Habits and the Brain

Habits: An arboreal species that may descend from trees to bask and move over the ground or even swim across a stream in pursuit of its prey. It is beautifully camouflaged, can move swiftly if disturbed, and has stereoscopic vision. If provoked the boomslang will inflate the neck region to more than twice the normal size....

Me: No no no, not "habits" - a "Habit"
Google: Oh, why didn't you say so?

Habit: an established custom; "it was their habit to dine at 7 every evening", a pattern of behavior acquired through frequent repetition; "she had a habit twirling the ends of her hair"; "long use had hardened him to it", a distinctive attire (as the costume of a religious order), put a habit on, substance abuse.

Hm... I have a lot of habits. No, not the species. The thing. Tons of them. I pull at my hair, bite my lip til it bleeds, bite fingernails, scratch my ears (yeah that ones weird), and a ton of others I wont get into for the embarassment of them. Well, I guess they aren't so bad...but I'd rather not talk about them. I kind of feel shame in a lot of them too. I'll find myself doing one of them and be like, "wow what am I doing? This is incredibly stupid of me."

So...why don't I just stop all together?

You know why? Because they're nervous habits. I'm a nervous person. Therefore, I act in many of them to distract my brain from being so scattered and anxious. Why so scatter brained? I don't know...ask the brain. It knows more than me.

I do find it kind of like a paradox that there are things in my brain that I don't usually think about. Things I know that I just never really get to. Kind of like when you have an epiphany and suddenly things are just that much clearer.

So I don't really know... or do I?

Nervous habits can be pretty destructive. In my case they're just kind of disturbing. Haha not really... but they kind of make me wonder about my mental health sometimes, which kind of reassures me that I'm sane. If I'm conscious of my mental and physical health, there's no way I'm crazy. lol

That said I think I should try to work on the whole nervous habit thing.

"Breaking Nervous Habits for Dummies" - there's probably one out there. I'll look it up.