Adolescence is the energistic stage. What health and good health you want to develop ?
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While still in high school and at home, a teenager's bad habit of sleeping through his morning alarm can be moderated by parents willing to repeatedly wake him up. Away from family at college, however, and without this parental support, the young person is at the mercy of his own bad habit, continually sleeping in and missing morning classes to his academic cost. As for starting good habits, it can be easier to install regular study habits when still under the shelter of family than when one has moved out and there are more demands and distractions of independence to contend with.
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When, during the last phase of adolescence, trial independence (ages 18-23), young people move away from home they must confront the personal baggage they take with them, habits weighing heavily among them - like procrastination, impulsive spending, and escaping into endless video and computer entertainment.
What last stage adolescents discover is that good habits are hard to start (that takes "will" power), and bad habits are hard to stop (that takes "won't" power.) In each case they find that habit change is resisted because people are so deeply invested in their own status quo - in how they are used to operating, which is familiar, predictable, and comfortable.
Eating habits are a prime example. Practiced daily for so many years, they are very hard to change in any permanent way through dieting because one's psychological and physical systems are so historically opposed to giving them up. People grow very accustomed to what and how much and how often they like to eat.
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Even if the diet was successful in the short term (like prepared diets often are), in the long term once a person loosens dietary strictness, former eating behaviors usually reassert themselves, which is why taking weight off and keeping it off are two very different matters.
Resist a habit, it seems, and the habit will defend itself. Habitual behavior will fight for survival. This battle to change a bad habit reminds me of cartoonist Walt Kelly's conclusion: "We have met the enemy and they are us." In this contest, the old "us" often wins.
Like launching a rocket, to start a good habit creates the problem of lift-off. It takes a disproportionate amount of focused energy to get the new habit off the ground and up and flying. The three R's of creating a good habit are: Reminders to regularly activate the habit, Repetition to establish consistency of practice, and Reward to recognize accomplishment.
Like suffering bereavement, to stop a bad habit creates the problem of loss. It takes a lot of giving up and doing without to let investment in an old habit go. The three A's of retiring a bad habit are: Acknowledgement of the habit's negative consequences, Assertion of commitment to change, and having an Alternative way to react when the old temptation arises.
Given the influential power of habits, it behooves parents to keep a weather eye out for what patterns of behavior their teenager gets into. Part of their responsibility is to help instill healthy habits of living in their adolescent where they can, and to give the teenager a strategy for changing unhealthy habits that he or she may unwittingly acquire along the way, if that is what the young person wants to do.
So, what are a few things you might tell your adolescent about habits?
Habits are learned patterns of behavior that, from practice, become embedded in how we repeatedly function to conduct ourselves, take care of ourselves, and to get things done.
Habits operate largely unmindfully; like programs that are performed with a minimum of conscious thought they create their own momentum from becoming desirable to do again.
Habits are indispensable because they allow us to create predictability, to act automatically, and to accomplish efficiently.
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Habits are goal-directed and functional - they have an objective and they serve a purpose.
Habits can serve us well when they help maintain and enhance how well we perform, and they can serve us badly when they undermine and harm how adequately we function.
Good habits are harder to start than to put off; bad habits are easier to start than to shut down.
Habits are so robust because they are routine, usually recurring under the radar of conscious regulatory thought.
To understand how a particular habit works, identify the circumstance that cues it, the motivation that drives it, and the objective it seeks to accomplish.
If you want to end a habit, don't try to stop it; start planning and practicing an alternative behavior to resort to when the temptation to repeat the old pattern arises