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By: M. Gilchrist  When we think of turning the page, many go to the idea of what they will do differently, what they will improve in themselves, and their actions. Unfortunately, many times this change does not happen. Maybe it does not happen consistently, and the good habits you were trying to make, break. Eventually, it seems impossible to stop bad habits. But why is this? Are we wired to continue patterns?
Patterns that we follow are not always our fault; for example, parents pass down their habits and values to their offspring. Even if a child wants to differ from these patterns, they probably won’t. This is usually linked to the early years of life, when most information is absorbed, and much of it is due to observation of the things around them. Behavioural imitation comes from the mirror neuron system, a group of specialized brain cells that respond when we perform an action and when we observe someone else doing it. Much of what is absorbed early on is stored as implicit memory, acting as a subconscious script for all our reactions in daily life. Not only is it due to these observational responses, but it is also due to the attachment theory, which explains the neurological adaptation that people make in their early ages to their caregivers' emotional and behavioural habits. This is an instinct due to a fear of abandonment, as the child depends on their parents for survival. Psychologist Bowlby helped coin the idea of internal working models, which determine our perspective on ourselves, our relationships, and others, usually due to the dynamic between the child and their responsible adult. If your responsible adult was emotionally distant, you might adopt habits like people pleasing and others that support the idea that care must be earned. Humans also have a familiarity bias, which basically means that even if certain patterns and habits inherited from your parents are bad, you will do them, simply because we are drawn to things that are familiar to us as it makes us feel safer. However, lots of psychiatrists and doctors debate on the extent of nurture, being what we learn from being taught by our parents, nature, or what has been genetically passed down to us. The psychologist Eric Turkheimer believed that behaviour was dependent on biological and psychological factors, which he concluded - through a human experimentation with twins - that were separated at birth, then exposed to different lifestyles. Then, they were later still seen with similarities in their behaviour. Even with the limitation of the experiment and human testing, nature is supported through the advancements of neurological research. The ways our synapses act depend on the proteins that instruct and power our brain connections. Genetic differences can alter the speed and how easily neurons communicate and adapt to situations through the neurotransmitters, synaptic cleft and other members of the synapse (the way our neurons transmit electrical impulses). Therapists work to remove things that you have gotten from your parents and childhood that are not good for you today. Despite the difficulty of the process, patients are forced to acknowledge the why for their behaviours, and connect them to traumatic backgrounds, so they can try to reverse the effects. Psychologists are helpful because all these factors that make it so hard to break a pattern are in our subconscious. They have been present in our life for so long, we don’t think about them - making it difficult to identify them as a problem in our mentality. In conclusion, our behaviours are shaped by nature and nurture. Our behavior is shaped as we grow; we become tied to the experiences we had as children and babies. Psychologists work to make the patient aware of the reasons for their complexes and personality, only then being able to mend the traumatic events and thus, their habits.
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By: L. Roschel  Have you ever thought about how we build habits without even noticing our actions? Well, as a reflex, we do everyday stuff such as brushing our teeth and taking the same path to our destinations, as if we activated the “autopilot” button. Yet, while we can build habits that help us evolve and save energy, nowadays, we are used to keeping habits that only hold us back. For instance, think about when you open your phone "just for five minutes", only to realise that an hour has passed. Without noticing it, the small choices we repeat every day gradually shape who we become and how we make decisions.
The danger of habits is that they rarely appear harmful at first. For example, procrastinating once seems harmless; skipping one workout appears insignificant; choosing the easiest option instead of the most beneficial one feels justified after a tiring day. However, habits work as footprints in our brains - they leave marks which become a map for the following days. Likewise, positive habits such as reading a few pages every night, exercising regularly, or helping at home may seem insignificant at the moment; they seem simple. Yet, slowly, they build discipline, knowledge, and character. Building habits is not about becoming perfect overnight. Many people abandon their goals because they focus only on dramatic transformations rather than consistent effort. In reality, improvement often begins with tiny actions repeated daily. A single page read each day can become dozens of books in a year. A ten-minute walk can evolve into a healthier lifestyle. Small actions, sustained over time, have an extraordinary power to transform ourselves. Therefore, we should pay closer attention to the routines we create and the behaviours we repeat without question. Habits are the architects of our future selves: they can either limit us to cycles of low potential or guide us toward growth and fulfilment. Although we cannot control everything that happens to us, we can choose the actions we practise every day. In the end, our habits do not merely shape our days; they show who we are. |