The Power of Habit

Learning how to change, with help from William James and Otis Redding

Yesterday afternoon, I spoke by phone with an old friend of mine. We’re close in age — within a year of each other, in fact — and have known each other since college. So, we’ve had the chance to share quite a lot of our lives together over the years.

Last fall, he experienced a knee injury that has required two surgeries and loads of physical therapy; thankfully, he’s (mostly) on the other side of that now, and is able to climb stairs and walk without pain again, for the first time in months.

During our conversation, my mind drifted off a little bit, wondering what it must have been like to do all that PT, day in and day out, week in and week out. I know I’d have started off strong, staying consistent with it for a while.

But at some point, maybe several weeks in, I know I would’ve felt the temptation to forget the therapy, just for a day. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt like it; “we can always pick it up again tomorrow,” I might have thought to myself. Which, of course, would have made it easier not to do it the next time I felt like not doing it.

It would have been all too easy to interrupt the healing process, it dawned on me, and maybe even put it on pause indefinitely, to the point that my knee would have stopped healing completely. And how that happens to many people in situations like this; it’s easier than we think not to do what we know we need to do.

To keep it going, my friend told me, he had to form new habits for himself, every day — because, like me, his motivation waxes and wanes too. Intention is too ephemeral to count on.

No, he realized, we can’t count on motivation or feeling alone — we need a scaffolding to put around our effort, to give shape to it if we want to keep going. Hoping to wake up every day with the motivation to do what we ought to… well, that’s bound to fail.

Right now, I’m finding myself time traveling quite often. And by that, I mean taking a mental trip back to the mid-20th or even 19th centuries, reading about writers, philosophers, historians, athletes and others who’ve become heroes to me over the years I’ve written to you here.

Every once in a while, a quotation will find me, whether it’s something I come across on social media, or in the reading I do, and just won’t let me go. That’s what happened when I stumbled across this, by the philosopher and psychologist William James:

“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”

And well, that’s certainly one way of putting it. But there’s more to what James means, which he elaborated on in a lecture he gave back in the early 1890s, to a gathering of teachers in Cambridge, Mass.:

“The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my hearers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right.”

Long before we had MRI machines, James understood that creating habits meant reinforcing them in the physical structure of our brains. He even used the word “plasticity” to describe what happens when we repeatedly take a particular action, creating and strengthening neural pathways in our minds.

Those repeated actions — and the same goes for thoughts, which we may as well call habits of mind — lay down tracks in our brains; as Aristotle reportedly said, “we are what we repeatedly do.”

And that’s all fine and good, as long as the habits you’ve built are healthy ones. But what if they aren’t? What if you’ve created habits for yourself over a lifetime that you aren’t even aware of now? That hold you back, instead of freeing up your “higher powers of mind” for their “proper work.”

When we’re young, we’re still building our habits, especially around how we think — the way we look at ourselves, how we think of ourselves in relation to others, whether we’re capable of achieving what we dream about. I look at my 11-year-old now, especially, and wonder how I can help him avoid the mental traps I fell into when I was young.

But when we’re adults, when we’re really grown up — and, at 54, I have to reluctantly admit that I am! — sometimes you have to stop and think: what habits have I become accustomed to, maybe so accustomed to that I’m not even aware of them? Ones that aren’t serving me anymore, that hold me back even now?

How can I become conscious again, even if it involves the kind of effort James identifies — when everything is a “subject of express volitional deliberation”? It’s so easy to fall into the same old grooves all the time; what if we need to wake up, you know?

When my friend and I talked yesterday, we shared how we’re active with exercising — he with physical therapy, me with running — but we’re still stuck in our old ways when it comes to what we eat. It’s so hard to change, we agreed, even though we need to. (I can hear Otis Redding’s lyrics — “I can’t do what ten people tell me to do” — in my head as I write this.)

How to become conscious and make positive, constructive, meaningful change, without snapping back into old habits — that’s the challenge I find is the hardest right now. James said “plasticity” means “possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once”:

“Everyone knows how a garment, after having been worn a certain time, clings to the shape of the body better than when it was new; there has been a change in the tissue, and this change is a new habit of cohesion. A lock works better after being used some time; at the outset more force was required to overcome certain roughnesses in the mechanism. The overcoming of their resistance is the phenomenon of habituation.”

I don’t have an answer just yet; maybe knowing the question is enough? Maybe that’s how we wake up, just becoming aware of what the right questions are to ask, depending on where we are in our lives at this particular moment.

Anyway, I’ve gone on far too long already. I hope you’ve had a great week so far and have been able to get some great runs in — as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell