“I am a man of thirty with wrinkles and lines on my forehead that make me look forty.”
A world-famous artist, Vincent Van Gogh, wrote to his brother Theo. As he suffered hardships of life and pain by creative work of painting, it left traces on his forehead. He was distressed because he looked older than his age.
Is Gogh the only person who worries about that? When we are tired or frustrated, we show our emotions on our faces unconsciously. Appearance of wrinkles is a natural biological process due to aging, but our facial muscles can also stiffen as our habitual facial expressions; if we frown or raise eyebrows when things do not go our way, after a few years, the very facial expression will be our portrait. “After a certain age, every man is responsible for his face”—this is not groundless.
Just as we have an involuntary frowning on our faces, we take many actions unconsciously in everyday life. Researchers at Duke University found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day were not the due to decision making, but were habits.
The brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. In order to save effort for recognizing something new, the brain has amazing ability to turn complex routines into unconscious habits.
If we have good habits, it is good. If we have bad habits, however, they can affect our lives, great or small. So we need to think about it; if we shake our legs during a job interview, we will be disqualified, and if we are abrasive in a habitual manner, we will get into trouble with others.
Nail biting is a kind of habit, but habits include something emotional like temper outburst. In the book, The Power of Habit, the author Charles Duhigg says that the willpower to control emotions can be cultivated and made into a habit. One employee named Travis Leach, who appears in his book, would lose control to a rude customer. As he even yelled, “Get out!” or threw things, he was fired.
Every morning, he would say to his reflection in the mirror and order himself to be better, but he found himself doing the same when he was in a similar situation. A few years later, however, he became a totally different person. He was kind to rude customers with equanimity, and even managed two stores; actually, he started to live a new life. What had happened to Travis?
The coffee company that Travis entered was training its employees in self-discipline, because normally calm employees would lose their composure when pressure was on them.
In the manual, there was a page that was largely blank. At the top, it reads, “When a customer is unhappy, my plan is . . .” The workbook was for the employees to imagine unpleasant situations and write out a plan for responding so that they would behave in a pre-set ways. Why did they have to write it on paper? It was to effectively train them to put their thought into action, by consciously imprinting it in their minds.
In that sense, this parallels the way to break bad habits presented by a documentary film. People who found themselves hard to break their bad habits such as smoking, messing up a room, or being late participated in the experiment. As they were unable to do as were their customs, they were stressed at first. Two or more months later, however, more than 90 percent of them broke their bad habits.
One thing they did was to write their bad habits as soon as they burst into the habits. Seeing the notes, they saw the errors of their ways. They had known what they had to change, but it had been no more than a vague idea. When they wrote them down on paper, however, they could realize how serious it was and they tried to reduce the frequency.
We have good habits as well as bad habits. It is the same in the life of faith. There is a bad habit (Heb 10:25) as well as a good habit. Following the good habit, which God set as an example (Lk 22:39–40), is the way to give energy to our soul.
At the proper time, God trains us with the words of the water of life so that we can make a habit of the divine nature. Even though we know that we have to have a good heart and do good, it is not easy to change self-centered behavior and the abrasive words which we are accustomed to, at a time. That’s because we unconsciously pout when we complain about something, or cast a disapproving glance to a person whom we do not like.
What about writing down everything that we have just overlooked at the thought that it’s okay because it is just a mistake or a kind of habit? Let us put up the sword named a bad habit, and polish the sword named a good habit every day so that we won’t follow the bad habit anymore and only do what is good. Let us forget ourselves who lingered to quit bad habits one second ago. Now—the present—is important.