Developing Flexible Habits
What I read: In praise of habits – so much more than mindless reflexes by Ian Robertson and Katsunori Miyahara. Edited by Sam Dresser. Published in Psyche July 26, 2021.
Before I dive into the topic at hand, you may have noticed that many of the articles that draw my attention enough to spur me to write a post about them are published by Psyche. That’s not intentional. It’s just that the articles they publish are of such high quality and depth that they draw me in and I feel compelled to write about them.
Psyche is a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophical understanding, and the arts. If you find these areas of thought interesting, I recommend you consider signing up for their newsletter.
Now on to the topic, habits.
Habits are something I’ve at various times intentionally adopted, nurtured, and abandoned. How much I worship at the altar of habits or eschew them completely seems to vacillate with which way the wind is blowing in my mind that day. I’ve been all over the map when it comes to habits.
I’ve written elsewhere about habits I’ve adopted to help me improve myself and my life circumstances. Lately one of the most popular of those articles was Setting Minimum Daily Requirements to Relieve Productivity Stress. In that article I discuss a habit I’ve often used of setting minimum accomplishments for a day to thwart the seemingly inevitable onslaught of perceived shortcomings I experience due to an ingrained mindset that one must always be productive. That’s a story for another time. But my point here is that the barrage of advice emanating from various fronts to acquire, develop, and stick to habits both thrills and horrifies me. Sometimes I don’t know exactly why.
Habit itself is a problematic word for me. The definition of habit that always rises to the top is a recurring, unconscious pattern of behavior acquired through repetition. Argh! That sounds dreadful. Sure, some things might be just fine as habits, but do I really want to live my life beholden to a bunch of unconscious actions, at least for the more important aspects of my life? I do not. Thus, my habits come and go.
Then the article I’m commenting on here today arrived in my inbox. After reading it I immediately had an aha moment. Perhaps this is the missing piece of the puzzle I’ve been trying to cobble together my entire life regarding habits.
Frequently the concept of habits is presented in quite stark terms. You adopt a habit. You stick to it. You do not deviate, no matter what. Even when it’s a struggle. I know some self-help types qualify their advice with some flexibility being okay, to jump back on the horse after being thrown so to speak. But in my experience, most approaches present themselves as rather rigid.
Successful people have great habits we’re told. Want to elevate yourself above the masses? Develop and stick to good habits. Want to be incredibly productive? Habits are the answer.
Habits run the gamut from something simple like brushing your teeth every night to something more daunting like sitting still at your laptop and writing at a certain time every day for three hours. I’ve tried to adopt and nurture so many habits over the years with widely varying success, and often abject failure.
Of course, some habits are inevitable and necessary. Indeed, we need habits as part of the basic apparatus of navigating life without delegating constant conscious thought to the repetitive necessities.
As the late philosopher Hubert Dreyfus said, habits are a part of our ‘everyday coping practices’.
Brushing my teeth every night works for me. I’m pretty good with that one. Going for a daily walk is another habit I do most of the time. Reading every night is another that has served me well. I walk on autopilot to my local coffee shop each morning. There are others. But so many other habits I’ve adopted and attempted to solidify in my life have been cast aside like a child losing interest in a broken toy. Oddly, writing is one of them. I write in fits and starts and seemingly without a consistent strategy. Yet, I’m productive as a writer. Go figure.
When I balk at a habit, I find myself thinking “Well, this isn’t working as planned so I might as well stop it altogether.” Then I do, only to pick it up again and repeat the frustrating process. Maddening.
My guess is that some of you reading this already relate to my habit dilemma while others of you are befuddled that I’m having issues with developing good habits.
So, what was my aha moment? It began when I read this in the second paragraph.
In tune with this characterisation, philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists alike often conceive of habits as highly mechanistic and near-automatic responses to environmental cues that unfold outside of our deliberative control. This conception of habits as mindless and reflexive might seem intuitive when we recognise that they are often counterproductive to our capacity to pursue our goals and desires.
Honestly, I stopped for a moment to breathe when I read those two sentences. I’m not sure why, but it struck like a lightning bolt of clarity. Despite the article being a far more nuanced piece about habits (definitely read it), this one point about habits stood out for me. I’ve often said if you read something and learn just one important thing, it’s worth the read. This is the thing I learned about habits and myself while reading the article.
Robertson and Miyahara are by no means anti-habit. They acknowledge their value and how they ease much of our daily functioning. However, using the example of driving the same commute route to work each morning, they point out that while a habit might appear mindless and without much engagement of the brain, they are anything but when viewed with more depth.
However, despite completing this task on something like autopilot, your drive will still be intelligently adjusted to situational intricacies, such as how fast or slow the driver in front of you is going, or when the traffic lights change. In attempting to account for the intelligent dimension of habit, researchers have moved away from construing habits as unintelligent mechanisms and towards modelling them as a species of belief. The puzzle we face in clarifying the character of habits is to explain their intelligent dimension while also acknowledging that they can often work against our intelligence and lead us astray.
This was an epiphany. Perhaps this truth is painfully obvious to some of you reading this, but that habits are not always to necessarily be undertaken inflexibly seemed like new information to me, or at least information that needed to be pounded into my head one more time before sticking.
Intellectually I guess I always knew there should be some give and take built into habits. Were someone to ask my advice about a certain habit, I would undoubtedly suggest they hold onto their habits with a loose grip, adapting them to suit their real-time needs and the specific situation. However, we can often dole out far better advice than we can follow ourselves.
My three hours of writing can sometimes just as easily be two or one and that doesn’t constitute a failure. Skipping a day of exercise doesn’t somehow negate the previous two weeks of adherence. That occasional impulse purchase of potato chips and subsequent entire bag binge doesn’t somehow wipe out the success of generally eating rather well.
I can choose to flow with the river of life and adapt my habits to meet whatever need and expectation I decide to set for myself at the time. Plus, we’re all thrown curveballs for which we must duck and weave if we’re to not get knocked to the ground by their force. We must inject reason and intellect into our habits and that means we must continually calibrate them. The article puts it this way.
…but, once a habitual routine is established, it is not itself intelligent.
Even when one develops a habit carried out habitually and with minimal conscious thought, honoring the intelligence that resides within the habit is valuable.
In opposition to the mechanistic conception of habits, some, such as the philosopher Jason Stanley, advocate for an intellectualist conception, on which habits are intelligent because they are really a kind of ‘settled belief’ about ways of achieving certain goals.
I’ve already written a lot here and I’ve barely moved you through half of the article’s content. Robertson and Miyahara absolutely respect habits and argue to encourage them while simultaneously viewing them from a different perspective that allows for their reasoned flexibility. The one point I wanted to state here, if only to reinforce it to myself by offering it to you, is that habits need not be rigid and finite. They can ebb and flow, adapt and adjust. Indeed, they are most useful and less frustrating that way.
Go ahead and read the article. I think you’ll find it insightful. The writers dive far deeper than I have here. Now I’m going to brush my teeth and go to bed. Have a great day.