How
do you spend your day?
Some of history's
icons had more eccentric habits than others. Consider Beethoven, who would
painstakingly count out 60 coffee beans for his morning brew:
French author Victor Hugo would be "awakened by
daily gunshot," before taking an ice-cold, public bath on his roof. He'd
also visit the barber every day:
Honoré de Balzac, the French writer, was said to
live his life as “orgies of work punctuated by orgies of relaxation and
pleasure," according to one biographer. He also had an epic caffeine
addiction, consuming as many as 50 cups of coffee per day:
A habit is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly
and tends to occur unconsciously. In the American Journal of Psychology (1903)
it is defined in this way: "A habit, from the standpoint of psychology, is
a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through
previous repetition of a mental experience."
Habitual
behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does
not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. Habits are
sometimes compulsory The process
by which new behaviors become automatic is habit formation.
Old habits
are hard to break and new habits are hard to form because the behavioral
patterns we repeat are imprinted in our neural pathways, but it is
possible to form new habits through repetition.
As behaviors are repeated in a consistent context,
there is an incremental increase in the link between the context and the
action. This increases the automaticity of
the behavior in that context. Features of an automatic behavior are all or
some of: efficiency, lack of awareness, unintentionality, uncontrollability.
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