Glossary

Habit

A ‘habit’ is a learned pattern of activity that through repetition has become automatic, fixed, and easily carried out. A habit is composed of a series of acts that follow on in reaction to a stimulus. It is a chain reaction of neural events starting in the brain, with some form of response then occurring in all our bodily tissues. A habit can be a repetitive thought, action, or behaviour.

Habits are neutral. They can be both positive and negative factors in our lives, depending on the nature of a specific habit. (Virtues can be habits as much as vices.) As a stereotyped response to doing some activity, habits can be useful for saving time. Habits come into play as we interact with our environment. They are not solely triggered from within ourselves.

However, once our habits, whether consciously or unconsciously learned, become automatic and unconscious, they become very difficult to change as we may no longer ‘see’ or feel them. (As FM Alexander once said, “The things that don’t exist are the most difficult to get rid of.”)

Our unconscious habits simply feel right and comfortable to us. Unconscious habits lead to us thinking, behaving, or performing tasks in stereotyped unthinking ways. This may mean that we misuse our whole psychophysical beings in the process of automatically performing our habit. We may then end up with unnecessary stress, tension, and a negative outcome, including the development of symptoms such as aches or pain. (Also see faulty sensory appreciation.)

Our habitual misuse is addressed in Alexander technique lessons as we loosen the seemingly automatic link between a stimulus and our habitual response to it. We do this through learning both to stop (inhibit) and the Alexander anti-stress directions. This allows us a new freedom of choice. Then increasingly, we – and not our negative, unexamined, and unconscious habits – can consciously run our lives.

See other glossary terms and definitions.