Habits

A behaviour pattern that has been learned so thoroughly that it becomes automatic, requiring no conscious action.

There are good habits and bad habits but the main point about them is that they are all behaviour patterns that have been so thoroughly learned that they are done automatically, without any conscious effort. If fact, if you concentrate on a habit it often causes the habitual behaviour pattern to break down. If you’re a piano player, try thinking about your finger movements when you play a well-known tune on the keyboard – you make more mistakes than you do when you let your fingers do the thinking.

Habitual behaviour patterns are, therefore, useful because they can be carried out effortlessly and free us to concentrate our energies on other things. But the difficulty with habits is that they are hard to change. Breaking a habit, be it overeating, over drinking, biting your nails or jumping to conclusions, is a tall order.

The key to success is to:

• identify precisely when you indulge in the habit, and what ingredients are present in the situation that triggers it. Then see what you can do to change the circumstances of the situation. So if, for example, you always smoke a cigarette when you have a cup of coffee, avoid drinking coffee.
  
  
• replace the habit with something else rather than leaving a void. Clearly the replacement needs to be something desirable or at least less harmful than the original habit you are seeking to break. So, for example, it would be better to stick your head out of the window and take in six large gulps of air instead of smoking a cigarette than to cut out smoking and put nothing in its place.
  
  
• reward yourself each time you succeed in breaking the habit. This acts as positive reinforcement. The rewards could be quick and simple, such as reading the newspaper for five minutes, or having a quick chat on the phone with a friend.

These three actions are vastly superior to breaking a habit by will-power alone. Will-power is where you stop a habit without changing the situation (ie you still drink coffee), or replace the habit with another activity, or reward yourself. Not surprisingly will-power has a poor track record when it comes to permanently breaking entrenched behaviour patterns.