The Habits You Will Form in Life

February 17, 2014Life EducationSolomon

A habit is what you repeatedly do when faced with a triggering event, or trigger for short. Today we will learn about some properties about these triggers and events. 1. Habits can be time triggered or event triggered. 2. Each trigger is programmed into a different muscle’s memory. 3. A habit has three parts. (a) The trigger happening, (b) you recognizing that the trigger is present, (c) you responding to the trigger.

Here are 4 examples

Ex.1 – Your habit to get sleepy around 11PM is a time triggered event that has been programmed into your human body. (a) 11PM comes, (b) [your body’s internal] clock tells you, (c) your body changes its body chemistry in preparation for sleep.
Ex.2 – Your habit to flinch at sudden, extremely loud noises is an event triggered habit built into your body’s muscles. (a) your ears receive the signal of a loud noise, (b) your mind determines that this is not an expected noise, (c) your muscles are told to flinch.
Ex.3 – Your habit to wipe your nose with a kleenex is an event triggered habit built into your conscious mind. (a) you sneeze, (b) your mind tells you this was a sneeze and you sense snot, (c) your mind tells you to go wipe it with a kleenex.
Ex.4 – Your habit to associate cats with dogs is an event triggered habit built into your subconscious mind (memory). (a) you see a cat, (b) you think about what you know about cats, (c) attached to your memories of cats are memories of dogs.

Everyone is born with default habits, biologically set. You yawn when tired, your stomach growls when hungry, etc. As you grow up, (a) you encounter different things that you didn’t know existed, like a red apple to eat, or an iPhone to play with, or situations you didn’t know existed like meeting a stranger, or hearing an ice cream truck song. As you are exposed to these triggers, (b) your environment, childhood, background circumstances all serve to determine how you think and therefore how you recognize the situation. Perhaps you recognize red apples because they’re always in the same place in your home, or you get them from the same store, or you pick them from the same tree, or you see apples in a variety of contexts and learn to recognize them objectively. (c) Whatever it is, after you recognize something, you then form your response to it. You could respond to a sneeze with getting tissue paper, toilet paper, rubbing it on your shirt, your friend’s shirt, etc. You could respond to seeing apples with happiness because you like the taste of apples and they’re always available on the shelf in your home, or with a cringe because you once found a worm in an apple you ate, or with sadness because you can’t afford apples unless they’re on sale at the store so it reminds you of your relative poverty, or with happiness because you like climbing the tree to pick apples.

Because your environment, childhood, background circumstance, and life experiences are out of your control and different for each person, everyone forms drastically different methods for recognizing triggers, and drastically different responses to triggers. This accounts for the diversity of humanity. A problem you may face if you don’t have sufficient guidance from peers and mentors is you may take your own anecdotal evidence and life experiences and extrapolate it to describe the world at large: because apples cause you happiness and taste good to you, you assume that for all people, apples cause happiness because they taste good to all people. You mistake describing yourself and your own world to describing the entire world. However, this is inaccurate because there are people who don’t like apples or respond very differently to apples. Thus, it is important to recognize the scope of your beliefs: that they extend no further than yourself, and those who agree with you.

If you have traveled, or learned about history or culture, you will realize that depending on the context, different things become socially acceptable and unacceptable. Growing up, whoever is in charge of you will give you your default values for what is socially acceptable and not. Furthermore, depending on what values society has at that time and place, your happiness towards apples might be socially acceptable, and it might not be. If you’re in country/location A where it’s acceptable, reacting with happiness is unpunished. If you’re in country/location B where it is not acceptable, when you travel there, you might end up punished. However, it is important to, as you mature, stop blindly following what circumstance has taught, and instead think through and understand the implications behind certain social standards, and to therefore be aware and in control of your responses. To be self aware, you should know trigger A results in response D for you, and to be able to do something about it in the event when you want to change it to response C.

Resources

The Stages of Correcting a Bad Habit
Daily Circadian Rhythm and Biological Clock
Habit (1887) by American Psychologist William James and my Notes on Habit by William James
Built the Habit on Android

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Overcome Perfectionism

February 13, 2014Mental HealthSolomon

Some people suffer from perfectionism, I am one of them. Here is a list of problems that make sense within perfectionism, but outside it, make no sense.

Never fail. Perfection means all success, and no failure, but this is unrealistic. It is unrealistic because, like I explain in my Life Education Curriculum post “Who am I?” that “Who am I?” is an incomplete question because it lacks context, “never fail” is a phrase that lacks context. Never fail at what? When? For how long? How do you define fail? If I hold a cup of water and I don’t spill it, did I fail? If the goal is to pour the water out, I failed; if the goal is to keep the water in the cup, then I succeeded. What is the goal? OK, let’s say we’ve established the goal is the pour the water out, does soda count? Is it only when guests are over and I’m pouring for someone else, or does it apply to all instances of pouring water. To yourself, you will never be timelessly perfect: you will make a mistake, and it won’t be perfect. The only real perfection you can achieve is with respect to someone else: maybe whenever Allison-John is here, you want to be perfect. You define yourself now as what Allison-John thinks of you, not what you think of yourself, or what anyone else thinks. This is delusional denial of truth: appearing perfect to someone else makes you perfect in their eyes, but it does not make you perfect in your own eyes unless you actively ignore and forget the times you made a mistake. This leads us to selective memory: perhaps you only remember the times you did something perfectly, because that’s what you want to think of yourself as, so you ignore and try to forget all the mistakes you’ve made. Now you can say you “never fail” because you can’t think of any time you failed! Within perfectionism, this makes perfect sense: you have achieved perfection. Outside perfectionism, we see that this perfection is based on delusion.
Never try again. It’s either all perfect, or, because of a single flaw, mistake, or imperfection, it is completely worthless to continue. “If you ain’t first, you’re last” – Talladega Nights. Many of us are programmed somehow, by our parents, society, teachers, peers, or ourselves, to be the best. That if you’re not the best, you’re worthless, it’s a complete failure. This is not true: we all know everyone fails. Everyone makes mistakes, we just don’t commit the mistakes to memory because the successes are more memorable. Within perfectionism, it is true: a mistake ruins the chance of timeless perfection, so to achieve timeless perfection we must move onto something else. Outside perfectionism, we know that timeless perfection is impossible to achieve: the more you do something, the probability of you making a mistake increases. Furthermore, outside perfectionism, we know that success is about determination, perseverance, hard work, and persistence. Outside perfectionism, we know it’s stupid to think that we can start something, and instantly be perfect at it, and furthermore never stop being perfect at it. Let go of timeless perfectionism, and embrace and accept the mistakes when they happen, so that you can learn from them and get closer to the more realistic goal of short term perfection.
Either-Or Fallacy. At the heart of all perfectionist thinking is all-or-nothing thinking, also called false dilemma (both links to Wikipedia). A perfectionist views the world as one of two things: perfect, not perfect. Within perfectionism, this makes sense. Outside perfectionism, we know that nothing in life is as simple as that, even though we wish it was: things come in ranges. There is a difference between 1 mistake in 100 tries, and 100 mistakes in 100 tries, but to a perfectionist, there is no difference. Since perfection does not exist in reality, perfectionism is a failure to understand and accept reality, a mental health issue that prevents you from looking at reality, which in turn makes it nearly impossible to make the right decisions because you have the wrong information to make decisions with!

By all means continue to pursue perfection, it is a noble pursuit. All I’m saying is, you should know it’s limitations, and its nature: you should know what you’re doing from an unbiased vantage point.

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