Habits are just a set of actions a person does; Behavior defines a person. It is controlled by the person. These habits and actions might reveal information about a person’s personality and identity.
Key Takeaways
- Habits are automatic and subconscious actions, while behaviors are any observable actions, including both conscious and unconscious activities.
- Habits develop through repetition and reinforcement, whereas various factors, including genetics, environment, and learning, can shape behaviors.
- Changing habits requires conscious effort and replacing them with new routines, while modifying behaviors can involve adjusting multiple aspects of a person’s life.
Habits vs Behaviors
The difference between Habits and Behaviors is that Habits are the things that a person performs over and over until it converts to second nature. While behaviour is the system’s response to the stimuli that surround it, habit is something that a person performs frequently and subconsciously till it converts into a habit.
Taking the same things again and again, could also be termed as a type of learning or revision till the person doing the action towards some circumstance becomes accustomed to it and no longer approaches it in different ways.
Because behaviour is the system’s response to the stimuli surrounding it, there are occasions when behaviour becomes unavoidable.
Comparison Table
| Parameters of Comparison | Habits | Behaviors |
|---|---|---|
| Type of action | It refers to activities that are repeated. | It is essentially a collection of Reaction Impulses. |
| Duration | If not halted, it can last a lifetime. | Cannot be readily halted or modified. |
| consciousness | It is carried out unconsciously. | It is carried out deliberately. |
| Affected by the nervous system | No, the neurological system has no control over habits. | Yes, the neurological system is the main controller of behavior. |
| Effects | The environment’s influences on an individual are known as habits. | Individual’s responses to their environment are termed as behaviors. |
What are Habits?
Habits are just a set of behaviours that we appear to execute naturally without applying conscious thought to our decision-making.
Habits are established by trigger, behaviour, and reward loop that has previously generated positive effects. When we utilize a habit loop frequently, it strengthens them over time.
The phrase “neurons that fire together wire together” is commonly used to describe this phenomenon, which means that the more we repeat a habit, the more effective our brains get at linking a pattern of behaviours, using less energy and allowing us to utilize it more.
Because they are automatic, habits are good. We do things without thinking about them, which allows our brains to focus on other things. The same may be said of undesirable behaviours.
What are Behaviors?
When we talk about behaviour, we’re talking about the system’s interaction with its environment. The organism’s system that surrounds a person has an impact on that person’s behaviour.
What we do, how we act, and even what we think and say are examples of behaviours. Our actions are frequently prompted by ideas we have acquired based on how a scene was the last time we encountered the same or a comparable trigger.
When confronted with a perceived threat, we may act instinctively and adopt evolutionary reactions such as fight, flight, or freeze, which are the body’s methods of keeping us safe.
There are many things to be proud of and nothing to be embarrassed about. Your actions reflect your personality, and personality is what people say about you.
Main Differences Between Habits and Behaviors
- The environment’s influences on an individual are referred to as habits. Behaviours are an individual’s outputs to their environment.
- Habits can be broken with time and constant efforts, but the behaviour is difficult to modify.
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1941406408328536
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1997.tb00650.x
Last Updated : 19 August, 2023
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Piyush Yadav has spent the past 25 years working as a physicist in the local community. He is a physicist passionate about making science more accessible to our readers. He holds a BSc in Natural Sciences and Post Graduate Diploma in Environmental Science. You can read more about him on his bio page.
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