On Washing Hands response

What really stood out to me in his writing was when he talked about how hand soap does not completely wipe out all the germs on your hands. I always learned that washing your hands was a necessity, but the process which he describes is way beyond the procedure I was taught. After talking about the germs that can congregate on our hands, he says that, "Plain soaps do, at best, a middling job of disinfecting. Their detergents remove loose dirt and grime, but fifteen seconds of washing reduces bacterial counts by only about an order of magnitude" (208). That statistic is staggering to me. I always thought soap killed everything after washing your hands.


Overall, changing habits is incredibly difficult for humans because we are, in essence, creatures of habit. Everything we do revolves around patterns and habits to make things less complicated. For example, work schedules are made in advance so that we can plan accordingly around it. If something goes wrong, such as a last minute time change, that interferes with other plans, we freak out. And even if there is habit that we know is bad, it is still hard to change because again, it is not convenient. In a society that is constantly moving, it is hard to find the time to change a habit. Study habits in particular were very hard for me to change. All throughout elementary and middle school, I never had to study for anything. But once high school came around, and my grades started to slip, I knew I needed to change. However, I would always get distracted while trying to study and venture off to do other things, because I was not used to studying. Eventually, after putting a lot of time into studying and forcing myself to do it, I overcame and changed my habit.