Attitudes
Recently, I was told that attitudes are mental habits. My first reaction was that this is too simplistic and doesn’t encapsulate the complexity of attitudes, but the longer I’ve wrestled with it, the more I am settled on this being true - an attitude is a mental habit.
We have physical habits or routines that help out all the time. I wake up in the morning, I start making coffee, I take the dog outside, I eat some breakfast… These things seem to happen, and I don’t think about doing them. What if that were not the case? I wake up and spend a few minutes considering all my options and what the best thing to do would be. Then multiply that out for the next twenty decisions. That would quickly get exhausting. Now, sometimes it’s good to go back and evaluate what I am doing and if it could be better, but the fact that I have these physical habits means that I don’t have to waste time and mental energy on deciding what I should do to start my day. It opens up a lot of space for other things and thinking through the important events that I need to spend my mental energy on. In the same way, we have mental habits - these are people I like and trust, these are people that I’m skeptical of, these are things I like to do, this is how I react to my frustrations, that person never gives me a chance, I always fail when I do this… All of these are mental habits that describe our attitude about things or people. It saves a lot of time and energy because we do not think critically about each situation; we have an established pattern and can move forward.
But is it helpful? Sometimes. Sometimes we need to be able to make quick and efficient decisions so our mental habits will serve us well. However, it is important to go back and consider our decisions once in a while to see if our mental habits are what we really want or if they are causing us to get stuck in a rut. If I think back to times I have had people in my life question my attitude, it has usually been around dismissing someone before I’ve fully heard what they say. Maybe they said something that caused me to dismiss them in the past, and now I’m stuck in the rut of my negative attitude toward them. It’s hard to go examine my attitudes, but it is a productive exercise.
If you would like to spend some time thinking about the mental habits that you have formed and whether those attitudes are helpful or not, please Contact Us.
