Creature Of Habit or Habitat?
Guess what? Why do you like having a morning routine?
Why are you searching for articles like ‘7 must-do things for an awesome morning routine?’
We, as humans, consider ourselves the pinnacle of evolution, the harbinger of intelligence on this planet. Sorry to burst your bubble, but we ain’t brother.
As humans we suffer from such an advanced case of delusion, we even tend to ignore that it’s actually one. We like to call ourselves free-willed, conscious beings, and whatever mumbo-jumbo to separate ourselves from the other animals by our capacity for reasoning.
All of this because? You can go to a job? Choose your favorite yogurt flavor? Your favorite pizza toppings?
Nah, I’d beg to differ, we are creatures of habit. Simply put, we like following routines so we can complete our checklist, calendar, task list, or whatever so that we can have a sense of false accomplishment.
See, I am not saying humans haven’t done anything great, I mean look at pizza, video games, and many other such brilliant innovations that have fazed the path forward for us.
All I want to say is we are more creatures than we tend to think.
According to an experiment, conducted at MIT, people were fit with custom-made electric black boxes (almost sounds like a black mirror episode), which monitored their day — meetings, eating, ins and outs, and sleeping. The devices also could record where the wearers were going, how fast, their tone, and subtle details of their body language.
What did they find?
Almost a solid 90% of what most people do on any day follows a crazy as fuck routine and their behavior could be predicted with a simple mathematical equation.
So, next time, you’re drinking coffee at your favorite coffee place, just know that your stalking ex is damn good at mathematics.
Psychologist John Bargh of Yale University puts it quite simply “It’s difficult for people to accept, but most of a person’s everyday life is determined not by their conscious intentions and deliberate choices, but by mental processes put into motion by the environment.”
Here comes the question: Are we creatures of habit or habitat?
To put it, even more, simpler ( for my more ‘delighted’ audience)
Are you making the decisions or are you compulsively forced to do it because of your habits that developed due to your habitat?
The science is clear on this: We are stupid, simple evolved bipedal mammals that have a weaved a complexity of superiority into our psyche and now think we rule the world.
Breaking this down, this massively constructed asinine illusion could be the key to actually understanding a lot about the brain, ah you a dumb thing!
Our brain, the smushy white jello in most people’s heads governs the basic processes of any animal, from breathing, food intake, horniness, and to breaking down and appreciating Samuel.L.Jackon’s performance in Pulp Fiction (ah, what a flick, eh!)
So brains help us do all this, but more importantly as an external stimulus rendered and created by the brain, habits are what help us get through the day.
When we engage in a habitual activity, we are not engaged in a task, but something that we have been doing for years, something natural and vice-a-versa.
Example from my life:
As a child, I had this weird rather loving habit of watching Beyblade right at 5:30 PM in India.
I came from school at 3:30, changed, ate my snack, pretended like I took a bath, tried to do my homework, lied, and then very religiously stared at the clock and at 5:30 PM turned on the TV, almost for the complete run time of Beyblade (4 years or so)
Habit.
Now, there were summer holidays, when I went to my grandparents’ house, it was a cool thing to do, or at least that’s what my parents told me. Here, neither did I have school, nor did I have the TV, because exactly at 5:30 PM, my grandma knew that she wanted to watch her TV show (some melodramatic garbage about a woman’s struggle in her in-law's home, very ’90s), she had her own freaking routine, cook, talk and gossip to the old ladies, make some chai, ask my grandpa to get out of the house and then sit in front of the TV at the right time to watch and simultaneously pretend like she was prepping for dinner (chopping veggies and shit)
This for me was a nightmare, not only did I miss Beyblade, but eventually, I realized I missed my cute ritual too.
On the other hand, I got addicted to that serial. Yup, I got into 90s woman’s drama. It was such an awesome feeling.
This is the power of a habit and a habitat.
I could have somehow convinced my grandma, that I wanted to watch Beyblade, but even if she accepted, the mere fact of sitting in front of the TV, without completing the preceding steps of my ritual, would in some ways make the whole experience a bit incomplete.
Although I didn’t try it, yeah, as an adult, I think I would have felt that way because that’s how I feel about sex without foreplay, incomplete.
This is what habits can do to the so-called ‘evolved primates’ and you thought sitting on trees and munching berries was stupid, shame on you.
So, one more thing, habits come in multitudes, right? You can’t have one. You have multiple, and not all are good, some or mostly a lot of them are bad.
What’s more, the bad ones are the ones that are so tempting and forbidden, that you do them every day.
Like me and smoking, developed the habit in 12th grade, bad breakups, shitty girlfriends, jobs, college, and stress, its been with me through everything, constantly providing me with the much-wanted dose of nicotine (writing about it, even got me smoking right now)
Trust, I have tried to change it, the habit. Successfully failed at kicking the habit.
These bad habits, we all want to change, sometimes we win, most times we lose. (Butting the cigarette in the ashtray now). This ain’t because you are a bad person, have the shitty willpower, or as such. (Even bad people can kick away bad habits, mind you)
We fail because habits are extremely, excruciatingly hard to change. They are hard to change because they are so ingrained into us, that it almost is automatic.
Then again, kicking and forming habits in 21 days, I don’t believe in it, and neither does science, (YES, that’s right stop saying it). This myth began as a simple misinterpretation of Dr. Maxwell Maltz’s work on self-image, where he found that 21 days of task completion didn’t lead to any habit formation.
You know people, that want something to be so true, that they started believing this and the idea just took off.
In reality, which is also backed by science, it can take an average of 66 days to form a new habit and somewhere between 18–254 days for someone to form a new habit.
The question I really want to pose is, does changing the habitat, kick the habit?
In this series of blogs, I will be exploring, habit formation, science, habitat correlation, and much more, so stay tuned and subscribe to my blog, mate.
