On the Value of Habits and Why We Should Develop Them

 "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." - Aristotle.

Habit as Essential to Every Day Life
Look around us and you will realize that we could not function without habit. 99% of everything we do is an activity conducted out of habit, rather than out of new learning or new decisions. Decisions and learning take energy expenditure, and most of what we do every day could not be done without the chemical channels literally carved into our brains by habit. We would spend all day trying to insert a button into a the button hole on a shirt if we did not have the ability to develop life-long habit. This suggests that habit is a kind of learning. Once learned, the brain changes physically to accommodate for the new learning, and like a well-carved out river bed, little will disturb the flow of the river except land-slides or extraordinary human power. This means our habits, over time, will become ingrained into us like grand-canyons delved by slow-moving glacial ice. Persistence pays off with well-honed habits. The tortoise wins the raise every time, whether it be developing a habit, climbing mountains, climbing the corporate ladder, or whittling your middle. So, think twice next time you decide to "break" a developing or well-established habit you've been working on.

William James on Habit
William James is particularly insightful when it comes to habit. "The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right."- William James


What is a Habit?
Habits are what allow us to follow diets through the years, as they become integrated into our lifestyles. Habits allow us to go from ice-cream slurpers to celery munchers in a mere matter of months if continued uninterrupted. Habits allow us to go from undecided undergraduates to highly skilled scientists, doctors, teachers, police officers, and business people. It is said that an activity must be practiced 30 times, consecutively, before it becomes a habit and that 10,000 hours must be spent on a subject for that person to become an expert in it. That, then means that there are 30 times for us to fail before the activity becomes a full habit, in which the task is more or less automatic. But on the wonderful flip-side, this means that there also only 30 times before it becomes second-nature. Only 30 times before we capture the indelible solution to our flakiness, unpredictability, money and weight-loss problems. Invest in this. Invest in yourself. Remember that habit, ultimately, is a personal investment in yourself, much like money in a bank that you yourself managed, an investment fund you proudly managed. Think of that. The potential for success is boundless after that.

The silver-lining, is that once we do become full embracers of those habits, life is significantly easier, saving us oodles of agonizing, stressful hours as we pine about when or how to get back on track with life and what we want. What we want gets done with habit. Anything great needs habit. Anything accomplished needs habit. Just 30 times on average, and we have mastered 95% of the problem- developing the habit to begin with. The rest of it is smooth sailing. Master the habit and you have a solution, almost without fail every single time. 

Newton's "Law of Habit"
"Every object continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless compelled to change that state by external forces acted upon it." Like Newton's first law of motion, a habit will continue until something distracts you or knocks you out of the regular course of events, such as an invitation to a party on a Tuesday night with your friends when you originally planned to attend your weekly spin-class. Tragically, this party could knock your spinning habit out of its orbit, depending on the number of times you've attended the spin class and the strength of your emotional association with this habit.

This is why it's so important to not go to that party on Tuesday and continue attending your weekly spinning class. The energy needed to return to the spinning class the following week will be significantly greater than the week of the party, and if you don't go the second week, exponentially harder after that. Thus, knowing how great a difference it takes to elevate oneself from the energy level of the habit once it's fallen to the first, like an electron knocked from its orbit. From this, we start to get a picture of how important it is for us to stay on track with our habits no matter how much we may be tempted by other events.

So, pick up those celery sticks, almonds and fresh veggies or whatever it is you want to develop a habit in. Munch away, and combined with proper support and some information, to your surprise, you can find yourself with a desire for vegetables in no time. Pick up those exam books and start ploughing away for an hour or two a night. Pretty soon you will be missing the quiet night time routine with your books. Just be aware that the first hour, and the second, and even the third time will be a struggle. Note that every time you sit down to study or eat carrots instead of brownies the difficulty will become less and the enjoyment greater. As when you were a child and finally got all the way across the monkey bars on your own, pretty soon you will even start to feel the same kind of pride and confidence that you did then and look forward to your study time or your fresh salad with light vinagarette on the side. If you slip up, remember, "two steps forward, one step backward." Continue on with your attempts as if nothing happened. Stick to your routine. Stay calm and carry on and have confidence that your actions will result in a positive end and smooth-sailing habits.

Good Habits and Bad Habits
James informs us how important it is to actually try to develop habits that may be good for us. It's important to note that habits are not only a means to help us to good for our selves and others, but a means to do unhealthy or unsafe things, as well. The same habits that keep our teeth healthy also make us fat, blacken our lungs, and deepen our credit card debt. The difference is that it takes about five times on average to develop a "bad" habit, versus 30 times on average to develop a "good" habit.

This has to do with the different chemical pathways and the ways that those chemical pathways act on our brains. When you eat chocolate ice cream, dopamine, a relaxant and "feel good" chemical floods the brain. The receptors in the brain remember this this feeling and connect chocolate ice cream with relaxation, and therefore as your head sinks into your chest and your eyelids struggle to stay open, wallah! you have the makings for a 3 p.m. craving for chocolate ice cream. This association between feeling good and ice cream becomes stronger with each satisfying of the craving, as with each bite you are reinforcing the brain's belief that ice cream induces relaxation.

Taking It Home
So, what is the best strategy? Armed with this knowledge, you can take further steps to make yourself aware of the danger of participating in "bad" habits and of the perils of caving into temptation while establishing or reinforcing a "good" habit. Ultimately, you run a huge risk of expending thousands of hours re-establishing your good habits every time you allow yourself "just this time." For the sake of spending those hours doing something enjoyable, stick to your good habits.

However, if you find yourself loathing the activities of habit, this is a separate matter that must be addressed first, in which you should examine your thought process to find out where the negative feelings are originating and whether or not the habit is actually worth pursuing.

Resources from: The Principles of Psychology, 1890 ch. 4 "Habit" by William James