This chapter collects the tips on what we as individuals can do to better manage toxic stress and to reduce the contributions of stress to acute and chronic illnesses. Because toxic stress is such a common problem and a potent contributor to our most costly conditions all around the world, but still poorly understood, we should elevate toxic stress to a top public health priority to guide our efforts to find the most effective ways to prevent and treat stress-related conditions.

This chapter explores some central features of morality in terms of what are commonly regarded as virtues. A virtue is a disposition that is an important feature of one’s character. As such, a virtue endures over an extended period of time, not just for a brief moment. Still, a virtue such as honesty implies its regular exercise. However, one can occasionally behave dishonestly without this undermining its standing as one’s virtue. The notion that some emphasis on basic moral virtues should be included in K-12 and college education has long received strong public support. However, there has also been widespread disagreement about just how this should be done and with what ends in mind. Presumably, some general uncertainty, if not disagreement, about the nature and foundation of morality accounts for much of this. This uncertainty is discussed in terms of reasonableness.

This chapter describes the theories of Clark Hull, who had an enormous influence on American psychology from the time he first wrote about - and reinterpreted - Pavlovs work in the early 1930s to well into the 1960s. Hulls ambition was to develop a general theory of learning and motivation based on the development of habits - as studied mainly in rats - that would provide psychology with the equivalent of Newtons contribution to physics. His vision inspired some of the brightest and most productive researchers into animal learning in the 1950s and 1960s. Important topics that the neo-Hullians studied included the partial reinforcement extinction effect and conditioning of visceral responses.

This chapter addresses the book’s first question by focusing on what classical Pragmatism can tell us about the ‘practice turn’ in International Relations. It assesses the value – both descriptive and normative – of defining practice as pre-reflexive or habitual. Dewey was clear: habits can be useful, but only if those subject to their hold can improvise when practice produces unwanted consequences. Applying this to International Relations, the chapter shows how a failure to adequately reflect on the situational value of an ideological commitment to ‘democracy promotion’ – what Bourdieusian-informed Practice theory might call a Western ‘habitus’ – contributed to the maladapted response to the humanitarian crises in Syria and Myanmar. This again points to the centrality of reflection, deliberation, judgement and learning to the Pragmatist approach. The chapter develops that argument by examining how Dewey’s ‘pedagogic creed’ aimed to put individuals and societies in control of their habits and how his critique of the unhelpful hierarchies in formal education was extrapolated to form a theory of social learning, which included an emphasis on the role democracy plays in facilitating the reflexivity and deliberation.

Can self-control be improved through daily practice or better technique? In this chapter, I show that the popular idea that self-control is “like a muscle” that can be strengthened through exercise is not supported by recent research. Teaching people “self-control techniques” is no solution either, as it may even widen the gap between those who are good at self-control and those who are not. How about new techniques such as “commitment devices” and “nudging”? Unfortunately, although some nudges seem promising, they cover only a small subset of the situations that call for good self-control. The conclusion of this chapter is that “some people simply have more talent for self-control than others, and therefore some people will have better prospects at achieving health, wealth, and happiness than others. We may have no choice but to accept this reality.”

Rumination and worry are characteristic mental processes within depression and anxiety that have been found to contribute to the onset and maintenance of multiple disorders and to interfere with effective recovery. As such, they are important targets for treatment and prevention. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been adapted to specifically target rumination and worry, building on experimental research. This rumination-focused CBT has been proven to be efficacious in clinical trials. Rumination-focused CBT is based on the ideas that (1) rumination is a learnt habit and that effective treatment requires recognition of the triggers for the habit and either their removal/interruption or the learning of new adaptive responses to the triggers, based on repeated practice and if-then plans, and that (2) thinking over difficult situations is a normal response that can be helpful or unhelpful, and the therapy works with clients to shift them into a more helpful, concrete (How?) way of thinking rather than an unhelpful, abstract (Why?) way of thinking. The current chapter outlines the key principles, structure, and techniques within rumination-focused CBT including functional analysis, formulation, shifting thinking style, absorption, compassion, how to conduct assessments, how to select treatment components, and how to handle problems.

Intentions are certainly an important step in the goal-pursuit process, as they clarify our course of action. Yet intentions are meaningless without action. Indeed, self-control is about more than simply knowing the course of action to pursue our goals; we must execute those actions as well. However, the reality is that the transition from intention to action can be incredibly difficult. Our inability to act in ways that adhere to our intentions can derail the goal pursuit process. However, there are ways to ease the course from intention to action, whether it be itemizing a step-by-step plan so that it becomes habitual, capitalizing on factors in our environment to nudge us toward action, or disrupting our environment to making on opportunities to change our behavior. Yet whatever the method, easing the transition from intention to action is essential to getting beyond merely stating our commitment to our goals and establishing a consistent pattern of action that maximizes goal pursuit.

This chapter introduces an evidence-based model for personal change called BET I CAN. BET I CAN stands for Behaviors, Emotions, Thoughts, Interactions, Context, Awareness, and Next steps. When it comes to mattering, you can easily see that it involves all the BET I CAN levers. For instance, we can add value by doing something (behaviors), relating to people in certain ways (interactions), and shaping the community where we live (context). In turn, we can feel valued through emotions or thoughts. Our plans to add value, or feel valued, as the case may be, always require awareness of our situation and next steps. Each letter of the BET I CAN model encompassed two skills. This is what we teach in the chapter: Behaviors (Set a Goal and Create a Positive Habits), Emotions (Cultivate Positive Emotions and Manage Negative Emotions), Thoughts (Challenge Negative Assumptions and Write a New Story), Interactions (Connect and Communicate), Context (Read the Cues and Change the Cues), Awareness (Know Yourself and Know the Issue), and Next Steps (Make a Plan and Make it Stick).

This chapter aims to set the record straight about a special sort of intelligence exhibited by habitual doings. It defends an enactivist account of habitual doings which, at its core, depicts habits as flexible and adjustable modes of response that are world directed and context sensitive. So understood, habits are wholly unlike the exercise of blind mechanisms or mindless reflexes. Nevertheless, we resist the familiar forced choice of thereby understanding habits in standard cognitivist terms. Our proposal aims to avoid the twin mistakes of either underintellectualizing or overintellectualizing habits. In tune with our enactivist elucidation of the core character of habits, the chapter also explicates how habits, so conceived, can support and thwart our larger projects.

I propose an ethics that is based on stories rather than rules. The things we do in our daily lives (our motor routines) do not require articulatable goals expressible in language. We develop the “good habits” that make us good people by developing/inheriting a set of prototypes, then responding to each life situation by comparing it with those prototypes. Such a multidimensional prototype system could be realized in a connectionist network embodied in a brain/body and embedded in a world. It would not require logical reasoning as such, but rather a form of skilled coping very different from anything else considered by ethical theory. Once we realize that ethical judgments are based on prototypes and stories, rather than rules and justice, we can rethink how best to empower the revolutionary changes that are now taking place in our concepts of ethics and courtesy.

Do nonrepresentational habits display intentionality, in the sense of aiming at, pointing to, or targeting some specific objects? I will here tackle this question from the resources of Dewey's pragmatism, and more precisely from his theory of habits and his functionalist theory of meaning. Meaning, for Dewey, is a normative phenomenon, only occurring in social and linguistic practices. The fact that utterances and thoughts can be about states of affairs does not require a specific mental property of pointing to or targeting for to be explained. Similarly, if behavior and habits can be described as being directed toward objects, this directedness is nothing before or beside the way our actions are normatively framed and organized in certain forms of organism–environment transactions, such as inquiry.

We are creature of habits. This suggests an intimate relationship of self and habits. Our self provides temporal stability and continuity in a changing environment full of contingencies. Such temporal continuity is manifest in our action and, more specifically a particular subset of action, that is, habitual action or habits, as distinguished from goal-directed action. Habits can be characterized by repetitive behavior that provides temporal continuity in temporally discontinuous environmental contexts. The origin and mechanisms of temporal continuity in habits, including its relationship to the self, remain unclear though. Based on various data, we assume that the temporal continuity of self, that is, self-continuity, provides the template for the temporal continuity of habits on behavioral, psychological and neuronal levels. Specifically, we assume that temporal integration of the temporally disparate stimuli related to intention, execution and outcome of action are lumped and integrated together into one temporal unit during their processing – this results in habits. Neuronally, the data from both self and habits suggests that temporal continuity, as measured by the autocorrelation window, may be mediated by the strong power in the slower frequencies in anterior cortical regions like orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Owing to their long phase cycles, the slow frequencies are ideal for integrating and thus pooling different stimuli across time. In conclusion, we here assume an intimate relationship of self and habits in terms of temporal continuity and integration on behavioral, psychological and neuronal grounds.

This chapter develops the basic outlines of a social ontology inspired by pragmatism and social interactionism, and explores the status of habits within it. It contends that bare social interactions provide the basic building blocks of such an ontology, and that habits, patterns of interaction, and institutional form provide the basic infrastructure through which bare social interactions obtain the stability required by social life.