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The Karma of Behaving Badly

Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.

 —   Elbert Hubbard

Performance becomes easier with practice. In fact, with enough practice, performance can become autonomous—that is, it requires no conscious attention at all. Consider activities such as driving a car or using a computer keyboard. When first attempted, performance is slow, hesitant, and filled with error, but with practice speed increases, variability decreases, and execution becomes increasingly effortless. What once demanded considerable attention can now be performed rapidly and accurately with little or no awareness of the component actions. With sufficient practice, the behavioral sequence becomes autonomous and conscious attention is no longer required to initiate or guide it. Mere exposure to the triggering stimulus is sufficient, and, once initiated, the action has a ballistic quality, tending to run on to completion all by itself.

For example, when driving, a red light is sufficient to trigger a complex sequence of events that brings the vehicle to a smooth stop a safe distance from the car in front of you. Rapid, accurate, effortless performance that makes no demands on dear conscious resources is the payoff of your years of driving practice. The down side of extensive practice becomes apparent when you want to respond differently.

If you moved to England, you would have to pay attention to what had been automatic in order to override the well-practiced behavior of driving on the right side of the road. But as you continued to practice driving on the left side of the road, there would be a gradual but inevitable shift to a new default driving pattern.

Summary: After considerable practice, reaction patterns become autonomous. While autonomous behavior can be overridden, it requires conscious attention to do so, until the new pattern becomse the default.

The Karma of behaving badly is that the bad behavior becomes progressively easier to perform—until it becomes the path of least resistance. Conversely, the more you practice acting in accord with your interests and principles, the easier it becomes to follow your path of greatest advantage—eventually becoming your default path.

Use It or Lose It

Habit strength, like muscle strength, increases with exercise. Bad habits are tough to break if they have been well practiced. However, each time you get yourself to do the right thing, you strengthen the intended habit, and the bad one atrophies a little. It will take a finite number of repetitions for the new response pattern to become stronger than the old one. If you remain mindful, time is on your side; eventually, you will discover that it has become easier to follow your intended path than the old path of least resistance.

 

 

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