I was on the road early this morning, driving back from the Cincinnati airport* and tuned into a podcast by Mel Robbins. (Who is hilarious – you should check her out on YouTube sometime.)<\/p>\n\n\n
As I listened, I had an epiphany regarding habits. I have been thinking of habits purely in terms of physical activity: flossing teeth, reading the Bible, daily exercise, etc.\u00a0 It seems to me that it could be useful to consider an entire second category of habits: habits of thought.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
No doubt others have made this connection, but for me it opens up new possibilities to explore: Does the “Habit Loop” hold for patterns of thought? Are thought patterns triggered by a particular cue? Are they geared towards a reward of some type? Can bad thinking habits be broken in the same way as bad physical habits?<\/p>\n\n\n
My interest in habits this past year was an off shoot from my starting point: the question of how much control we have over our own thinking.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
I had come to consider the information about habit formation to be an interesting and useful, but separate, rabbit hole.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Now I find that it might have led me right back to my starting point!<\/p>\n\n\n
I need to give it some thought…<\/p>\n\n\n
___________<\/p>\n\n\n
* Melissa is taking a well-deserved break for a few days to visit her friend Emily in New Jersey. We left the house at 4:45 am. That gave me a good excuse not to stay up until midnight last night.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was on the road early this morning, driving back from the Cincinnati airport* and tuned into a podcast by Mel Robbins. (Who is hilarious – you should check her out on YouTube sometime.) As I listened, I had an epiphany regarding habits. I have been thinking of habits purely in terms of physical activity: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3351,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350\/revisions\/3351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}