

Further, we can program a pleasure reward from painful things that give no outward benefit. Mental disorders from our upbringing can make us believe we shouldn’t have something good, making a relatively non-moral matter into a moral one.

Even when there’s no benefit, we feel comfortable with what we’re familiar with. Our guardians raised us in a culture that we believed as children to be “the best way”, irrespective of reality, and it’s not uncommon for people to persist in it, at least partly.

On occasion, a minority of people will break so hard from their culture that they feel more comfortable with change than with familiarity. These people tend to break rules and start trends. If they’re successful enough, their risks will pay off.

Good/Bad

One of the benefits of habits is that it frees up our mind to think about other things. If we still analyze our established habits instead of letting the subconscious perform the tasks, we tend to produce inferior results than if we had simply trusted our habits.

Bad habits destroy us. We usually accept bad habits because we see a short-term benefit that offsets long-term adverse consequences. Or, to put more plainly, hard work pays off tomorrow while laziness pays off now.

All virtues are good habits, as well as all outward success. At the same time, habits also foster evil and failure as well.

One unique quality that humanity has compared to any other organism is the ability to stop mid-habit and ask “why am I doing this?” We can often do it constantly, but can often have the ability stifled by trauma. If someone experiences enough trauma as they age without resolving it, they become completely automated into strange, largely obsolete patterns.

The only way to kill a bad habit is to either spend lots of time not doing the habit or reprogram the habit to something else as a reward. Quitting outright is very difficult, and even years later can surge back again if we do it only once. Reconditioning a habit is much easier, and often is the only difference between failure and success at pretty much anything.

Meaningfulness

If anyone performs a habit, but finds meaning in it, it’s a tradition.

Traditions maintain society and bind groups together, mostly in how practicing them reinforces what everyone already knows.

However, traditions only have value to the degree they’re not boring. As soon as they’re boring, they’re simply a mindless set of tasks to accomplish a different purpose. Each of our personalities’ openness to new experience dictates how fast we get bored.


Application

While habits are inherently neutral, the results they create and their original motivation can determine if they’re good or bad. Staying on top of them requires changing to attain the results you want.

To change our habits, we must control our methods, since we can only control our triggers in a cult and have no control over the results directly.

Bad habits are wildly destructive, but they’re not irredeemable. People can change their methods to suit their needs while sidestepping the adverse behaviors that first caused their issues.

Habits compound, so we can’t afford to let another day persist knowing of a bad habit and not wishing to change it. It only gets harder as we get older.

Life is relatively short, but the experience becomes shorter when we don’t perceive reality from habitual patterns. Thus, we must only do habits that build the good life and stop all destructive habits immediately to avoid making life even more short or meaningless.

Habits are a string of pleasure/method/pleasure. For that reason it can string together into other habits (pleasure/method/pleasure/method/pleasure). Over time, it can lead to severe results:

The value of tradition comes through how much we find meaning in it, so getting a group to find meaning requires several simultaneous approaches:

  1. Give the same thing for the low-openness people.
  2. Give new things for the high-openness people.
  3. Make a small part of it mandatory that involves everyone, and the rest being optional as people desire to do it.