Thursday, 24 June 2021

Creating Habit!

    What is a Habit?  It is a repeating unconscious pattern of behavior which is not an outcome of conscious thought.  In simple term, it is just like a clock alarm - which executes when it reaches the mark, unfazed by any external factors.  So are the habits, these are actions which are a result of a trigger.  The trigger and the action are not controlled consciously.  There is nothing called a bad habit or a good habit, it is just the favorable/unfavorable outcome of the habit decides the characteristics of it.

    How is a habit formed?  The super powerful brain of us, sometimes choose to become lazy in order to cut down its workload and try to map every input received to an action.  When same action is repeated continuously for a same input, it decides just to map the input to the reaction and execute it every time it gets the same input, bypassing all the thought process, excluding the external factors and ignoring the alternative favorable outcome.  Thus we end up unconsciously acting to a situation in a same way, until we consciously decide to change it.  It is like getting back to home from office in our car.  The input would be to get to home in car, once we get used to it, are we consciously driving the vehicle, trying to analyze the speed of it and changing the gear, and taking right/left turns in the road?  It just happens as a habit and our super powerful brain relaxes itself with some good music on the way back home.

    Now the interesting part – Can we understand the automatic thought patterns, set the required trigger and by thus create a habit all by yourself – consciously!  Is this possible? – Yes it is.  But you need to know exactly what you wish for and what the trigger is, if not the whole thing would go wrong and you would end up with too much thing to correct.

    To have this set up initially, you need to first know what exactly you are looking for as the outcome and what is the trigger which can get it going.  Once this process map of this is completely figured out, all you have to do is kick start the trigger consciously and take it through to the outcome you want, slowly doing it step by step.  You might have to do this for a couple of times after which you would notice yourself that your brain doesn’t even wait for you to take you through to the steps, it will just run past all the process and end up in the final outcome.  Thus, you have created a habit!

    Once a habit is set, it would take another habit to override the earlier one – in other terms, erasing the brain map of input to trigger and rewriting another one.

    This above chunk of text maybe too complicated to understand, but this is something you and me have been doing day in and day out, right from brushing our teeth to going to bed.

    You can try a simple trick! – Try asking why you do some act of yours until you really find out why?

     Happy working on your brain!

    ~MindEngineering!

2 comments:

  1. Well said! Identifying the drive to start a habit is the toughest part I feel. Your thoughts?

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    1. Absolutely! At times a habit can be brilliant, but the motivation can be very silly and it is tricky to find it

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