Are Habits Innate or Acquired?

I recently saw a clip of the writer Wang Meng speaking; his gist was that habits matter enormously, that we should stick to good habits long-term and shed bad ones as early as possible. He is right, but it is worth pressing further: why are so many people unable to keep good habits, yet unable to break bad ones? Is a benign or vicious habit formed by inborn genes, or by postnatal upbringing?

I once came across another story: that in 1978, 75 Nobel laureates gathered in Paris, and a reporter asked one white-haired laureate what he had learned in life that mattered most. He replied that it was the good habits his kindergarten teacher had helped him form.

The story is uplifting but sloppy; I suspect it is a garbled myth. This skeptical habit of mine is itself a personal habit that has helped me learn a great deal. Without skepticism there is little deep thinking, and learning without deep thinking has limited value.

I doubt the story for two reasons. First, I have seen several versions, none of which names the old scholar, which is implausible. Second, I cannot see why 75 Nobel laureates would congregate in Paris — rare enough to be suspicious. When something is implausible, it is probably false.

Wang Meng surely has many good habits and few bad ones; otherwise he could not have achieved so much. But I suspect his advice to keep good habits and quit bad ones is not actionable.

Bookstore shelves are full of titles like Develop a Good Habit in 28 Days, supposedly helping people build good habits. But in my experience, most people with good habits did not seem to acquire them through training; they appear simply to have been born with high self-discipline. Conversely, those helplessly trapped in bad habits also seem innately lacking in self-discipline.

For a while I often visited Professor Huang Xizhen, a famous respiratory specialist at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, who ran a smoking-cessation clinic. Many patients came to her for help, and some became regulars I grew to know. I asked them: is quitting smoking really that hard? They said yes, extremely.

I watched my father quit smoking. He had smoked for decades; when my mother was hospitalized after her stroke, the attending (my brother's alumnus) told him that to prevent a second stroke he must quit. My father at once declared he would stop immediately, and from that day he never smoked again. The process was genuinely uncomfortable, but he did it on his own, without external aids.

Many will say this was because my mother's life was at stake, giving him such powerful motivation. But my work brings me into contact with countless dying cancer and stroke patients; when doctors tell them to quit and warn that death risk is high if they do not, they still cannot.

I have a friend, a generation older than me, with exactly this problem. I repeatedly urged him to quit smoking and drinking. He told me: I know you mean well, but I can't quit; I am not afraid of death. Look, when I die, you don't need to burn paper money for me; just bring some cigarettes and liquor to my grave. He was not joking.

Doctors arguably deal with human habits more than any other profession, and I believe most colleagues feel as I do: our exhortations to patients and families to drop harmful habits usually end in failure. Relatives eagerly hope the doctor's words will have an effect, but the results are disappointing.

I myself have built many good habits, such as writing daily without fail for twenty or thirty years. I took this up spontaneously in adolescence; no outside force helped, yet it is now deeply rooted.

My study habits are also strong. I personally think my IQ is only average — though many around me disagree, and consider me brighter than most. I know I am not the clever type; what I have accumulated owes more to study habits and persistence than to raw intelligence.

My brother and I grew up in the same household, yet our characters and habits are utterly different. So I lean toward the view that many human traits rest on inborn genes, and that habits arise spontaneously on that genetic foundation.

Good habits have good inborn genes; bad habits have bad ones. The tale of lifelong benefit from good habits picked up in kindergarten is fine to listen to but not to take seriously. Kindergarten teachers have many children; why do different children grow up with utterly different habits? Reflect on that, and you will not so readily believe such superficially plausible sayings.

The professional medical term for bad habits is "addictive behavior": smokers have nicotine addiction, drug users have substance addiction, the promiscuous have sex addiction. For a long time these were thought to alter brain structure, but recent brain science suggests the more likely sequence is that a brain abnormality comes first, which then produces addictive behavior, which further worsens the brain problem.

The most typical example is some bipolar patients, who are more likely than others to have pathological lying, gambling disorder, sexual promiscuity, binge eating, and dangerous driving; their brain structure is congenitally abnormal. Most people with bad habits are not so severely affected, but they still have varying degrees of structural brain abnormality.

Those with stronger self-discipline, in turn, may simply have had more fully developed brains in the womb. This raises a very practical question for us clinicians: how should we help patients break habits harmful to their bodies — by relying on simple medical advice, or by deeper research and more effective scientific methods?

We all know that the sustained damage of bad habits is irreversible; if they are not stopped, clinical efficacy is sharply reduced. Theoretically, to neglect this element is to rule out any complete and ideal treatment plan.