Ruts and Habits
deirdremoon and I were talking over lunch, and I mentioned a good conversation amywithani and I had with ikkyu2 over dinner last Friday. We'd been talking about behavior patterns and pattern-breaking in general. It's a hard thing to do -- often even diagnosis (identifying the pattern to break) is nontrivial. deirdremoon and I started talking about ruts v. habits, and she asked me to define the difference between them.
I distinguish between ruts and habits in the sense that would normally be referred to as good habits versus bad habits. In this post habit should be read to understood as including good by reference. By 'automatic behavior pattern' I mean a default, the thing the person would do in the absence of external pressures.
A habit is an automatic behavior pattern that the person perceives as a net positive. Canonical example: Taking care of your laundry as soon as some small number of loads is ready to go.
A rut is an automatic behavior pattern that the person perceives as a negative. By contrast with the previous example, leaving off doing laundry until you have to wash practically all your clothes in a multiple-hour event is a behavioral rut. Typically doing all that laundry at once will kill off one of a (highly valued) weekend day.
A habit is a valuable allocation of time and energy; it frees up personal resources for other, more rewarding activities -- like a good investment, it pays a return. A rut is an inefficient allocation that saps those reserves -- like a tariff or excise levy, it increases the existing cost of the activity.
Identifying behavioral patterns and altering them to express underlying preferences is hard, and ties in to previous posts on learning to be happy; au fond, these are related skills.
I distinguish between ruts and habits in the sense that would normally be referred to as good habits versus bad habits. In this post habit should be read to understood as including good by reference. By 'automatic behavior pattern' I mean a default, the thing the person would do in the absence of external pressures.
A habit is an automatic behavior pattern that the person perceives as a net positive. Canonical example: Taking care of your laundry as soon as some small number of loads is ready to go.
A rut is an automatic behavior pattern that the person perceives as a negative. By contrast with the previous example, leaving off doing laundry until you have to wash practically all your clothes in a multiple-hour event is a behavioral rut. Typically doing all that laundry at once will kill off one of a (highly valued) weekend day.
A habit is a valuable allocation of time and energy; it frees up personal resources for other, more rewarding activities -- like a good investment, it pays a return. A rut is an inefficient allocation that saps those reserves -- like a tariff or excise levy, it increases the existing cost of the activity.
Identifying behavioral patterns and altering them to express underlying preferences is hard, and ties in to previous posts on learning to be happy; au fond, these are related skills.