The Habit of New Year’s Resolutions

This is the time of year when resolutions are made to be broken. Many start the year with the best of intentions. The Chinese, I understand, like to start their new year neither owing or being owed money.

The resolutions we make are about habits: it’s the time of year when we recognise and promise ourselves we’re going to deal with all the bad habits, in one go. We’ll exercise regularly, drink less, eat better, spend money less and time more productively... Our New Year’s intentions are the best. It’s the follow through. The Oxford English Dictionary defines habit as: a practice that is hard to give up; an automatic reaction to a specific situation; an addictive practice. No wonder follow through is so hard.

By February, resolutions are a distant memory, packed up with the Christmas ornaments to be dusted off again next year.

F. M. Alexander’s position has sometimes been simplified as: the only habit is a bad habit. But that isn’t quite what he said:

We get into the habit of performing a certain act in a certain way, and we experience a certain feeling in connection with it which we recognize as ‘right’.[1]

I use the word ‘habit’ in its widest sense, as the embodiment of all instinctive and other human reactions…as a constant influence operating for or against us… [2]

Habit of itself is neutral, neither good nor bad. Habits are small patterns of behaviour built up over time which can be combined in different ways to perform different tasks. They are the way humans and animals get through the day: without habits, we would have to filter, process and respond to every stimulus in our environment, a concept that is as inconceivable as it is overwhelming. It is, as Alexander said, whether the habit is useful or not that is important, not the habit itself.

The first element of changing a habit is to become aware of it, and that is often where the strongest mental resistance comes in. Walter Carrington said that Habit is the thing that gets in the way of change.[3] The most common habit, he said, is that of approaching any task by making an increase in muscular effort [4], of tensing and stiffening. This makes learning new patterns difficult. One habitual reaction, often denied or unrecognised, is fear. This is especially true when change is involved. Change, no matter how much we want it, has an implicit threat: we know what we’re giving up, but we can never really be sure that we’ll get everything we think we were promised in return. It goes back to our earliest Christmases: was Christmas Day ever as gloriously perfect as its anticipation?

What Alexander really opposed was learning by the trial-and-error method. It works well for animals because they function within a small range of instinctive behaviour. It worked for primitive peoples because they lived in a slowly changing environment. The range of skills they needed to survive (although more extensive that the animals they hunted) did not need to evolve in their stable environment. Alexander argued that the trial-and-error method no longer sufficed, that change in society was too rapid and modern culture too complex. If that was true in 1904, how much more true is it now?

Habit, he said, affects function: good habits of use raise the standard of general functioning and are a constant influence for good; the habit that lowers the standard is a constant influence for ill.[5]

Decisions dictated by old, unrecognised, inappropriate habits do not, argued F. M., lead to the best responses now, and will do so even less often in the future as the pace of change continues to accelerate. It is not a question of having habits; it is a question of who is in charge: you or your habits.

The trial-and-error method of changing habits is at best inefficient, and more usually, simply doesn’t work. It is why New Year’s resolutions fail and habits we thought we’d dealt with creep back. Alexander’s goal in teaching the Alexander Technique was to give people the ability to recognise and change habits no longer appropriate or necessary.

So the Alexandrian New Year’s resolution would be not so much to change the particular habit, but to look at the general pattern: acknowledge the habits and make a conscious choice about the ones that operate for, and discard those that operate against, us.

[1] Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, p. 86

2 Alexander, The Universal Constant in Living, pp. 7-8

3 The Act of Living, p.13

4 Ibid., p. 11

5 Alexander, UCL, p. 76

Catafalque

Sean Henry

Regent’s Park, October, 2007