Just a fleeting thought

Habits are choices we have made in the past and have continued with them until we perfect them, absolutely.
Strange to think of them like that but that is the way they are programmed in the brain.
When we start something new we are conscious of doing it and concentrate on getting it right. After a while we have to think about it less and less until it becomes an habitual way of working or thinking.
Just as it is hard to make the habit it is just as difficult to undo it and requires conscious concentration to do so until a new way of working, or a new habit is created.
Take for example the way we feel about someone. The reason behind our feeling are complex and rooted in the unconscious realisation that they hold up a mirror to our own failings. So as to avoid this reality we respond in a certain way, we get angry, or call them stupid, or laugh at them. The habitual response was probably formed when we were children and this was the way we coped with difference when we were young and amongst our peer group.
The question is, do we wish to be controlled by habits created to cope in the playground and classroom as children, or has our view of the world matured and it is now time to up date the response reflecting that maturity?
I remember starting to smoke. I did it because the other students at college did so and the smell of cigarettes did disguise the awful smell of rotting dissection specimens which came out of the deep freeze each week.
It took hard work on my part to make smoking a habit which was automatic but when it did my goodness didn’t it hold me tight!
It took a conscious decision to change the habit to one of not smoking and took just as much concentration and time.
‘But that’s different,’ I hear you say,' the way I feel about things isn’t like smoking.’ The bad news; it is and the way it is coded in your mind is the same regardless of what it is.