Question

Do you believe a habit (positive and negative) is a learned conditioned behavior? Explain why and give an example of your or someone else's habit and explain how this is conditioned or learned behavior. How would you break a negative habit?

Answer 1

• I think habits whether positive or negative are acquired behaviours,which get conditioned over time making them learned behaviours.Learned behaior is something that a person watches repeatedly over a long period of time and then just kind of picks up the habit.
• For example,I picked up the habit of setting my clothes on the basis of colours,which I saw one of my relatives doing and subconsciously,without even realising I started doing it myself. And actually it became easier for me to find my clothes.
• Sometimes it is conscious and sometimes one doesnt even realises the habit being picked up from others.
• The area of the basal ganglia that has been particularly associated with habit formation is called the “striatum”. When we repetitively do something the “striatum” starts to associate a particular context/habit with a reward (dopamine release).
• Negative habit my friend has is of nail biting which she developed without realising and now its become a prominent part of her behaviour. Also one of cousin's has major negative habit of smoking.
• Breaking someone's habits is not an easy task,its a step by step process and takes time.Habits become hard to break to because they are deeply wired by constant repetition into our brains.
• And when you add pleasure to them- like you have with smoking, for example- the pleasure centers of the midbrain get fired up as well, and continue to fire long after the habits stop, creating the cravings that folks struggle with.
• Overall these auto-pilot habit / routine behaviors are evolutionary-wise and practically a good thing; They keep us from having to re-invent the wheel of our daily lives by making an infinite numbers of decisions all day long, which in turn, provide us with more brain-space to think about more important and creative things.
• The downside of these routinized patterns comes when those patterns land more in the bad-column than the good.
• Breaking habits isn’t about stopping but substituting.Identifying the triggers is important.For instance,my cousin smokes when he is alone in bathroom.He smokes about four at a time.Need to lessen it first,make it 3 and take tiny steps to keep reducing it.Not allowing him too long in the bathroom,my calling him out again and again could work too.
• Different strategies work for different people. Its an individualized process.