Habits
Lynette Huff
PSY/250
October 28, 2013
David Dakroub

Habits

Habits are an acquired pattern of behavior that has become almost involuntary as a result of frequent repetition (The Free Dictionary, 2013). Habits are something that people do like either biting nails, smoking, doing drugs, or washing their hands a number of times. Some habits can be good and others can bad. Most people find it hard to break bad habits and take on good habits. The whole world can have bad and good habits those habits are what help make up our personality. Sometimes our habits are how some people perceive us and maybe even the way they treat us. We will look into how these habits can perceive us and how we can use them or not use them.
When analyzing one of our habits it would be a bad one because we have a tendency to bite our nails. Nail biting started for us when we were little, why it started could not tell anyone why or how. Looking back we do not remember ever having a role model except maybe other little children that did the same thing. Do remember our mother telling us to stop biting our nails that is was bad. Now that we are older we have stopped biting our nails in some ways, the only time we bit our nails now is when we are stressed. We guess we started biting our nails again when we decided to quit smoking, which is another bad habit we picked up along the way. We started smoking and quit biting our nails when our father pasted away and we had to step up to the plate and take care of our mother at eighteen years old. It is kind of like we traded one bad habit for another bad habit. So we quit one bad habit and started back up on the other bad habit. We can quit the bad habit of nail baiting as long as we put our minds to it.
We continue our nail biting because we get stressed out or we get worried about things that are happening. There are times when we do not bite our nails and that is usually when we are not stressed or worried about something. When we are relaxed and things are going as they should be going is when we can forget about biting our nails. Even when in our younger days we tried that stuff that people can put on their nails to help them stop and that did not even work. A habit could be broke if a person changes their behavior and how they think about things. We could even stop biting our nails if we change how we feel about things around that stress us out. The more we look at this bad habit we set and try to figure out ways to break it and keep it working. We will just have to see what happens.
According to the behaviorist theory why we have this bad habit might have something to do with habit hierarchies. Habit hierarchies more or less says that a person would establish a bad habit in accordance to a situation (Friedman & Schustack, 2013). This habit according to the habit hierarchies had to come from situation that started from when we were young. According to the behaviorist theory also our habit of biting nails could also be a coping mechanism. This means we bite our nails in order to cope with the stress that we are going through. Biting our nails is what makes us feel a little better about the situation that we are that we are stressing about. So all of this would explain why we bite our nails and maybe why we cannot quit biting our nails.
According to social/cognitive theory the reason we could have formed our nail biting habit could be because we had ADHD when we were younger. ADHD is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder which means we have a hard time concentrating and keeping still (Friedman & Schustack, 2013). We could have started nail biting in accordance with not being able to sit still or keep focused on things. The factor of social/cognitive theory that explains our nail biting would emotional intelligence which talks about using things to help a person’s anxiety problem (Friedman & Schustack, 2013). Both of these could really explain why we started nail biting and whey we still bite our nails now. We would have to get both of these problems under control in order to be able to stop our nail biting.
When looking at operant conditioning we are talking about applying rewards for good behavior and consequences for bad behavior. We could for a reward for not biting our nails could be going out and getting something new, like maybe some new nail polish. For biting our nails a consequence could be to have to put a dollar in a jar that could be used at a later date for something good. This would be a really good plan and could be set up in a way that could work. We have noticed that when we are keeping ourselves busy we do not bite our nails. So the more we keep busy and reward ourselves for not biting our nails we could eventually stop biting our nails all together.
Well between behavioral and social/cognitive theory they both explain my personality pretty good. When we were younger we probably had ADHD and back than it was not something that was talked about. So we just learned how to cope with our anxiety problems by biting our nails. This explains that we were probably very hyper and distracted easily and this all had to do with our social intelligence. We feel though that between the both of them we could use them to our advantage to help us break our habit. Bad habits can become good habits if we just change our behavior towards how we act towards things.
When looking at our bad habits and good habits we can see where they might come from or how they could have come about. It is so neat how our behaviors can establish our personalities. Our behavior can explain our personalities and why we would act a certain way. It is also very neat how our behaviors can explain how we started a certain bad or good habit. We think the more we can study a humans habits we can be able to explain their behavior. When we are able to explain the habits and behavior then we will be able to understand why people do the things they do. This all could make sense of why serial killers do the things that they and why they act the way they do.

Reference
Introduction to Operant Conditioning. (2013). Retrieved from http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/a/introopcond.htm
The Free Dictionary. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/habit
Friedman, H. S., & Schustack, M. W. (2012). Personality Classic Theories and Modem Research [University of Phoenix Custom Edition eBook]. : Pearson Education, Inc. Retrieved from University of Phoenix, PSY/250 website.