Bad Habits Video
In this ‘Bad Habits’ video, Mark Tyrrell of Uncommon Knowledge discusses how humans are habitual beings, and why this is useful in helping us to learn effectively. He goes on to show how bad habits can develop by ‘piggybacking’ on this useful natural process. Mark talks about how emotions drive habits and how that knowledge illustrates how bad habits are best approached therapeutically - by looking at what emotion the habit is attached to. He discusses how the first step to addressing any habit is to identify it in yourself and see how it is working. And then to see if it is meeting any emotional need for you, and how you might otherwise meet that need more healthily, giving a case example of a man who couldn’t stop throat clearing.
Transcript of Bad Habits video
Human behaviour is habitual - or becomes habitual. So the more we do something, the more able we are to do it. If you imagine a pathway through a very dense forest: you first clear that pathway, and then if you use that pathway every day for years and years and years, pretty soon it’s very easy to go down that pathway, because you’ve carved out the pathway. It’s the same with human behaviour. If you do something time and time and time again, it’s very easy to do it automatically. And this is great for learning; if you learn a musical piece on a guitar, and you do it over and over and over again, pretty soon it’s very easy to do that, even if it felt difficult to start with. You’ve built a pathway in your mind, and you can play the guitar - or that piece on the guitar - very easily.
But this principle also holds true for habits, as well, which can be bad habits. Good habits, of course that’s great! But bad habits…the more we do them, the more we’re likely to do them. For example, if you get home from work and you habitually watch five hours of TV - bearing in mind that the less TV we watch, the more likely we are to stay alive! There’s some recent research to show that people who watch hours and hours and hours and hours of TV are more likely to die - of any cause - than people who watch much less TV. It could be to do with the inactivity, which is very bad for human beings, the fact that we’re just sitting; we’re not designed just to be sitting down all the time. It’s a very bad habit, just watching television; just being passive, switching off the brain, not thinking so much.
Other bad habits might include compulsions or addictions that are perhaps milder than being totally hooked on alcohol or heroin, but still irritating. So people who continually nervously scratch themselves or have a nervous cough or even tear out bits of their eyelashes and eyebrows, and so forth. These are habits that we all get into, often driven by anxiety. Emotion has the word ‘motion’ in it. Emotions want us to move, want motion. So if you’re feeling anxious, you tend not just to sit still; you tend to start doing things. Pretty soon, these things can become habits.
To address a habit, we need to think, "Okay, what is driving this habit?" Repetition is driving it, the fact that you’ve done it before means you’re more likely to do it again; but also there’s an emotion behind the habit - it could be anxiety, it could be anger. I remember working with somebody who had a chronic habit of clearing his throat. He felt very angry with many people in his life, but he wasn’t very assertive. So we had to teach him assertiveness skills, and when he started to actually be clear and calm with these people about what he was angry about, started to actually resolve issues, then his throat clearing stopped. [clears throat] He always wanted to (ahem) say something with the throat clearing, but he never felt like he could. Sometimes behind a bad habit is some sort of emotion that’s seeking expression but not able to get it. So you think, if you have a bad habit, could it be that?
Laziness; procrastination, just sitting around when you need to be working; shouting people down if they disagree with you - all these are habits, and the first way to overcome a habit is to see it within yourself. If a person is blind to their own habits, then they don’t know themselves so well. So having some objectivity about yourself is the first step to overcoming a habit; looking at the emotion behind the habit and attempting to meet the need of that emotion through legitimate means; and also replacing the habit with something else. If someone’s a chronic TV viewer, for example, then rather than watching the TV, something else needs to replace it; a person doesn’t just stare at a blank TV screen. They might read a book or go for a walk or practice a musical instrument or decide to watch an hour of TV instead of five hours a night and then plan what they need to do instead. We need to plan what the replacement is for the habit.
Sometimes there is no replacement, or not an obvious replacement. With the man with the throat clearing, the replacement for the throat clearing was talking to people about his needs and situations; that was his replacement for throat clearing. So what we’ve done there is we’ve forged another pathway through that forest in the mind; a pathway that actually takes him somewhere useful, rather than just being a dead end. So many bad habits are just dead-end behaviours.
The ideas contained within the articles in this part of the site really offer possible solutions to all kinds of bad habits that trip you up, annoy you, and possibly annoy other people.
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