To Habituate or Not to Habituate

Do habits prevent us from experiencing life to the full, or are they critical to managing our attention?

Some types of habit seem straightforwardly damaging to our health and happiness: doomscrolling on social media, for example, deprives us of time we could be spending out in nature or with our friends. Bad habits also sap our agency, turning us, while we indulge them, into little more than machines. (If you’re a nail-biter, as at least one of us here is, you probably feel an urge to bite your nails; to that extent, your habit controls you.) 

Even good habits—like taking the same walk in the woods every day—could perhaps have a negative side. “Habit weakens everything,” Proust’s narrator tells us; it “strips sacred forces of their mystery.” After a few weeks of the same route, you end up on autopilot, not even listening to the birds or looking at the trees. Instead of experiencing a particular redwood on a particular morning with a particular person, it’s just another loop around the same old track. Habit has anesthetized you.

It’s for reasons like these that philosopher Immanuel Kant saw all habits as objectionable: even when you do the right thing, you’re doing it for the wrong reason if you do it out of habit.

But Aristotle famously believed exactly the opposite. For him, good habits are precisely the way you acquire virtues; as long as you develop the right habits of mind, you’ll reliably do the right thing. Nothing wrong with habit, then, as long as it’s the good kind.

And as for habits sapping agency, William James had a fascinating counter-argument: “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.” We can’t possibly pay attention to every single detail of every single action every single moment; we’d get burnt out, and would never achieve anything. If you want to compose a brilliant new song, it would probably help to learn an instrument first, so you don’t have to spend a bunch of mental energy finding the strings or keys. You just let your fingers fly, while your imagination takes care of the brilliance.

Plus, our habits are a big part of what makes us who we are. A rockstar is someone who knows how to shred a guitar, day in day out. A surgeon is someone who makes a habit of fixing people. A philosopher is someone who knows how to think a certain way, and loves to do it.

So how can we resolve these very different attitudes to (good) habit? Friedrich Nietzsche offered an interesting compromise, which he called “brief habits.” Do your walk every day for 6 months, then switch to basketball or ballroom dancing. Each new habit allows you to know something fully and deeply—but once you know it, move on! Is this good advice? Bad advice? Dangerous for those seeking a lifelong relationship? Let’s ask our guest: Shaun Gallagher from the University of Memphis, author of Action and Interaction.