As human beings, we are creatures of habit. We seek predictability and reliability as a means of keeping ourselves safe. Habitual behaviour – in other words, behaviour that is repeated until it becomes automatic – helps us foster that feeling of security.
Habits, especially those we perform on a subconscious level, are vitally important as our brains have limited capacity to process new information and rely on repeated patterns to smoothly navigate daily life. The trouble is, some habitual behaviours do not always serve us and can have an unhelpful impact on both our own lives and the lives of those around us.
With the individuals in our settings, often a central part of our role is to support change in certain habitual behaviours to ensure each person can lead a rich and full life.
In day-to-day life, much of our behaviour is habitual, from eating breakfast and brushing our teeth, to getting dressed and going to work. Having repeated these behaviours over and over again, we eventually operate on autopilot, freeing up capacity in our brains for dealing with new information.
Many of the habitual behaviours we develop could be considered ‘helpful’; for example, fuelling our bodies with nutritious food and taking regular exercise, both of which keep us fit and healthy. Similarly, developing healthy coping mechanisms to self-regulate when we feel overwhelmed helps us to stay calm and regulated in stressful situations. With enough repetition over time, these behaviours and responses become automatic.
However, sometimes, less helpful habitual behaviours can also take root: eating junk food while watching TV; smoking; biting nails; or reacting in particular ways to certain people or environments. When we repeat these behaviours again and again, we begin to perform them on a subconscious level, making them difficult to recognise and address. Our brains get stuck in fixed patterns.
When we know the individuals we support well, we can often predict how they may react to certain stimuli and the behaviours we might see in a particular situation.
While being able to foresee behaviour can be a useful way to minimise risk and keep people safe, if we are not careful, we can end up unintentionally stifling individuals’ growth and contributing to the likelihood of certain behaviours recurring. For example, if someone in our care repeatedly reacts to loud noises by becoming agitated and showing physically risky behaviours, we can sometimes find ourselves saying things like, ‘She’s always like this,’ or, ‘There’s nothing we can do about it’.
Alternatively, we might try to remove known triggers entirely, which may be a temporary solution, but removes the opportunity for an individual to have new experiences that can, in turn, help to change emotions, driving alternative behaviours.
Watch our webinar about removing behaviour triggers.
By anticipating and expecting the habitual behaviour, we can unwittingly perpetuate it until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy or avoid it completely leaving an individual with no strategies to use when they inevitably face this situation again.
So how can we support individuals to change a cycle of unhelpful habitual behaviours?
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