Habits & Traditions

Habits & Traditions

As I finish the holiday weekend, I started thinking about how alike habits and traditions are.  I watched my daughter in her twenties truly appreciated the traditions of family, playing games, and cooking/eating our favorite foods on Thanksgiving.  I also talked to my other daughter (who spent the holidays with some friends and could not be with us this year) as she voiced her regret at missing the festivities.   There is often comfort in tradition as there is in our habits… both are behaviors that seem to happened naturally and are part of who we are.  Both can be changed, but the process of change often feels foreign and uncomfortable even if it is positive… much like attending some other family's holiday with traditions that may be wonderful but are different than our own.

It's just like riding a bike.... you never really forget a habit .

It's just like riding a bike.... you never really forget a habit (good or bad.) 

According to a 2009 MIT study, "Habits help us through the day, eliminating the need to strategize about each tiny step involved in making a frothy latte, driving to work and other complex routines. Bad habits, though, can have a vise grip on both mind and behavior. Notoriously hard to break, they are devilishly easy to resume, as many reformed smokers discover. ... Important neural activity patterns in a specific region of the brain change when habits are formed, change again when habits are broken, but quickly re-emerge when something rekindles an extinguished habit -- routines that originally took great effort to learn."

The study also suggests that a learned pattern remains in the brain after the behavior is stopped, and that is why it may be so hard to change a habit.