I read somewhere that habits can be categorized into three: good habits, bad habits and habits that do not matter. For example, it considered a good habit to take a bath or to shower daily while the opposite becomes a bad one. But whether you do it in the morning or in the evening does not really matter. We were not born with our habits but rather we learned them. The formation of our habits can be attributed to several factors.

First would be our families. We learn most of our habits from this basic unit of society which we grew up in. If everybody in the family tends to wake up at dawn, there is a big chance that you have adopted that same habit of waking very early in the morning. Young kids tend to assimilate the habits of the people around him and usually these are the ones who are part of their families.

As they grow older, they have more interactions with people outside of their family circle and they learn separate sets of habits from them. For teen-agers, this would be from their friends. The peer factor is very strong during adolescence thus, we can observe these young people having very similar habits starting with the way they dress and their leisure activities.

Third is our culture. This has an even bigger scope. Some of our habits are culturally laden like the penchant for spicy foods or the bowing of the head every time we meet somebody of authority or more senior than we are.

Habits may be positive or negative. The good ones we just need to maintain but the bad ones we can unlearn and replace with positive habits.

This is the start of another year for us and it is high time for us to learn new and positive habits.

Tags: culture, Habits, peer pressure

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Habits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.