“We need habits. Without them, we couldn’t bath, get dressed, and find our way through the grocery store. Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.”
– Henry James
Habits work to increase efficiency in the brain and body and they allow us to go on auto-pilot while completing so called mindless tasks.
- Washing the dishes, walking down a flight of stairs, or tying our shoes.
Think of a life without habits. A life spent learning these mundane tasks over and over.
- Instead of effortlessly going up the stairs, you would have to learn each time. Life would be slow, frustrating, and vastly inefficient.
Habits grease the wheels of life. But the efficiency of habit comes with a price.
- By making our actions instinctive, you become mindless. Habits sometimes take away our conscious power to choose and can limit our options.
- Many of us have bad habits like habitual vices like eating sugary foods, smoking, drinking, watching too much TV, coffee, etc.
We all know what if feels like to be drawn to something because of habit.
- How easy it is to devour a bag of potato chips
In these situations, the efficiency of habit overcomes our capacity to choose. The brain switches to auto-pilot, with our bad habit at the controls. In subtle ways, this happens all day long.
- We get up, take a shower, and drive to work along the same route, day after day.
This ingrained chain of habits can also make change daunting.
Re-source: Rewire
an instance of rewiring something : change
“While our habits often control us; by exerting conscious choice, we can learn how to control them.”
– William James
- We can’t change all of our habits overnight. Through conscious practice, we can slowly re-wire the system of new, more productive habits.
- The key is awareness; noticing. This is where change starts.
- When we become aware of our habits, we can now choose whether to follow our usually unconscious conditioning or chart a new pathway of habit.
By learning to direct your attention, you will begin to shape your mind and develop habits that will help shape your life.
By shifting our habitual thought patterns and behaviors, we activate and establish new neural structures in the brain. And by activating these structures again and again, we re-wire the brain to create a new set of habits.
You alone choose moment by moment who and how you want to be in the world. Pay attention what is going on in your brain, own your power, and show up in your life.
craving and resource from “Start Here” – master the lifelong habit of well-being – by Eric Langshur and Nate Klemp
