What's your opinion about habits? Are they helpful? Tiresome? Facilitory? Bad habits also exist and they typically are detrimental, but I'm talking about 'good' habits. What are yours? How long does it take for a repetitious behavior to become a habit? As an example: does your 'routine' include exercise? And, is this exercise something you enjoy or something you think you need to do? The longevity of any habit probably rests on the answer to this question.
On the whole, I favor habits in that they provide order and structure or at least they provide a standard to choose to continue the behavior/habit or to improve/refine/etc. or possibly to eliminate or replace. Actually I propose that we all have some habits, whether we wish to acknowledge them as such or not. And yes, sometimes we don't recognize that it is our habit until it's pointed out to us.
My point is that habits are guideposts, they do provide a standard that we currently are abiding by. According to some 'authority' it takes a repetition of 3 times to change what was a habit into a new habit. And in that time the habit that was becomes no longer appropriate for you. Not too sure what this says about the habit, but I think it does say quite a bit about you and references the enjoy or need question.
IF habits are good, are behaviors we want to encourage in ourselves then when they no longer are viable does this indicate we have grown? That we now can replace the former habit with a new one? Or is it no longer necessary? Suffice it to say that there is no such thing as a complete void. We will use the 'space' if it is vacated permanently... perhaps with a new habit.?
1 comment:
I think real habits take quite a while to create and the problem is that they are often much easier to break, at least the good ones are. For instance, if I have a habit of exercising every morning and then I go out of town for the weekend and skip the exercise, it is often difficult to get back into the routine of it when I get home. I sure wish that good habits were as addictive as bad habits seem to be. It's like weeds as opposed to desired plants. The ones you want in your garden are so hard to keep and the weeds are so hard to get rid of! LOL!
Post a Comment