Beating Depression's Beaten Path. Top Story - November 2021.
Human beings are creatures of habit. We have a subconscious bias toward doing everyday things in certain ways that feel comfortable to us. I put my left sock on before the right one, but I always put my right shoe on before the left. I brush my teeth in a certain pattern; I shave my face from left to right. Whatever the task is, I definitely don’t remember choosing the particular way in which I complete it. As a child I learned the basics but as I grew older I simply found a way of doing them that just felt comfortable to me. If not by the lack of discomfort, but by the reinforcement achieved by repetition. Either way, our brains employ a flavor of the ‘path of least resistance’ strategy with these simple tasks; that being said, would it not make sense that our brains also employ this strategy with other functions buried even deeper in our subconscious?
