What Habits Are
“Habit” is a word for an area where your subconscious mind controls your actions in the absence of input from your conscious mind. Most of your every day life is controlled by habits… you have a habit of breathing, sleeping, waking, etc. When most people talk about habits, though, they are referring to ones where you are aware of the habit but still relinquish control to your subconscious. Smoking, drinking, gambling… these are things where the decision to do it is made by your subconscious, and your conscious mind, while aware of what you are doing, is nothing but an observer.
There are two things you should know when looking at habits from this viewpoint. The first is that if your conscious mind involves itself, becoming more than an observer, it can break (or change) that habit. The second is that even if you do decide to make a change, but don’t give regular attention to maintaining the change, you will allow that area to slip back to your subconscious mind’s control. If you have established enough of a different pattern, that won’t matter, because the subconscious will continue along the new pattern, but if you slip before that new pattern is set, your subconscious will go back to its old ways, and your habit will return.
Now let’s get something straight… not all habits are bad. Taking a shower every day is a good habit, as are brushing your teeth, chewing with your mouth closed, and exercising. Smoking can even be looked at as a good habit, if the benefits outweight the costs… it’s just that the costs for smoking are cumulative, and quite high over the long term, where the benefits are NOT cumulative, and only valuable over a very short term. So one person may consider something a bad habit, where another might consider the same thing neutral or even good.
How Habits Form
You form habits by repeating the same response, or a very similar response, to the same, or very similar circumstances. You form your habit of breathing by exhaling when your lungs are empty of oxygen and inhaling when they are empty of air. You form your habit of smoking by picking up a cigarette in certain situations, which can then expand if you start doing so in more situations. Doing something one time is seldom enough to form a habit… it usually requires tens, hundreds, or even thousands of repetitions.
Performing the same action in response to non-similar circumstances can peripherally reinforce a habit that is forming, but the impact is small. That is, if you have a habit of smoking first thing in the morning, and you smoke one at lunch time, that isn’t really enough to expand the habit to smoking at lunch, and if you have smoked a few in the morning, then smoke one at lunch, it is unlikely to cement the habit of smoking in the morning, either.
How Habits Change
There are two kinds of change that can happen with a habit… replacement and removal. Replacing a habit is FAR easier than removing it.
When you replace a habit, what you do is change which action is fired when certain circumstances trigger a habit response from your subconscious. Basically, you have trained your subconscious to fire off a habit when certain circumstances arise. Replacing a habit simply points that trigger at a different habit, such as chewing gum instead of smoking. That’s relatively easy, because all you’re doing is choosing a different habit to fire, rather than trying to change the whole subconscious pattern of responding to those circumstances with a a habit.
Removing a habit is the other side of that coin… it is conditioning the subconscious to STOP responding to a certain set of circumstances by firing a habit trigger. This is mostly done by altering the way you perceive the set of circumstances. If you want to remove a habit of swearing, for example, you could train your subconscious to look at the circumstances where you would normally swear through a filter of “What if my baby was here?”. Even this doesn’t actually remove the habit trigger, though… it simply keeps your subconscious from seeing the set of circumstances that trigger it.
That last is why people who form a habit of smoking, then quit, can one day pick it up right where they left off. They changed their perception of the circumstances for the time where they quit, but then their perception goes back to, or close enough to, the old set that fire off that trigger. Abra cadabra… your habit is back!
The ability for “removed” habits to return is one more reason why replacing habits is more effective… even if that set of circumstances arises, it fires off the replacement habit, not the original. I haven’t really looked into replacement FOLLOWED by removal… that might be a relatively effective technique, so that even if you backslide it’s only to the replacement habit, not the original.
Conclusion
The reality is that if you want to alter a habit, the first thing you must do it become consciously aware of it. After you become aware, you have to make a conscious decision to change, and you’d better have motivation for the change, too (and internal sources of motivation are by far the strongest, most persistent sort). Then you can work on replacing the habit or removing the habit trigger.
Don’t expect instant results when trying to change habits. Chances are pretty good that you’ll have a fight on your hands for at least two weeks… often much longer. Just keep your focus on now, on the progress you have already made, the changes that you already have, not on the permanent change that is your goal… it’ll make it much easier to stick with it.
