How to Break Habits, Essay Example

Guthrie’s theory of habit breaking emerges from a theory of psychological behaviorism, such that habits themselves are merely examples of learned behavior. In short, habits indicate that there is a consistent response to a given stimulus that the subject experiences: the habit is precisely how the subject reacts when confronted with this stimulus. Accordingly, for Guthrie, the approach to breaking so-called “bad” habits is to change the pattern of behavior that is the persistent reaction to the given stimulus. For example, one would be taught to react to the stimulus in a different manner, thus canceling the normal behavioral response.

In the case of cigarette smoking, Guthrie would therefore suggest that the person wishing to break the habit finds another behavior pattern to the stimulus of wishing to smoke a cigarette. Thus, whenever someone wished to smoke a cigarette, they would instead perform a different activity, such as chewing a piece of gum. Accordingly, for Guthrie’s theory to work, it means that the subject is conscious of his or her bad habit and wishes to break it. This will lead to trying the therapeutic techniques of replacing behavior with another form of behavior. However, the second key component of this theory is that it rests on the presupposition that the behavioral model is entirely sound. Thus, on the one hand there is a purely subjective decision to break the habit – this can be controlled. On the other hand, the behavioral approach is only viable if habits such as cigarette smoking can be entirely understood in terms of the subject’s response to a stimulus in his or her environment and that a change of the reaction to the stimulus is sufficient.

In this case, Guthrie overlooks the more physical and neurological influences on habits. For example, from this viewpoint cigarette smoking is assumed to not have any effect on the physical body, such that it overlooks the possibility that the addictive nature of nicotine is what fuels the habit. Hence, it could be suggested that the weakness of this model is that it is too reductionist in character. By reducing the habit in its entirety to the behavioral reaction to the stimulus, other causes of the habit, which are not related to behavior, may be omitted.