Habit and Routine

Since the Enlightenment, the general consensus has been that our brains essentially react to signals received via our senses and what follows is an orderly chain-reaction of emotion, reason, analysis, and decision-making, which is sent back to our bodies as commands about how to move in response whatever we're sensing. In recent decades, however, neuroscientists have discovered that this isn't at all how it works. Our brains, it seems, are not reaction machines, but rather prediction machines. They aren't waiting for stimuli in order to respond, but are rather actively anticipating, even creating, what is happening based on experience. Indeed, some 90 percent of what we "perceive" is actually our brain's prediction about what it expects to be happening, with only 10 percent of our so-called perceptions being facts about the world as it actually is.

As a result, we live in a world of habits and routines derived from our experience that in turn further confirm our predictions in a kind of self-filling cycle.

Habits and routines are important to all of us, but especially to young children because they don't have the accumulated experience we adults have from which to make predictions. Classroom routines are part of creating an environment for young children in which at least some of the stressful guesswork is removed from the prediction process. 

Of course, this lack of accumulated experience also, at least in part, explains why young children are notoriously facile divergent thinkers (the process of creating multiple unique ideas or solutions to problems, commonly referred to as "creative thinking"). They haven't developed the habits and routines of thought that tend to lock us adults into a more limited range of ideas and solutions.

Routines are a collection of useful habits, ideally self-selected. Of course, the initial classroom routine may be imposed by adults, but in a healthy classroom, the children themselves immediately begin to shape it to suit themselves both individually and collectively. We may have provided the initial framework, but over weeks and months what the children do within that framework is all their own. And as anyone who has ever tried to flip-flop their classroom routine, or otherwise wrest control of it from the children, quickly discovers how important it is to them: some might go along, but many more will, in one way or another, fight back. 

That's because habits and routines are important.

The great psychologist and philosopher William James wrote, "Education, in short, cannot be better described than by calling it the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior." This, of course, jibes with what we know about the predictive nature of human brains: our very survival is dependent on this type of "education."

That said, we all know that habits and routines can become problematic. Many of our mental health challenges, like anxiety and depression, can at least in part be thought of as "bad habits," habits and routines of mind that careen beyond our control. And the pursuit of mental health is one of attempting to replace those bad habits with better ones.

But on a more prosaic level, our habits and routines can deaden our experience of life because they leave little room for surprise. I think of it as a kind of calcification in which the world becomes duller because my brain's predictions have become, well, predictable. Old habits can make it increasingly difficult to think outside the box, because, after all, by the time we're "experienced" 90 percent of what our brains perceive are actually just habit or routine responses to the messages of our senses. I regularly find myself inspired by the sheer creativity of young children who, when left to think for themselves, solve problems in ways my old, calcified brain simply would not conceive on its own.

When our habits and routines are too rigid and inflexible, they cause us to pay less attention to the actual world around us as we get lost in our habitual predictions. We miss the changes, subtlety, and beauty. We may have purchased our home for the view, but habit and routine tend to blind us to it until a visitor enthuses over it. 

We cannot live without habits and routines, but at the same time, if we aren't aware, they make the experience of life less intense and therefore less real. I've been thinking a lot lately about the 90 percent of my experience that is, essentially, habit and routine. That percentage definitely drops when I spend time with young children, when I travel, when I engage with art, when I read a novel, and especially when I remember to be curious instead of judgmental. 

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