The Karma of Practice

Autonomous Behavior: The Default Path

Performance becomes easier with practice, eventually becoming so effortless that conscious attention is not required for successful execution.  At this point the behavioral sequence is said to be, autonomous.  Consider activities such as driving or using a word processor. When first attempted performance is slow, hesitant, and filled with error, but with practice speed increases, variability decreases, and execution becomes increasingly effortless.  What once demanded considerable attention can now be performed rapidly and accurately with little or no awareness of the component actions.

Conscious attention is not required to initiate an autonomous sequence; mere exposure to the eliciting stimulus is sufficient. And, once initiated it has a ballistic quality: it tends to run on to a predetermined target without additional guidance.

When driving, a red light is sufficient to elicit a sequence of behaviors that I produce, but occur outside of my conscious awareness.  Neither my cognitive resources, nor my intention are required to initiate and guide the complex sequence of behaviors that brings the vehicle safely to a smooth stop.

Rapid, accurate, effortless performance - that makes no demands on valuable conscious resources - has obvious advantages.  The problem is changing a behavior after it has become autonomous.  For example, an experienced driver would take longer to learn to reliably stop at a green light, than he originally took to learn to stop at a red light.   Until the new habit is acquired, the driver must pay attention in order to over-ride the well practiced behavior of driving through a green light.

Stephen Tiffany³ - whose views have been paraphrased in the preceding paragraphs - suggests that after considerable practice one's responses to certain stimuli [e.g., stressors, temptations] become autonomous.  Autonomous behavior can be over-ridden, but it requires conscious attention to do so.  The karma of repeatedly following the path to immediate gratification is that this path becomes autonomous.  As a result, whenever conscious resources are occupied by a demanding social situation, powerful emotional state, or diminished due to fatigue or intoxication, one tends to follow this default path.  

An absent-minded relapse occurs when mindful processing, which is necessary to interrupt the autonomous sequence, is not invoked when needed.   This may occur when a person was simply not conscious of the original commitment until the relapse sequence was already well under way.  Less dramatic but more common, the person was more or less aware of the unfolding of the sequence of events leading to the lapse, and was also fully aware of the previous intention to remain abstinent, yet simply failed to dedicate the conscious effort required to interrupt the autonomous behavior chain. 

Some high risk situations are characterized by a conflict between a previously made commitment and an autonomous habit.   The conflict will resolve in either success or failure, and, needless to say, success is better.   

The purpose of these pages is to promote success by tipping you off about the biological, psychological and social factors the pertain to addictive disorders.  Bear in mind that the PIG is such a potent and deceptive foe that intellectual appreciation is not sufficient.  The procedural knowledge required to intentionally guide your actions when face to face with potent stressors and temptations cannot be acquired by reading alone.  Each person must develop this competence through personal experience.  

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Footnotes

1. Ainslie, George, Specious reward: A behavioral theory of impulsiveness and impulse control. Psychological Bulletin. 1975 Jul Vol 82(4) 463-496

2. Frankl, Victor E. Basic concepts of logotherapy. Confinia Psychiatrica. 1961 4 99-109

3. Tiffany, Stephen T. A cognitive model of drug urges and drug-use behavior: Role of automatic and nonautomatic processes. Psychological Review. 1990 Apr Vol 97(2) 147-168

We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

-  Aristotle

[We] advance by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in battle - they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

- A. N. Whitehead

Character is simply habit long continued

- Plutarch

Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.

  - Vince Lomabardi

- Strange de Jim