William James (1842-1910)
In April 1870, a twenty-eight-year-old James made a cautionary note to himself in his diary. “Recollect,” he wrote, “that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action–and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser–never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number.” The importance of forming such “habits of order” later became one of James’s great subjects as a psychologist. In one of the lectures he delivered to teachers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1892–and eventually incorporated into his book Psychology: A Briefer Course–James argued that the “great thing” in education is to “make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”
The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
James was writing from personal experience–the hypothetical sufferer is, in fact, a thinly disguised description of himself. For James kept no regular schedule, was chronically indecisive, and lived a disorderly, unsettled life. As Robert D. Richardson wrote in his 2006 biography, “James on habit, then, is not the smug advice of some martinet, but the too-late-learned too-little-self-knowing, pathetically earnest, hard-won crumbs of practical advice offered by a man who really had no habits–or who lacked the habits he most needed, having only the habit of having no habits–and whose life was itself a ‘buzzing blooming confusion’ that was never really under control.”
Nevertheless, we can summarize a few of James’s tendencies. He drank moderately and would have a cocktail before dinner. He stopped smoking and drinking coffee in his mid-thirties, although he would cheat with the occasional cigar. He suffered from insomnia, particularly when he was deep into a writing project, and beginning in the 1880s he used chloroform to put himself to sleep. Before bed, if his eyes weren’t too tired, he would sit up and read until 11:00 or midnight, which, he found, “very much enlarges the day.” In his later years, he took a nap every afternoon from 2:00 to 3:00. He procrastinated. As he told one of his classes, “I know a person who will poke the fire, set chairs straight, pick dust specks from the floor, arrange his table, snatch up a newspaper, take down any book which catches his eye, trim his nails, waste the morning anyhow, in short, and all without premeditation–simply because the only thing he ought to attend to is the preparation of a noonday lesson in formal logic which he detests.”
* Source: Daily Rituals by Mason Currey