Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.
— Elbert Hubbard
Performance becomes easier with practice. In fact, with enough practice, performance can become autonomous—that is, it requires no conscious attention at all. Consider activities such as driving a car or using a computer keyboard. 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.
With sufficient practice, the behavioral sequence becomes autonomous and conscious attention is no longer required to initiate or guide it. Mere exposure to the triggering stimulus is sufficient, and, once initiated, the action has a ballistic quality, tending to run on to completion all on the brake. The relatively complex behavioral sequence of smoothly bringing the vehicle to a stop a safe distance from the car in front of you has become autonomous. Rapid, accurate, effortless performance that makes no demands on dear conscious resources is the payoff of your years of driving practice. The down side of extensive practice becomes apparent when you want to respond differently. For example, if you moved to England, you would have to remember to drive on the left side of the road. Initially you would have to pay attention in order to override the well-practiced behavior of driving on the right side of the road.
Summary: After considerable practice, reaction patterns become autonomous. While autonomous behavior can be overridden, it requires conscious attention to do so.
It was easier to learn to stop at a red light than it would be to learn to stop at a green light after you have already learned to stop at the red light. Once it has become autonomous, stopping at the red light is the path of least resistance—it takes no effort and the behavior seems to happen all by itself. To respond differently [drive through a red light] requires that you use your will to over-ride the autonomous behavior.
The Karma of behaving badly is that the bad behavior becomes progressively easier to perform—until it becomes the path of least resistance. The same is true for allowing yourself to react childishly to the things that happen. On the other hand, the more you practice acting in accord with your interests and principles, the more you strengthen the tendency to perform virtuously. With sufficient practice the path of greatest advantage gradually becomes your default path.
Use It or Lose It
Habit strength, like muscle strength, increases with exercise. Bad habits are tough to break if they have been strengthened by a lot of exercise. However, each time you get yourself to do the right thing, you strengthen the intended habit, and the bad one atrophies a little. It will take a finite number of repetitions for the new response pattern to become stronger than the old one. How many exposures? Douglas Adams suggests that the magic number is 47. Of course, that is just a guess. It might take 72 or 23, but it will not take a million, probably not even a hundred. You will get better at this with practice and after perhaps 47 mindful response you will find that it has become easier to follow your intended path than the old path of least resistance.
You can succeed at this task, but you must stay mindful during the early phases of habit change and make sure you respond intentionally to each and every high-risk situation you encounter. While you are going through it, it may seem as though it will never end, but if you can stay “awake” during this stage of habit change, you will discover in retrospect that this part of the passage did not last very long.