Sick Soul's Healthy Mind Chapter 3- Habit and Emotion. Aidyn Jones section#02

(Sick Souls, Healthy Minds Chapter 3 starts off with this quote)

I interpret this quote as William James controlling his thinking and takes the time to actually think things through rather than acting on impulse. This quote is especially important nowadays because so many people cruise through life without thinking about anything or anyone. I can relate to this because at the restaurant I work at no one cares about anything. This is a bold statement, but I truly mean it. The servers don't do anything and stay on their phone all shift instead of   This quote sets up for the chapter of this book to be about how William James expands the psychology field. As an Industrial Organizational Psychology major this chapter was especially interesting. In psychology, we get to hear about tons and tons of cool theories, but we never really get to learn about the people behind them. William James is an American philosopher with roots in pragmatism and functionalism. He had many health issues that interrupted his medical studies at Harvard, but he still graduated. This quote is especially important nowadays because so many people cruise through life without thinking about anything or anyone. I can relate to this because at the restaurant I work at no one cares about anything. This is a bold statement, but I truly mean it. The servers don't do anything and stay on their phone all shift instead of cleaning and attending to their tables. The cooks do the bare minimum to keep their jobs even if it means not helping fellow coworkers. An example of servers not caring is when last night multiple people rang in their employee food while the kitchen was busy and short staffed. This incident made me wonder why people think the way they do even if it means disregarding other people’s feelings. This connects to the question that William James explored when writing Principles of Psychology, how does life give rise to human consciousness?

In this point of William James’s life, he had the perfect wife and family, but he had the need to do something great. He also struggled with financial problems.  In SSHM chapter 3 (pg.70), James thinks the best way to define someone is by the moment they felt most alive. This left him trying to find the real him. William James discovered that a survival mechanism for people is to go through life without thinking, which he called routinized action. This introduces the next topic of the chapter, which is habit.

Habit was already a sought-after word even Aristotle commented on the word, We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act. It is a habit” (SSHM, pg. 72). James wanted to figure out how habits were a part of the mind. He thought that habit was a way to figure out the real self. In today’s time breaking bad habits has become a trend. For example, there’s a lot of social media trends where people stop using social media all together in order to promote productivity. I linked a YouTube video describing why more and more people have shifted to staying offline. James discovered that minds are “a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once” (SSHM, pg. 73). This made me realize how everything we come in contact with can change us, but we are able to control some portion of how we react to the stimulus. As someone bad with change this quote made realize that human beings are meant to change. We are supposed to create new habits. We are supposed to grow up, travel, explore life. John Kaag notes that habits” feel good deep down in our flesh and bones”. (SSHM pg.74). This relates to me because at the restaurant I work at things were extremely toxic for a while so one of the older servers handed me a vape and said it would make me feel better. While it made me feel better almost a year later, I still hold onto this bad habit. Kaag’s quote made me realize it’s not the vape that made me feel better it’s the feeling of being able to take a break from the busyness of the kitchen. It’s the feeling of connecting with other coworkers about what flavor we have this week. It’s the disconnect from reality that the vape provides. James highlights the ability people have to change their lifestyle from a single thing, “Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.” James goes on to note, “We might be spinning our own fate, but we are pretty clueless weavers”. (SSHM, pg. 76) I find this incredibly fascinating because it really puts in perspective every decision, we make no matter how big or small can impact our entire lives. Also, there’s many times where I don’t feel in control of my own life, but James’s perspective makes me realize there’s so many little ways I have changed my life.

SSHM chapter 3, then goes on to explain human emotion. James describes emotion, “An emotion is not a ghost in a machine or some enigmatic force that drives us through our daily affairs. Instead, it is always tightly bound to our actions and bodily states, and not in the way we typically think” (SSHM, pg. 86). James believed “We don’t laugh because we're happy, we’re happy because we laugh"(SSHM pg. 87). This is called the James-Lange theory. This in an interesting take because in social psychology we are taught the Schacter-Singer 2 factor theory where emotions require both physiological arousal and cognitive appraisal of the situation. In other words, something happens to us and then we associate a feeling to the stimulus. However, I can see truth in what James is saying because when I have a positive outlook on the day, the day is always better. For example, I was having an extremely bad day at work. 3 people called out and I had to do another station then the one I was scheduled. Then, one of my coworkers comes up to me and said just smile it’ll make you feel better. This actually worked, I put a smile on my face even though that’s not what I was feeling inside and I felt so much better.

To wrap things up, chapter 3 of SSHM made me realize that people behave the way they do because it’s a habit. It’s a survival mechanism to get them through the shift. People are so used to not doing anything because they mentally can’t handle the change in patterns.

Discussion Questions:

Do you see truths in the William-Lange theory?