School is supposed to help children learn how to form good habits. Since we are homeschooling that raises a bunch of questions. What are habits supposed to be good for to begin with? How do you form them? Or get rid of bad ones for that matter? And what, if anything, is the relationship between habits and willpower?

To dig into this we all decided to read a bunch of books on this topic including some famous ones, such as Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Walter Mischel’s The Marshmallow Test

Other books included Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin, Willpower by Roy Baumeister and of course The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. We also went back to some old texts including Aristotle on virtues and William James. For good measure we added some more recent readings on neuroplasticity, including books by Norman Doidge and Ruby Wax.

Yesterday evening we got together for a discussion of what we found. The key insight was that good habits extend and improve willpower. They do so by making certain behaviors more or less automatic thus reducing their mental effort which provides a firm mental grounding even under stress. The second critical bit we all agreed on was that foundational habits such as getting enough sleep, eating well, and exercising are critical for all other habit formation.

One way this all became much clearer to me was to think about sailing. Much of learning how to sail revolves around having good habits on board, such as coiling lines that are not in use, putting tools always in the same spot, etc. Having these habits not only means that those tasks take up no mental energy but also that you are well prepared should something go wrong letting you react much more calmly as a result.

Next step: we will each try to form one new good habit.