Ah yes. The study of habit surely goes back to the invention of the printing press and has influenced us all. After all, we attend school to learn habits beneficial to our civilization. We never really unlearn most of them and even our rebellion is usually in the form of a habit of laziness.
That much can be done by consciously changing a single habit is really the most important insight. Any such takes time best not ruined by attempting too much in dealing with several habits. Better a single change is reinforcing one's self esteem as well.
I use a habit of fasting Monday, Wednesday and Friday to sound and beneficial effect. I use Sunday morning to attend a one hour meditation. These are all planned habits that accomplish two things. It ingrains carefulness in what i eat and it encourages me to do additional meditation during the week.
We all have daily habit regimes. My 'habits' impose a superior regime over those daily habits.
The real take home is that self inspection will allow you take control as much as is desirable.
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The lost hope of self-help
Habits – good or bad – were once a matter of ethical seriousness. Are they now just another technology of self-absorption?
With metronomic
regularity, new books about both the strange and the mundane things
human beings do with metronomic regularity become bestsellers. The
American ‘habit’ industry produces a huge popular literature examining
how habits are formed and how they are broken, how they enable and how
they hinder, and how they are a function of heroic self-discipline or a
confession of its absence.
They
maintain that people can cultivate not just a ‘learning habit’ but even
an ‘achievement habit’. They suggest that ‘Jesus habits’ and ‘joy
habits’ are liberating, but that the ‘worry habit’ is shackling. ‘Habits
not diets’ are the best way to free the self from the siren call of the
refrigerator.
According to the bestseller, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
(2014), there are pesky habits of individuals (like smoking and
procrastination), but also propitious habits of successful organisations
(such as the ‘latte habit loop’ devised by Starbucks for its baristas –
‘latte’ here is not milky coffee, but a behavioural mnemonic) and
social movements (like the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the early civil
rights era). Gretchen Rubin, the author of another bestseller, describes
herself as a ‘happiness expert’ and argues that habits are ‘the
invisible architecture of our daily lives’. Training attention not only
on this faintly perceptible structure of habits, but also on the shadows
it casts and the light it lets in, will make readers, Rubin promises,
‘better than before’.
Much
of today’s habits literature has a contemporary feeling, with its focus
on time management, individual productivity, and business success, but
the genre has a long history. For millennia, there has been a tradition
of august thinkers writing about how healthy habits promote – and
unhealthy habits undermine – self-fashioning and moral improvement. The
ancient Stoics, for example, sought to understand how perfecting one’s
reason by making it a habit could be the path to virtue. The
Enlightenment psychologist Maine de Biran had a harder time squaring
rigorous intellect and habitual practices, contending that ‘all that
happens exclusively under the sway of habit should lose its authority
before the eyes of reason’. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, was fascinated
with habits. He had his own übermenschliche work habits, while
at the same time he felt grateful to every bit of ‘misery and… sickness’
that came his way because they gave him ‘a hundred backdoors through
which I can escape from enduring habits’. Gertrude Stein couldn’t have
disagreed more. For Stein, the habits of ‘daily island life’ – those
simple, unglamorous rituals of cleaning, eating, sleeping – were the
means by which people who had lived through the savagery and chaos of
two world wars could orient themselves with the simple and commonplace.
As
ever, the habits literature of today promises order in a disordered
world, but it also comes with a subtle and significant difference. The
most important difference is not the forgotten art of style, though the
staccato prose, exclamation points, bland generalisations, and clichéd
motivational quotations of today’s literature neither stimulate the
imagination nor activate the will. Rather, it is the lost promise of
habits literature as a form of ethical inquiry and social commentary.
Individual improvement has always been the purpose of habits literature,
but the genre used to require appraising the society in which the self,
and the habits, formed. Historically, thinking about habits without
social contexts or ethical consequences was unthinkable. Today it is
axiomatic.
So
what is a habit? There is consistent agreement throughout this long
tradition that a habit is a learned behaviour repeated so often that it
becomes involuntary. When it is a repeated behaviour that comports with
ideals of health, righteousness, and wisdom, it can go by other names
such as ‘spiritual practice’, ‘ritual’, and ‘routine’. When it is a
repeated behaviour contrary to notions of health, righteousness, and
wisdom, its synonyms are ‘tick’, ‘obsession’, and ‘addiction’.
‘Sovereign will’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘necessity’ were once the
keywords of this literature; nowadays they are ‘mindfulness’,
‘happiness’, ‘autopilot’. The ‘thou shalts’ long common in theological
discussions of habits as spiritual practices have faded. Now the call
for action comes not from on High, but from the individual’s bad
conscience or longing for happiness.
Earlier
authors relied on logical argument or rhetorical power to explain what
the French philosopher Félix Ravaisson, in 1838, described thus: ‘The
progression of habit leads consciousness, by an uninterrupted
degradation, from will to instinct.’ Today’s authors turn to
longitudinal psychological studies suggesting that ‘as much as 40 per
cent of everything we do is done merely from habit’. Ravaisson and
today’s habits writers are both rattled by the prospect of human beings
being forced to do anything without their consent.
Steven Covey’s 1990 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
is a high-water mark in the contemporary American habits literature.
Covey spawned a mass market for all-things-seven habits (seven habits of
‘highly effective teens’, of ‘happy kids’, and of ‘network marketing
professionals’). He did so by taking the notion of a ‘paradigm shift’ –
coined by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn as a way of understanding
the structure of scientific revolutions – and applying it to the
structure of people’s perceptions about themselves and their worlds. If
we are looking for the origin of the the voracious American appetite for
self-improvement, however, we have to go back two centuries before
Covey, to Benjamin Franklin.
For
Franklin, cultivating wholesome habits was as crucial as discarding bad
ones for the ‘bold and arduous project of arriving at moral
perfection’. Franklin warned that those very behaviours that cunningly
‘took advantage of [our] inattention’ would keep us from ethical
improvement. In his Autobiography, the 79-year-old Franklin
recalled his youth when church services seemed to hold no promise for
his moral perfection. So he took matters into his own hands. He
developed a hierarchy of 12 virtues he wanted to become second nature:
temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity,
justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity. When a Quaker
friend gently reminded him that he had left out one virtue he could use a
little more of – humility – Franklin conceded and added it to the list
to bring it up to 13.
Franklin had a staff of subordinates to help him cultivate self-reliance
He
then figured out the habits that would help ingrain these virtues. For
temperance: ‘Eat not to dullness, drink not to elevation.’ For
tranquillity: ‘Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or
unavoidable.’ And for the elusive humility he pulled out the big guns:
‘Imitate Jesus and Socrates.’ Franklin invented what he described as a
‘method’, and what the French philosopher Michel Foucault two centuries
later would characterise as a ‘technology of the self’, to track his
habits. Today’s habits writers would simply call it a chart. He put the
days of the week along the X-axis, the virtues he sought to habituate on
the Y-axis; a black dot meant he had slipped up on that day in that
virtue, while a column of clear blocks meant a virtuous day – a clear
conscience. He included mottos from Cato, Cicero, and the Proverbs of
Solomon to inspire him and encourage his practice of particular virtues.
Franklin’s
‘13 virtues’ method continues to be put to use in elementary school
curricula and self-help manuals. His style of graphing, charting, and
mantra-deploying technologies of the self are replicated in the habits
literature in all sorts of ways. Practitioners of personal growth
advocate making a ‘core values’ chart so that all of one’s daily
commitments and activities comport with one’s life goals. The Post-it
method involves sticking a yellow note on the food pantry door to help
the reader’s higher self to stop his lower self from mindless munching: are you truly hungry, or just bored?
There’s also the smartphone method for habit-breaking and making. Set a
smartphone timer to ring every 30 minutes either with pleasing church
bells or a jolting honk of a horn to make sure the habituator is aware
of both good habits and bad ones.
Not
unlike today’s habit industry, Franklin also had his social blindspots.
In addition to his knack for industriousness and regimentation, he had
his common-law wife Deborah to take care of their two children and his
illegitimate son; a devoted sister Jane, who, though an impoverished
mother of 12, served as her elder brother’s scribe, family
record-keeper, and personal soap-maker; as well as household slaves who
tended to his earthly needs so that he could devote his time to
cultivating his virtues. He had, in short, a virtual staff of loved ones
and subordinates to help him cultivate his self-reliance. Today’s habit
industry is similarly blinkered about the social and economic
architecture which for many makes cultivating personally-rewarding
habits possible.
For
self-help readers who like to base their habit-management on ancient
east Asian wisdom, Lao-Tzu’s dictum that ‘a journey of a thousand miles
begins with one step’ reassures them not to be anxious about reforming a
persistent habit. Others might prefer the advice of that jocular
American sage, Mark Twain, who similarly observes: ‘Habit is habit, and
not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a
step at a time.’ Carl Jung, by contrast, offers a behaviouralist
approach. ‘We seldom get rid of an evil merely by understanding its
causes,’ he argues, observing that obstinate habits ‘do not disappear
until replaced by other habits’. Abigail van Buren, better known as
‘Dear Abby’, is more upbeat: ‘A bad habit never disappears miraculously.
It’s an undo-it-yourself project.’
Of
all of the habit prophets celebrated today, the Renaissance essayist
and philosopher Michel de Montaigne is perhaps the most revered.
Especially when the habit under examination is enervating (or even
debilitating), habit experts turn to his meditations on the ‘sleep of
habit’ that dulls the individual to herself and her world. ‘For in
truth,’ Montaigne wrote, ‘habit is a violent and treacherous
schoolmistress. She establishes in us, little by little, stealthily, the
foothold of her authority… with the help of time, she soon uncovers to
us a furious and tyrannical face against which we no longer have the
liberty of even raising our eyes.’ Whether the habit in question is
procrastination or nervous hair-twirling, authors have found this
particular quotation indispensable.
One cannot blame these authors for turning to Montaigne. In Of Habit, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law
(1580), he provides a treasure trove of images for thinking about how
practices calcified into habits can deform the self. What is often
missed is his equally urgent insistence that habits deform one’s
understanding of others. What was insidious about one’s own silent
consent to certain habits was not only that they ‘unhinged’ one from
critical reason and self-reflection, but also that they blunted one’s
ability to discern the beauty and dignity of other people. For
Montaigne, the rumoured cannibalism in the New World was no more
grotesque than the barbarism of the Old, and men lying with men no
weirder then men lying with women. Thus, Montaigne’s scrutiny of habit
also encouraged a scrutiny of the ethnocentrism and moral chauvinism of
one’s own society.
The
American philosopher and psychologist William James also appears
frequently as an authority in the habits literature. It is not because
the habits writers are philosophical pragmatists. James is a favourite
because of his ‘fly-wheel’ metaphor, from his 1890 Principles of Psychology:
Habit is … the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices … from which the man can … [not] escape. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
If
this chilling image of a deterministic universe seems hard to square
with James’s (occasionally) buoyant ‘will-to-believe’ pragmatism,
perhaps it is because it was also hard for James himself. He was riddled
with deep and paralysing bouts of ‘neurasthenia’, and struggled to find
medicine a rewarding career after turning away from his childhood dream
of being an artist. James developed pragmatism to work between these
warring intellectual impulses; on the one hand, his ‘tender-minded’
romantic longings, and on the other, his 'tough-minded’ desire for
scientific authority.
This
oft-quoted passage has a vibrant life in the habits literature. But the
passage to follow merits mention too. There James, who will never let
determinism get the last word, challenges this morbid version of habit,
and calls upon the will to fight back. James takes the reader from
macabre nay-saying, caught in the fly-wheel of a predestined world of
habits, to yea-saying maxims of overcoming. James’s message here is not
to be satisfied by maxims. Don’t just shout maxims back at a deterministic universe, James exhorts, act on them by remaking habits to be fruits of your own will by practising them over and over and over again. ‘Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day …
[Be] the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated
attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He
will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his
softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.’
The
fuller passage does more to show readers a conflicted self like their
own, struggling to believe in and to exercise free will, despite an
intimate awareness of a universe that conspires against it.
Even
more important are James’s moral concerns, bound up in his
preoccupation with the psychology of habit. James suspected that habits –
dumb, blind, and often the result of something arbitrary or accidental –
were the actions and beliefs people mistakenly ascribe to nature or
necessity. But for James, the things casually attributed to the ‘human
condition’ are nothing of the sort. They are just the condition human
beings have gotten themselves into. And yet the promise of this
revelation wasn’t simply that it should free the self from sea salt
brownies and wasting time on Facebook, it was that it could liberate
modern societies from their penchant for violence and militarism. In
this light, James’s ‘Laws of Habit’ argument is best understood in
relation to his ‘Moral Equivalent of War’. Published shortly before his
death, the latter makes the case for redirecting habits of devotion,
duty, and strenuosity, from moral campaigns fuelled by hatred to those
that foster harmony; in essence, from warfare to social welfare.
Today’s
habit authors do surprisingly little moralising. They do not hint that
smoking makes the reader a bad person. They suggest she cut the habit
because it makes her lungs black
For
all the great historical thinkers and writers on habit who appear in
today’s habits literature, two major figures are curiously absent:
Alexis de Tocqueville and Arnold Toynbee. De Tocqueville and Toynbee’s
observations about habit – American habits in particular – are as
relevant today as they were when de Tocqueville visited America in 1831,
and Toynbee in 1964-65. For de Tocqueville, what he called ‘habits of
the heart’ – family relations, religion, notions of belonging – were
crucial for fostering and sustaining a democracy. He thought the absence
of these habits of affiliation might ‘some day prove fatal to its
liberties’. Though de Tocqueville coined the term ‘individualism’, he
did not think that habits belonged to the atomised human being, but
rather to the social self. Similarly, when Toynbee wrote Change and Habit: The Challenge of Our Time (1966),
he highlighted the dangers in the Cold War world, of Americans’
persistent parochial habits of heart and mind that kept them from
thinking as citizens of the whole ‘human race’. For Toynbee, much like
de Tocqueville, it was habits in the aggregate – not in isolation – that
presented the greatest promises, and also the principal perils, for
human flourishing. As with Montaigne, habits were social things.
There
is much to recommend in today’s habit industry. It can awaken readers
to new perspectives on themselves and their world. It can encourage
people to take up challenging new practices that might roughen up the
smooth grooves of familiar rituals, or it might help to chart a smooth
new path through the rocky terrain of life.
But
still, there is also something troubling about the habits literature of
the present, and it is not its moralising tendencies. It may be that
today’s habit authors do surprisingly little moralising. They do not
encourage the reader to deny herself a cigarette by hinting that smoking
makes her a bad person. They suggest she cut the habit because it makes
her clothes smell and her lungs black. Nor do they insist she break her
procrastination habit because she has an ethical obligation to get that
report to her boss by 10am as promised. They encourage her to break her
procrastination habit because she wants to keep her job and her
vitality.
The
shortcoming of this new habits industry is that it has lost touch with
the social and ethical dimensions of habit talk so central to the
classics in the genre. To be sure, habits authors have long adopted what
now is called behaviouralist approach to the making and unmaking of
habits. But Franklin’s ‘methods’ (imperfect as they were), Montaigne’s
relativism, and James’s pragmatism demonstrate that habits are more than
technologies of the individual self. They are also cultural practices,
tethered to the social and economic contexts, and they have ethical
implications. When today’s habit aficionados figure this out, they will
truly offer readers a better self and a better society.
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