The Benefits of Habits

I came across a simple, but enlightening quote about habits that I thought worth passing on. Basically, it said that because no one escapes forming or falling into habits, we might as well choose positive rather than negative ones. Who could disagree? Though I’ve blogged about this before, it’s worth repeating—habits and routines serve an evolutionary purpose. Thinking eats up mental energy, so our ancestors who negotiated life without unnecessary thinking had energy left over for more important, life-enhancing tasks. An ancestor who, like clockwork, headed out early each morning to hunt for game saved energy and likely survived better than his next-cave neighbor who spent time deciding what to do with his day. So, view habits as mental energy savers. The quote I ran across is from Olga Kotelko, a 94-year-old competitive athlete. One of her suggestions to live well is to create habits (“Going the distance,” Parade Magazine, 12/29/13m page 11). She chides, “There is no book, you will notice, called The Seven Ephemeral Whims of Highly Successful People,” taking a poke at Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People” (a book I highly recommend). The article goes on to explain that, “Under stress, people tend to fall back on routines—whether healthy or unhealthy. In a recent experiment, University of Southern California psychologist Wendy Wood, Ph.D., one of the world’s top experts in habit formation, found that students around exam tim...
Source: Normal Eating - Category: Eating Disorders Authors: Source Type: blogs