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Developing good habits and eliminating the bad ones
by Joseph Earnest September 30, 2011
Newscast Media HOUSTON, Texas --According to psychologists, habits are formed as a result of repeating an activity. People develop good and bad habits during the process, and at some point try to eliminate the self-destructive ones while retaining the beneficial habits. A habit can also be viewed as an act that has become associated with a large number of stimuli. The more stimuli that elicit the act, the stronger the habit.
According to Edwin Ray Guthrie, a behavioral scientist, there is one general rule for breaking undesirable habits: Observe the stimuli that elicit the undesirable act and perform another act in the presence of those stimuli. Once this is done, a new, desirable act will be elicited by those stimuli instead of the old, undesirable act.
For example, if hearing the alarm clock in the morning causes someone, after he or she wakes up to smoke a cigarette, that person can replace the habit of smoking with reading a book, doing exercise or meditating when awakened by the sound of an alarm clock. It takes roughly 30 days of repeating an act or activity everyday, at the same time, for a habit to form.
Functionalists wanted psychology to be a practical science and not a pure science, and they sought to apply their findings to the improvement in personal life, education, industry, and so forth. Functionalists were more interested in what made organisms different from each other than what made them similar.
One of the leading functionalists of his time was William James (1842-1910). James offered five maxims to follow in order to develop good habits and eliminate bad ones.
- Place yourself in circumstances that encourage good habits and discourage bad ones.
- Do not allow yourself to act contrary to a new habit that you are attempting to develop: "Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again."
- Do not attempt to slowly develop a good habit or eliminate a bad one. Engage in positive habits completely to begin with and abstain completely from bad ones.
- It is not the intention to engage in good habits and avoid bad ones that is important, it is the actual doing so: "There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed."
- Force yourself to act in ways that are beneficial to you even though doing so at first is distasteful and requires considerable effort.
All of James's maxims converge in a fundamental principle: Act in ways that are compatible with the type of person you wish to become. Add Comments>>
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