Casandra Foster, age 10, of Goshen, Alabama, for her question:

Is a reflex the same as a habit?

There is a world of difference between a reflex and a habit. You must learn to live with your reflexes. But you and only you can make and remodel your habits,. The more you know about habits, the better. You can use the information to make a world of difference in your own life.

While the mind is thinking its important thoughts, the body is carrying on all sorts of operations by itself. Some of these actions are reflexes and some are habits. When you touch a hot stove, your body jerks you away to safety before you have time to think. When a speck flies close to your eyes, your lids usually blink shut by themselves. These quick safety measures are reflexes. They are built in operations that the body performs without orders from your mind.

When you touch a flame, a nerve in your skin flashes a signal to the spinal column inside your backbone. There the signal is relayed to an order giving nerve. This nerve flashes an order to your muscles and they jerk you to safety. And the whole, complicated operation of this reflex happens in a moment, before you have time to think. You could, of course, use will power to keep your hand in a flame. But this silly defiance would be difficult    as well as painful.

When you want to cross a room, you start walking without thinking of the necessary balancing and complicated muscle work. You may be tempted to think of walking as another built in reflex, but this is not true. Walking,. Is a learned habit. Years ago, you learned to trawl and toddle, then finally to walk by yourself. It seems automatic because you have done it so many times that your body has learned the instructions by heart. But you have far more control over your habits than over your reflexes.

A habit may be a useful timesaver or a useless time waster. Smoking is a bad habit and every smoker went to a lot of trouble to learn it. Like any harmful habit, it can be broken. But breaking a habit is much harder than learning it. Sensible people keep an eye on the things they do without thinking. They lust live with their built in reflexes, but they can select their habits.

We form habits also in the way we think. Believe it or not, we can train our minds to think along sensible lines. We can question and challenge our sloppy thoughts and straighten them out. If we practice this, our minds form sensible habits for coping with simple prob¬lems. This rewards us with more time and better skills to tackle challenging new ideas. It is nice to know that you are the boss, the absolutely supreme boss of your habits. You can decide to make them work for you or just let them go on working against you.

We also have a quota of emotional habits. We all know people who constantly take the gloomy view and look at the dark side of everything said or done. This outlook is triggered by down grading emotional habits. Such a person always expects the worst and, the world being what it is, the worst usually happens. You can, if you choose, reverse this picture by practicing a cheerful outlook. Notice that the people with the habit of looking for the bright side, in some mysterious way, seem to find it. The mystery can be explained by a lot of well practiced habits.