Article for sharing - HABIT! [Part 1]

This simple five letter word "HABIT" have impacted each one's daily life, be it through our actions, behaviours, spoken words, our likes and dislikes. Habits can be either good or bad. Through our growing years we are always being taught to adopt good habits in life! Those who have bad habits in their life will normally have trouble of getting rid of them, says the phrase "bad habits die hard!"

Let me share with you all an interesting article related to HABIT in order to have a better understanding of it.

We're Creatures of Habit. WHY?

by Donald D. Schroeder

Without habits we could not function--perhaps even survive. That's the good side of habits. Habits allow us to perform an astronomical number of actions without significant conscious thought, effort, or undue attention--like tying our shoes, buttoning a shirt, riding a bike, walking, running, typing, remembering a telephone number, even responding to danger.

What a Habit is

A habit is a learned pattern of acting or thinking or feeling. It is not a pattern we are born with, as many lower creature responses are. Don't confuse these learned patterns with inborn or "wired-in" involuntary responses such as digesting, breathing, sweating or shivering at cold. Developing habits, particularly if they are good habits, allows us to conserve higher mental processes for more demanding tasks and challenges. By contrast, wrong habits waste human energy and limit human growth and development.

A habit starts to form when we respond to something--physically, mentally or emotionally--several times. How many responses are required to start a habit may vary from person to person or with different kinds of stimuli.

But as we respond, a pattern starts to occur, neural circuits and pathways in the marvelous human brain and nervous system are formed. Precisely what happens in the human mind and body is even now beyond the mind of man to fully understand.

Learning patterns, at first, go into the brain's short-term memory system. As they become more establised they move over into the brain's long-term storage center. This much is perceived by those scientists who have studied the subject of habits.

Then the brain activity at which humans excel--memory--goes to work so that a specific message or stimulus triggers an automatic response, thought or feeling. We call a lesson that the brain's cells have learned well enough to accomplish automatically, without thought, a habit.

Good habits and bad habits are formed essentially the same way. Therefore it is critically important for parents to see that children establish good habits particularly in early years of life. Habits are difficult to unlearn. The brain apparently never totally "forgets" bad habits, although they may drop out of dominance in one's life through lack of use, or if replaced by another, it is hoped, better habit.

What we call human personality, in its broadest sense, is to a large extent a composition of thousands of individual and specific habit traits. Humans are compounds of various habits. Thoughts a human thinks are not habitual, of course, but patterns of thought very much tend to become habitual. Some people develop sound thought patterns; others are habitually scatterbrained.

The capacity to form habits is possible with most higher living things. But the way the marvelous human mind was created with the spirit in man, humans, more than any other creatures and more than we care to admit, are creatures of habits--habits of thinking, habits of acting, habits of feeling.

"The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken"

~ Samuel Johnson ~

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