“Habit” is the current buzzword in the fitness/nutrition world, and for good reason. Habits can carry us through situations where we are tired or stressed or suffering decision fatigue and “automate” our choice process. But what about those “bad” habits we strive to break? What about those New Year’s Resolutions to stop doing x,y,z?
So what is a habit? A habit is really nothing more than a highly refined skill developed over time with dedication and practice. That “bad habit” is actually a marvel of evolutionary design. There’s nothing bad about it, even if it may not be consistent with your goals. If you can form an undesirable habit then you are fully capable of forming one that you desire.
When we engage in a behavior or specific task we create a neural pathway, a little road that the traffic of our thoughts and actions can drive on. It’s like it runs from home to work. The daily commute of a task. It’s slow at first, but as you practice it’s like a construction crew is turning that 1 lane road into a 4 lane superhighway. Practice begins to wrap the road in a substance called myelin; the more myelin the faster the speeds. Tasks that we are experts at come without thought, they just happen.
The infrastructure of our mind is also extraordinarily resilient, degrading only from age or degenerative disease. This is why it’s so hard to break undesirable habits, in fact it’s impossible to break a bad habit. That myelin that wrapped up your little neural country road and turned it into 95? It only goes one way. Once it’s wrapped up it’s there for good.
The only way to move away from our undesirable habits is to create new, stronger ones. This requires deep practice, consistency, and time. It requires work, mistakes, and corrections. It requires self awareness and forgiveness.
The path forward is not forged by reveling in the past. Create a new future one tiny road-turned-superhighway at a time.
