Everyone says these days that no one reads any longer. Yet book exhibitions boast of huge profits as sales soar sky high. Why such a contradiction? Well, very few read literary texts or serious stuff. The serials seem to have so vitiated the taste of the audience that melodrama, larger than life, is the heady mix now. So bookers may come and bookers may go, but books readers seem to prefer are the DIY types.
The favourite most DIY types are books about how to form a habit. Well, forget books, the YouTube world abounds with videos about habit formation.
Habits, it may seem, are tough to leave. My contention is that habits are tough to form. Why? How so? A concrete example may help. Suppose someone wants to leave drinking tea. Typically the argument is one cannot leave the bad habit.
Actually, in my opinion, the person concerned is not forming a new habit, that is, the habit of either drinking something else or drinking less tea, may be. What I am trying to say is that breaking a bad habit is actually forming a new habit. We are, in brief, re-forming (means both 'reform' and 're-form') habits.
No, it is not a mere word play. Actually, it is an attitudinal shift. Instead of a negative view of 'reforming' something negative, here is an attempt at positively looking at behaviour as doing it all over again, but a new way.
I suppose such an approach works because nobody likes criticism, no one likes being told that (s)he is wrong. Instead, asserting the possibility of person beginning a-new, assauges the ego, more showy and more fragile these days than any crystal chandelier.
Well, 're-forming' a habit requires twenty-one days, they say. I am.not so sure of the magic figure. May be, if we were to remember the Pavlov experiments, in fact, the entire behavioural theory, we know that habit formation requires not merely repetition the nth time, but basically the reward motiv.
Be it the lever pushing mice or the salivating dog Skinner and associates discuss, any new habit requires a prize to the 'subject' forming it. This stick-n-carrot approach is useful both for animals, and their masters!
I would not know! I think such a stimulus-response is boring repetition. Instead a creative, a positive challenge would be the right way. Try it. Then (re)forming would never be a question!
Pratima@ Positivity is the route to re-form!
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