The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (color ebook reader .TXT) 📕

basic, and no one can really understand himself who is in doubt

about his memory. In such diseases as neurasthenia one of the

commonest complaints is the “loss of memory,” which greatly

troubles the patient. As a matter of fact, what is impaired is

interest and attention, and when the patient realizes this he is

usually quite relieved. The man who has a poor memory may become

very successful if he develops systems of recording, filing,

indexing, but his possibilities of knowledge are greatly reduced

by his defect.[1]

[1] It is the growth of the subject matter of knowledge that

makes necessary the elaborate systems of indexing, etc., now so

important. It is as much as man can do to follow the places where

the men work, let alone what they are doing. This growth of

knowledge is getting to be an extra-human phenomenon. Of this

Graham Wallas has written entertainingly.

A second fundamental ability of living tissue, and of particular

importance in character, is habit formation. Habit resides in the

fact that once living tissue has been traversed by a stimulus and

has responded by an act, three things result:

1. The pathway for that stimulus becomes more permeable; becomes,

as it were, grooved or like a track laid across the living

structure of the nervous system.

2. The responding element is more easily stirred into activity,

responds with more vigor and with less effort.

3. Consciousness, at first invoked, recedes more and more, until

the habit-action of whatever type tends to become automatic.

There is in this last peculiarity a tendency for the habit to

establish itself as independent of the personality, and if an

injurious or undesired habit, to set up the worst of the

conflicts of life,—a conflict between one’s intention and an

automaton in the shape of a powerfully entrenched habit.

Habits are economical of thought and energy, generally speaking;

that is their main recommendation. A dozen examples present

themselves at once as illustrative: piano playing, with its

intense concentration on each note, with consciousness attending

to the action of each muscle, and then practice, habit formation,

and the ease and power of execution with the mind free to wander

off in the moods suggested by the music, or to busy itself with

improvisations, flourishes and the artistic touches. Before true

artistry can come, technique must be relegated to habit. So with

typewriting, driving an automobile, etc.

More fundamental than these, which are largely skill habits, are

the organic habits. One of the triumphs of pediatrics depends

upon the realization that the baby’s welfare hangs on regular

habits of feeding, that he is not to be fed except at stated

intervals; as a result processes of digestion are set going in a

regular, harmonious manner. In other words, these processes may

be said to “get to know” what is expected of them and act

accordingly. The mother’s time is economized and the strain of

nursing is lessened. In adults, regular hours of eating make it

possible for the juices of digestion to be secreted as the food

is ingested; in other words, an habitual adjustment takes place.

If there were one single health habit that I would have

inculcated above all others, it would be the habit of regularly

evacuating the bowels. While constipation is not the worst ill in

the world, it causes much trouble, annoyance and a considerable

degree of ill health, and, in my opinion, a considerable degree

of unhappiness. A physician may be pardoned for frank advice: all

the matters concerning the bowels, such as coarse foods, plenty

of water and exercise, are secondary compared to the habit of

going to the stool at the same time each day, whether there be

desire or not. A child should be trained in this matter as

definitely as he is trained to brush his teeth. In fact, I think

that the former habit is more important than the latter. The mood

of man is remarkably related to the condition of his

gastro-intestinal tract and the involuntary muscle of that tract

is indirectly under the control of the will through habit

formation.

Sleep[1] the mysterious, the death in life which we all seek each

night, is likewise regulated by habit. Arising from the need of

relief from consciousness and bodily exertion, the mechanism of

sleep is still not well understood. Is there a toxic influence at

work? is the body poisoned by itself, as it were, as has been

postulated; is there a toxin of fatigue, or is there a

“vasomotor” reaction, a shift of the blood supply causing a

cerebral anaemia and thus creating the “sleepy” feeling? The

capacity to sleep is a factor of great importance and we shall

deal with it later under a separate heading as part of the

mechanism of success and failure. At present we shall simply

point out that each person builds up a set of habits regarding

sleep,—as to hour, kind of place, warmth, companionship,

ventilation and even the side of the body he shall lie on, and

that a change in these preliminary matters is often attended by

insomnia. Moreover, a change from the habitual in the general

conduct of life—a new city or town, a strange bed, a disturbance

in the moods and emotions—may upset the sleep capacity. Those in

whom excitement persists, or whose emotions are persistent,

become easily burdened with the dreaded insomnia. Sleep is

dependent on an exclusion of excitement and exciting influences.

If, however, exciting influences become habitual they lose their

power over the organism and then the individual can sleep on a

battle field, in a boiler factory, or almost anywhere.

Conversely, many a New Yorker is lulled to sleep by the roar of

the great city who, finds that the quiet of the country keeps him

awake.

[1] As good a book as any on the subject of sleep is Boris

Sidis’s little monograph.

Sleeplessness often enough is a habit. Something happens to a man

that deeply stirs him, as an insult, or a falling out with a

friend, or the loss of money,—something which disturbs what we

call his poise or peace of mind. He becomes sleepless because,

when he goes to bed and the shock-absorbing objects of daily

interest are removed, his thoughts revert back to his difficulty;

he becomes again humiliated or grieved or thrown into an

emotional turmoil that prevents sleep. After the first night of

insomnia a new factor enters,—the fear of sleeplessness and the

conviction that one will not sleep. After a time the insult has

lost its sting, or the difficulty has been adjusted, there is no

more emotional distress, but there is the established

sleeplessness, based on habitual emotional reaction to sleep. I

know one lady whose fear reached the stage where she could not

even bear the thought of night and darkness. It is in these cases

that a powerful drug used two or three nights in succession

breaks up the sleepless habit and reestablishes the power to

sleep.

People differ in their capacity to form habits and in their love

of habits. The normal habits, thoroughness, neatness and method

come easily to some and are never really acquired by others.

People of an impetuous, explosive or reckless character, keenly

alive to every shade of difference in things, find it hard to be

methodical, to carry on routine. The impatient person has similar

difficulties. Whereas others take readily to the same methods of

doing things day by day; and these are usually non-explosive,

well inhibited, patient persons, to whom the way a thing is done

is as important as the goal itself.

Here comes a very entertaining problem, the question of the value

of habits. Good habits save time and energy, tend to eliminate

useless labor and make for peace and quiet. But there is a large

body of persons who come to value habits for themselves and,

indeed, this is true to a certain extent of all of us. Once an

accustomed way of doing things is established it becomes not only

a path of least resistance, but a sort of fixed point of view,

and, if one may mix metaphors a trifle, a sort of trunk for the

ego to twine itself around. There is uneasiness in the thought of

breaking up habits, an uneasiness that grows the more as we

become older and is deepened into agony if the habit is tinged

with our status in life, if it has become a sort of measure of

our respectability. Thus a good housekeeper falls into the habits

of doing things which were originally a mark of her ability,

which she holds as sacred and values above her health and energy.

There are people who fiercely resent a new way of doing things;

they have woven their most minor habits into their ego feeling

and thus make a personal issue of innovations. These are the

upholders of the established; they hate change as such; they are

efficient but not progressive. In its pathological form this type

becomes the “health fiends” who never vary in their diet or in

their clothing, who arise at a certain time, take their “plunge”

regardless, take their exercise and their breakfasts alike as a

health measure without real enjoyment, etc., who grow weary if

they stay up half an hour or so beyond their ordinary bedtime;

they are the individuals who fall into health cults, become

vegetarians, raw food exponents, etc.

Opposed to the group that falls into habits very readily is the

group that finds it difficult to acquire habitual ways of working

and living. All of us seek change and variety, as well as

stability. Some cannot easily form habits because they are

quickly bored by the habitual. These restless folk are the

failures or the great successes, according to their intelligence

and good fortune. There is a low-grade intelligence type, without

purpose and energy, and there is a high-grade intelligence type,

seeking the ideal, restless under imperfection and restraint,

disdaining the commonplace and the habits that go with it. Is

their disdain of habit-forming and customs the result of their

unconventional ways, or do their unconventional ways result

because they cannot easily form habits? It is very probable that

the true wanderer and Bohemian finds it difficult, at least in

youth, to form habits, and that the pseudo-Bohemian is merely an

imitation.

Habit is so intimately a part of all traits and abilities that we

would be anticipating several chapters of this book did we go

into all the habit types. Social conditions, desire, fatigue,

monotony, purpose, intelligence, inhibition, all enter into habit

and habit formation. Youth experiments with habit; old age clings

to it. Efficiency is the result of good habits but originality is

the reward of some who discard habits. A nation forms habits

which seem to be part of its nature, until emigration to another

land shows the falsity of this belief. So with individuals: a man

feels he must eat or drink so much, gratify his sex appetite so

often, sleep so many hours, exercise this or that amount, seek

his entertainment in this or that fashion,—until something

happens to make the habit impossible and he finds that what he

thought a deeply rooted mode of living was a superficial routine.

Though good habits may lead to success they may also bar the way

to the pleasures of experience; that is their danger. A man who

finds that he must do this or that in such a way had better

beware; he is getting old, no matter what his age.[1] For we grow

older as we lose mobility,—in joints, muscles, skin and our ways

of doing, feeling and thinking! It is a transitory stage of the

final immobility of Death.

[1] Says the talkative Autocrat of the Breakfast Table: “There is

one mark of age