Let’s get philosophical for a moment: Who are you? Or more to the point, what are you?
Are you your arms and legs? If your arms and legs were to be removed, you would still be yourself, so that’s unlikely. Are you your brain? That seems most probable. If you remove the brain, you don’t go on existing. But the same is true for the heart, the liver, and the stomach.
All of this is made even more complicated by the fact that your cells are constantly coming to life, dividing, and then dying. Your skeleton, your brain, your heart, all of it replaces itself. And the whole time, you feel perfect continuity between before and after these transitions.
Obviously, who and what “you” are is a far too complex question to have just one answer. But that does not mean the question is impenetrable. Psychologists, physicians, and theorists of a variety of disciplines have theorized where a person’s personality comes from for a long time.
Today, we are going to look at one of the most compelling answers: That your personality comes from (and therefore can be changed by) your habits, even if those habits are bad.
What are Habits?
Have you ever wondered to yourself why you prefer the food you prefer? Or why do you like the music that you like? The most common answer comes down to what is known as “familiarity bias”. Even if they don’t realize it, people like what is familiar.
Way back when humans were living in caves and contending with sabretooth tigers, any change in their environment meant danger. A bent branch, disturbed dirt, these were things the human mind could spot even if the person who spotted them wasn’t consciously aware of them.
As a result, people have a positive relationship with what is “normal” and a wary relationship with whatever changes that. This is fundamentally where habits started for humans.
But it goes one level deeper than that: If you need to solve a problem, your brain starts by asking two things. The first is obvious: “How does one solve this problem?” But as a result of asking that question, the brain homes in on another: “Has this problem been solved before?”
Habits are what your brain recognizes as “normal”, and what it recognizes as “normal” is the solutions to problems related to survival, health, and happiness.
How do Bad Habits Form?
Of course, not all states of “normal” are good. If you normally eat a family-sized bag of chips and drink two liters of soda a day, you will probably suffer some health consequences. At the same time, however, this is your “normal”. Your body and brain will have a hard time finding a way to solve the problem of idle hunger without going to your most-used solution.
Once you understand habits, then understanding bad habits is simple: They are states of normalcy that are satisfying in the short term but damaging to a person in the long term.
Whether it’s eating junk food or getting upset at a sports game, bad habits come into existence as a result of our body’s natural hormonal cycles. Consider dopamine, for instance.
Dopamine is a hormone that makes a person feel happy. It is also important in the formation of serotonin, the hormone that makes a person feel sleepy. Eating salty snacks and sweet candies triggers an instinct in you that says that eating fatty foods and sweet treats indicates you are successfully surviving. That releases dopamine into the system.
However, if you stop eating those fatty and sweet things, your body will still have a need for the dopamine created by eating them. That dopamine is part of a cycle, and if it goes away, then everything reliant upon it gets messed up. In the short term, the foods give you a dopamine “hit”. But in the long term, you become reliant on them while they degrade your body.
How Bad Habits Spiral into Your Personality
As you can read on the Gallus Detox Website, a reliance on a substance for any feeling or chemical balance can be disastrous. Whether it’s bad food, drugs, or alcohol, it will ruin your health at the same time that it compromises who you are, little by little.
The problem really starts to show itself when that bad habit starts to eclipse other things in your life. Imagine you were so reliant on bad food for the energy and dopamine it gave you that you had trouble being satisfied by anything but the fattiest, sweetest things.
Or, to go a step further, imagine that you were addicted to a narcotic drug. Suddenly, nothing is as satisfying to you as using that drug. Every relationship and obligation becomes an obstacle between you and the drug. Your personality gets undermined until the drug is part of it.
The Flip Side of the Coin
You might have already thought of this, but if a bad habit can change your personality, then a good habit can do the same. Eating bad food and using narcotic drugs are not the only things that can give you dopamine. So can spending time with your friends, family, or kind strangers.
Our society is so focused on consumption, focused on defining ourselves by what we put inside ourselves, that people often make the mistake of assuming that a habit can only involve taking things. But you can make a habit of giving things too and it will be just as fulfilling.
The real difficult part of being human is that giving and taking are often equally satisfying. So, be careful how much you give and how much you take, as it can define your personality.
Conclusion
We started by asking the question of who or what “you” are. Experts are of the opinion that people are the actions they take. Their personalities and the things they do are inextricably linked. Which gives your habits a ton of power in determining your personality.
