Habits Are an Essential Force in Ones Life - Essay Example

Guthrie’s idea of threshold adjustment states that the behavior of a person can change if the stimulus is weak or could be tolerated. For instance, people who smoke may not be elicited to puff a cigarette if they can indulge in reducing the number of sticks a day until eventually, they would endure not smoking. The threshold method is further reinforced through sidetracking. This is avoiding the cues that may compel undesirable behavior (Olson & Hergenhahn, 2009) such as avoiding friends who smoke. Another helpful strategy is adopting the exhaustion mechanism which suggests repetition of the habit until the person feels the anguish of fatigue. An example would be to let the person smoke until he coughs or gets sick. Such a reaction to the smoking habit enables him to ultimately give up the habit. An equally important strategy is the use of incompatible responses. Allowing the person to chew gum helps forge the link between the habit to smoke and the relief from smoking.

Despite the proposed methods above, habits are hard to break. This is attributed to the familiar neural pathways involved. Some neural patterns established in the brain, particularly the basal ganglia are known to be critical to addiction and habit formation that retains the memory of such habit. When triggered, the pattern returns especially when cues like the smell of cigarette smoke come back and reassert making the desire to stop difficult.

Part 2
Learning to learn according to William Kaye Estes is a process where a person would become effective in solving a problem when she had solved several problems in the past. Problems serve as a learning experience for the individual to become more skillful in dealing with relevant problems that may confront her. This idea of Estes is supported by the experiment of Harry Harlow on monkeys. Harlow permitted the monkeys to choose between a box with peanuts and a box without them however altered the shape with the goal of the monkeys learning which of the two boxes signals a reward. With several trials, the monkeys learned to disregard information that is irrelevant such as the shape (Krebs & Blackman, 1998). This indicates that when a person learns a task for the first time, her performance might be poor but after the experience, the person’s ability to do a task improves which is the essence of learning how to learn.

The application of learning to learn in a real-life situation is evident when a student first enters a new occupation such as going to college. Since attending college is a new endeavor for a first-year student, she does not know how to prepare effectively for the school’s examinations. As a result, she may waste time and effort reading irrelevant materials in preparation for the exams. Nevertheless, as the student is exposed to such relevant experience, she learns to prepare efficiently as she not only learns the associated skills of being a college student but also learns new strategies for learning. Read More