A book entitled The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (Charles Duhigg, 2014) explains that habits have a great power to shape a person’s life beyond one’s consciousness.
The following is an excerpt from a small section of the book:
“Habits are strong, but subtle. They can appear outside of our consciousness, or they can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reconstructed by tweaking the parts. They make up our lives much more than we realize – they are so powerful, in fact, they cause our brains to cling to them to the exclusion of everything else, including common sense. ”
This paper will explain how to harness the power of habits to help students achieve better performance in school. The discussion includes: understanding of habits, strength of habits, how to form habits, utilizing the strength of habits to help students perform better . However, so that the writing is not too long, the presentation is divided into two parts.
Definition of Habit
What is a habit? Habit can be defined as an action or deed that is repeated over a period of time continuously.
Examples of habits: brushing your teeth before going to bed at night. In this case, the action or action is brushing the teeth. Time before going to sleep at night. So whenever a person is going to sleep at night, he brushes his teeth. And this is done continuously, not just a day or two, but every night before bed.
The result of habit is a good life or vice versa. If the habits that are done are things that are good or lead to goodness then the life that occurs is a good life or welfare in life.
On the other hand, if the habits that are done are bad things or lead to bad things, then the life you get is a bad life or maybe suffering in life.
The good news: that habit can be changed. So for example a person often feels suffering because of his habits of life, then he can try to escape from that suffering by changing the habits of life that lead to suffering into new habits that lead to a healthy and happy life.
The Power of Habit
Habits function to change our behavior. By doing good things (even though they are very simple) on a regular basis, people will become accustomed to doing good things (lightly and automatically, and the brain no longer thinks hard about it!), And in turn the person becomes a person who behaves well.
According to Charles Duhigg, when a habit occurs, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. Stop working really hard, or shift your focus to another task.
So unless you deliberately fight a habit – unless you discover a new routine – the pattern will automatically reveal itself.
When an activity has become a routine and the routine is maintained, then the activity turns into a habit. Habit makes everything run automatically. When something is running automatically in humans, the brain is no longer working hard for that something.
Note: The role of habits is so important in one’s life that it deserves attention. So, it is important that we get used to good habits in our life, so that we get a good life.
