Man and his creature of habit - on the power of our habits and how we can change them
"Man and his creature of habit"
Are you sometimes used to it too?
That your creature of habit rewards you
when you feed it according to its desires
far from forward-thinking diligence
but with readily available, dopaminergic, comfortably pleasurable
comfortably pleasurable mountains of stimulus
with all that the hands quickly grasp
without touching comfort zone boundaries
and at the same time there are the visions
inside us that whisper - it would be worthwhile
to educate our creature of habit
instead of fleeing back into "Tomorrow for sure!".
For when our creature of habit weighs us down
sluggish, confused, tugging at the leash
instead of walking cheerfully forward with us,
to where we already see ourselves,
it's time to grab our everyday leash
instead of letting ourselves be dragged so unconsciously
to lead us to where we would still like to be,
to birth our potentials into being.
In this way the creature of habit becomes a faithful companion
the best friend and pathfinder
is guided instead of the other way around,
and with each habit nourished anew
to get used to the unfamiliar with you from time to time
to the unfamiliar - it will reward you.
"The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken" (Warren Buffett).
Today's article is about understanding the background of our habits, and thus ourselves, a little better. After all, it is estimated that they make up about 70% of our waking consciousness.³
What exactly is behind habits, how do they develop and how can we use them to our best advantage instead of letting them limit us, let alone determine us?
We use the term habit to describe relatively automated reaction sequences consisting of trigger, action and feedback (e.g. reward). Such habitual loops develop over time through repeated learning and practice processes and involve complex neurobiological processes. We find these habitual loops not only in the motor area, i.e. as certain physical sequences and combinations, but also in the form of thinking habits that accompany and shape us, for example, in problem-solving, either in a beneficial or in an obstructive way¹.
According to the principle "Neurons that fire together, wire together" (Donald Hebb), habits can be understood as neuronal traces - like trails that have established themselves over a longer period of time through repeated wiring of different stations in our brain.
How long this period spans is neither clearly scientifically proven, nor can it be applied to every person as a "one size fits all" rule, but can vary greatly from person to person.
For example, one study² concluded that it took between 18 and 254 days for study participants to establish a new habit to the point where it was mostly fluid and automatic. Which is not to say, of course, that at some point we cross some kind of threshold after which we no longer need to put any effort into our actions at all. Here it also depends very much on the behaviour under consideration. If it is the fingerings when playing the piano, after a longer period of time less conscious decision-making effort will be necessary than with the newly established yoga routine. After all, we are not magically and quasi-passively moved to the yoga studio on the mat at some point.
The process in which new habits become more and more crystallised involves a shift in the corresponding neuronal processes in the brain.³
While at the beginning a new habit is still connected in the area of the brain that is responsible for our language and conscious thinking (the so-called cerebral cortex, specifically the prefrontal cortex), with increasing repetition this process moves into deeper layers, the so-called basal ganglia.³
This freeing up of capacities in our front brain areas is intended to ensure that we have enough brainpower left over to be able to make conscious decisions for our life management, problem solving and goals. One could also say: for everything unusual, so to speak, neuronally unfamiliar terrain.
Imagine if this process of habituation didn't exist and they spent a lifetime driving like a learner driver, working like a first-year apprentice, talking like a toddler and living in their hometown like a newly moved in - that would certainly be quite exhausting, let alone compatible with the many other (everyday) challenges.
Our brain wants to manage its energy as efficiently as possible, and that is precisely why the habituation processes described above are so important and necessary. However, as with pretty much everything in life, there is a flip side to this coin.
In those situations in which our energy budget is already tight, so to speak, or even overdrawn (for example, when the decisions made today were already too many, the hangover and hunger too great and the sleep too little), we particularly like to fall back into our automatisms - unfortunately also into those that we actually want to discard.
"All animals in nature are out to conserve energy, and humans are no exception. This means that our behaviour always seeks the path of least resistance, which offers us the prospect of rewards at the lowest possible cost.⁴
This is exactly why willpower alone will not be enough in the long run, because these exhausted states and external stressors cannot be completely avoided in life.
In the sense of a "away from, towards" strategy (known from Neurolinguistic Programming, NLP for short)⁷, the first thing is to think about the habits we no longer want, towards those we want to build up instead.
This strategy is based on the assumption that our subconscious can process and implement positively formulated inputs better. And on the fact that our neuronal pathways cannot simply be erased, but rather are expanded via new, repeated circuitry.
So the more "alternative exits" you build into your habituated loops, the stronger your neuronal flexibility and thus your inner freedom of action becomes.
A few concrete ideas are summarised below: