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Habit: description and analysis

Habit

1 - Description and analysis

Habit is a common name given to various psychological phenomena, such as vital habits, motor habits, and purely psychological habits.
1 - Vital habits.
- Our body gets used to the cold as it gets used to the heat, and it gets used to staying in high places as it gets used to a pattern. From food patterns, a drug, or a poison. It is said in a more general sense: The eye gets used to the darkness, and the villager gets used to the noise of the cities. It is also said: Helping is a vital habit, because white blood cells are used to defeating germs and their toxins. What this means is that vital habit removes our sense of external influences, so we do not feel the harshness of the region, and drinking poison does not affect us. Rather, we get used to it just as we get used to darkness and noise. These phenomena are called biological adaptation, and they are among the issues on which scientists differed in their explanations: some of them explain the immune event, for example, by raising (white blood cells), and some of them explain it by the physical-chemical balance. They are all vital habits whose study goes back to the science of life, not to psychology.

2- Motor habits.
- Motor habit is an acquired willingness to repeat some movements and perform some actions. Some of these actions are simple and have nothing to do with will, such as our traditional natural movements or signals, and some are complex, such as the movements we make when wearing clothes, or when adornment and showmanship, and eating, and some of them require training and exercise, such as riding horses, driving bicycles, or Cars, playing a musical instrument, or memorizing poetry, all of which are based on motor mechanisms and fixed neural connections generated through repetition and voluntary learning, then after practice they no longer require effort or will.

3- Pure psychological habits.
Pure psychological habits are acquired dispositions that cause a person to feel, think, or act in the way he felt, thought, or acted before. Habits of thinking include: order and consistency in thoughts, going deep into them, being careful or quick in making judgements, going deep in imagination and reasoning, limiting attention, and directing it quickly. Habits of emotion and will include self-control, suppressing anger, fighting passion, contentment, chastity, chivalry, and other moral habits. Benjamin Constant said, describing himself: “I was shy like my father, so I got used to concealing what I was feeling, only making individual plans, and relying only on myself to accomplish them, until I began to find in the opinions of others, their interest in me, their assistance to me, and their visits to me.” As an obstacle to work, then I also became accustomed to never talking about my own concerns, and not to participate in the conversation except in dire necessity. If I participated in it, I would liven it up with a joke that would help me hide the truth of my thoughts. (Benjamin Constant, Adolph, ch. I..).

Classification of habits.
The division of habits into vitality, movement, and purely psychological is the division that we will follow in this book. However, some scholars classify habits in a different way. Let us now mention some of these classifications:

A - General customs and private customs.
Among these classifications is the classification of (Egger), who said: Habits are general, and in particular, specific subjects (Habitude spéciale), or partial (Particuliere) are the habits in which one action is limited to repeating in one pattern, such as a musician getting accustomed to playing a specific piece of music. General habits (habitude générale) are habits that include different actions, but of the same type, such as a musician’s habit of playing every new piece of music without hesitation. His habit is therefore a general habit, because it has given him an established faculty that applies to different psychological actions. (Aghajar) said: The skilled worker is the worker who has acquired general habits that he can apply in all new situations. Acting is a general habit because it includes speech, movement, and gestures, which the actor can use in every new role. The scope of the general habit is broader than the scope of the private habit, because the general habit includes intellectual preparation, artistic skill, and style. He also said: Mastering a language is a general habit, because it requires that the speaker be familiar with the structure of words and apply the rules of parsing in every new structure. Even more general than this habit: the habit of learning a general readiness to learn every language. The specific custom is limited to retrieving the verbs of the previous languages ​​as they are without change, while the general matter encourages renewal. But when we talk about the results of the article, we will show that the difference between private habits and general habits is not real, and that each of the habits is, in a sense, general, because it is the performance of limited actions in uncountable circumstances.

B - Passive habits and active habits.
Also among these classifications is the classification of Maine (Doberan), who said: Habits are passive and active. Passive habit (Habitude Passive) is the habit that enables a person to tolerate any of the stimuli, so he smells appropriate or inappropriate smells, and becomes accustomed to contemplating beauty, or seeing ugliness, and it leads to diminished sensation and weak feeling. As for the active habit, it is an acquired tendency that prompts us to perform physical, intellectual, or moral actions similar to the actions we have performed previously, such as walking or talking, or the habit of selfishness, chivalry, courage, or courage. It requires both action and awareness. A passive habit requires emotion and feeling, and the function of perception in active habits is to increase their clarity and make them clearer. Its movement is easier, and its action is more precise and complete.

However, the difference between active matter and passive matter is not absolute, because these two materials often communicate and cooperate. When studying the causes and consequences of habit, we will show that there are no passive habits, and that biological adaptation itself requires internal vital activity.

Definition of habit.
These different actions have common characteristics, which is that habit is an established and permanent state that does not change easily, and it is individual and acquired, unlike instinct. It saves a lot of effort in repeating the action, whether that action is a biological adaptation, a motor habit, or a psychological one. So we can define habit by saying: It is a permanent, acquired readiness to perform the same actions or have the same effects.

This definition shows us that habits are different phenomena of one psychological state. Let us explain this by studying the causes of habits and their results.