Habits

Habits make up who you are, and how you act. They are the building blocks of personality and action, just as the cell is of life. Habits though, as you are probably aware, can be negative, just as well as positive. They can keep you doing something great, an example being learning, or keep you doing something that slowly kills you, an example being drugs. Today, I will talk about what habits are, the contingent importance of habits, and the inconsistency avoidance tendency.

Habits are, as stated earlier, building blocks of your personality and your actions, as well as your mindset, which wasn't mentioned earlier. Besides that, habits are tendencies that have been hard-wired into your brain, and body, and is now an automatic procedure in your life. Some examples of this are brushing your teeth every morning, showering every day, and making your bed in the morning. Habits can also be more than just actions; habits can be thoughts, they can be words or expressions you use often, and other things. Habits are formed within about 60 days of doing something consistently, something I'm trying to make a habit is reading, I read 30 minutes a day, every night, it's been about a month or so, and at this point I don't get into bed without reading. It takes good work to build habits.

I said that this is the contingent importance of habits; contingency, in philosophy, is something that is not always true and not always false. This applies to habits. Habits are not always good, habits can be extremely destructive to you such as smoking. However the habits stated earlier, brushing, showering, and making your bed, are, for the most part, positive habits, they positively affect your mindset and/or some other aspect of your life. That's why habits are important, because they can affect you. This is why you should pick and choose the habits you build carefully.

The inconsistency-avoidance tendency is a cognitive bias that states, people are reluctant to change, eliminating bad habits is a rare trait. Some reasons for this is that, as I've talked about in constraints, the brain tries to conserve energy, so being reluctant to change, this also prevents inconsistency. Another plausible reason is that it facilitated the ability to survive in groups by our ancestors, and if everyone was changing, it would be hard to continuously cooperate, and work together. This bias addresses the work it takes to break a habit, if you are starting a habit that is not good for you, you need to stop it before it's to late. As Warren Buffett said, "The chains of habit are too weak to be felt, until they are too strong to be broke." Break the chains before they're unbreakable. It takes 60 days to build a habit, destroying a habit is another question.

That's all, habits are building blocks of your personality, and things that you’ve become used to, they can be important or they can be unimportant, and they are extremely hard to change once they’ve formed. Hopefully you enjoyed reading, and learning about habits, I thank you for reading, I’ll see you next week; peace.

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