Habits Are for More Than Just Productivity
How our habits form us and reveal what we worship
It’s another January and that means it’s another chance to fall short of all our New Year’s resolutions. Or, you could join in the hot new trend these days and forgo resolutions altogether and replace them with habits.
The recent rise in popularity of habits is thanks in large part to James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, which according to the publisher has sold over 15 million copies.1 Goals are binary—they are reached or they are not. Usually you can tell if you are going to achieve them pretty early on and that's why so many people stop going to the gym the third week of January. But with building new habits, it's not about achieving a certain milestone; it's about getting just a little bit better each day. It’s flexible, it’s forgiving, and you can start small. And the best part is, once it becomes a habit, it becomes automatic.
It’s easy to think that James Clear, and others like him, discovered a new way to hack the human brain to be more productive, but the focus on habits is not new. From Ben Franklin to Aristotle, those who came before us have seen the wisdom of cultivating good habits. And now research is helping back up that ancient wisdom. Studies have found that a massive portion of what we do comes from habit and not a conscious decision. In fact, one such study, “suggested that as much as 40 percent of the actions we take every day are not the products of choices but of habits.”2 It’s a pretty nifty survival mechanism that allows us to reserve brain space for the things that do require our conscious attention.
Willpower is a limited resource and so it’s best to save it for when we really need it. Sönke Ahrens compares willpower to a muscle that must rest after it has been fatigued.3 This is important because, when you make grand goals and then eventually don’t achieve them, it’s usually because the Present You is writing checks that Future You doesn’t want to cash. The idea of saying no to your daily late night dessert is much easier in the morning than the reality of refusing the ice cream when it’s right in front of you. And so what this means is that you need to do is set yourself up for success and not rely upon a constantly depleting reserve of willpower. You need good habits to make up for future you’s lack of motivation.
That’s the basic idea behind the “habits” craze. But this is not a productivity article,4 because productivity is not our chief end. Our chief end is to glorify God by becoming more like Him and partnering with Him. And so, there’s a far more important reason to pay attention to your habits: because our they form us into the kinds of people we will be.
Our habits flow from our loves
Your habits don’t just appear out of a vacuum. They flow from a source. James Clear writes that your habits are “how you embody your identity.” It’s the physical manifestation of inner realities. But one thing that Clear overlooks is how our identities are primarily driven by what we worship.
Worship is not something only the religious or superstitious do. Worship is primarily a designation of worth—what you desire, what you love—and so, in that sense, all humans are worshipping creatures.
David Foster Wallace (of Infinite Jest fame), who never claimed to adhere to any organized religion,5 said in a 2005 speech, “There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
One of the biggest ways we can declare the worth of an object is through our time—our habits. If you want to know what you actually worship, don’t look at what box you’ve ticked on your Facebook profile (if you’re one of few people who still uses theirs), look at your habits. To play off of a famous phrase from Jesus: Where your habits are, there your heart will be also.
The philosopher, James K. A. Smith, in his book, You Are What You Love, refers to our habits as liturgies. Liturgies are rituals of worship, historically a specified order of events in a worship service. But in our lives, we have our own little worship services every single day as we pursue that which we desire.
“To be human is to be a liturgical animal, a creature whose loves are shaped by our worship.” -James K. A. Smith
But you may say, “Not me! I’m a rational being.” Uh huh, sure. We like to imagine ourselves as purely rational beings, but humans are not that. We are not “brains on sticks.” We are primarily driven by our loves. Smith writes, “Human beings are first and foremost lovers.” Give me a person who claims to solely be “rational” and I guarantee you can uncover a raft of irrational behaviors, either in the past or the present.6
Because we are “lovers,” our affections give direction for our lives. They drive how we live, especially our habits because our habits come from that unconscious side of ourselves.
“You are what you love because you live toward what you want.” -James K. A. Smith
This works in both the positive and the negative. Sin often doesn’t start with a conscious decision but with bad habits that flow from disordered loves. Often we think about sin in terms of making a conscious, bad decision. “Why did you do that?” my parents would often ask when I did something dumb and I would often just respond with, “I don’t know.” And the reality is that I didn’t really know. It just came out of me. But it was still sin and I was still responsible. It flowed out of my heart, and my heart had been shaped by thousands, perhaps millions, of liturgies enacted on behalf of my desires.
Ultimately, our bad habits flow from a sinful heart with disordered loves. To change your life you must change your loves. And this has huge implications for those who seek to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. In the church, we often treat Christian discipleship as merely a matter of information transfer. If they learn the right things, then they will be okay and live a righteous life. But because we are beings motivated by our desires, our discipleship to Jesus needs to be just as much about our affections as our beliefs. Theology is important. But it is not sufficient on its own for a life of rightly-ordered worship and virtue.
“So discipleship is more a matter of hungering and thirsting than of knowing and believing.” -Smith
Our habits form our loves
So, if we desire to reshape our affections to that which is good, how do we do that? We must change our habits. I know it sounds like circular reasoning, but Smith describes it as a feedback loop. Our habits flow from what we love, and our loves are formed by our habits. What we continually practice over and over again eventually forms us toward the end goal we are aiming for. As Daniel Nayeri put it in his amazing novel, Everything Sad is Untrue, “Maybe we get the endings we deserve. Or maybe the endings we practice.”
Our habits shape what we love because we learn to love through our bodies. We are embodied beings, not just a brain. In his book, Desiring the Kingdom, James K. A. Smith writes:
“We are the sorts of animals whose orientation to the world is shaped from the body up more than from the head down. Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies.”
This is why you need to reshape your habits in order to reshape your loves. If you truly want to show you value something, you must make a concerted effort to shape your life around it. It will not just naturally happen.
We are often unaware of our habits and how they shape us. Many of our habits are shaped by the society in which we live, what Smith calls “cultural liturgies.” They are the water we are swimming in and see it as entirely normal and unremarkable.
For instance, it’s entirely normal to us, and possibly even expected, that if a friend or family member wanted to get ahold of you that they would text you instead of call, write a letter, or just show up at your house. It says something about our culture and I don’t know about you, but it definitely has helped shape how I tend to prefer what is quick, convenient, and impersonal. Like a good Millennial, I run for the hills from phone calls.
If something is a habit, something we’ve always done, then we can deceive ourselves into thinking that we are the ones in control, that “I only do this because I want to or I like it.” But if you try stopping, you’ll soon recognize that you can’t, not without extreme difficulty. Because habits are automatic and basically unthinking, we don’t always see how pervasive they are in our life. We all have blindspots.
And this makes it hard to be on guard against liturgies that are ordered toward harmful ends. We don’t know what we can’t see. These rival liturgies pull on our hearts and can shape us in far deeper ways than rival ideas because they can sneak in unnoticed. Smith writes, “If you think of love-shaping practices as ‘liturgies,’ this means you could be worshiping other gods without even knowing it.”
Is it much of a win if you protect your kids from the latest scary ideologies but they grow up to be money-obsessed, predatory lenders?
I don’t think my way into consumerism. Rather, I’m covertly conscripted into a way of life because I have been formed by cultural practices that are nothing less than secular liturgies. My loves have been automated by rituals I didn’t even realize were liturgies. -Smith
The habits we build up end up being our life. John Mark Comer points out in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry that the average American spends 705 hours on social media a year. That’s over 29 days. It’s almost an entire month’s worth of hours. You could spend 705 hours a year on social media, or you could read through the Bible almost ten times through according to Crossway’s research.7
How we spend our time is how we spend our lives. It’s who we become (or don’t become). -Comer
How to form good habits
As modern humans, we want the one quick solution that will revolutionize everything. But the answer is that there is no quick solution. You just have to slowly move forward one step at a time; eventually you will end up in a better place.
Those steps need to be taken before you have to rely on your willpower. If you’re having trouble with self-control and discipline, then take a look at your environment. Set your future self up for success so you don’t need to draw from the well of willpower when the moment of truth arises. It’s easier said than done, though. And environment is not just the set up of the room, but everything around you, what apps you have on your phone, whether you have your phone with you at all, the kinds of people you are around, the time of day, headphones or not, are you hungry or dehydrated, and so much more.
“Have you ever wondered why so many stores blast loud music or provide other diversions? They want you to act on impulse. It’s not in their best interest to provide a distraction-free environment where you can think clearly and resist temptation. Studies have demonstrated that even mild distractions, like trying to remember a phone number, leave people more likely to make unhealthy choices.” -Drew Dyck, Your Future Self Will Thank You
It’s also not enough to just stop doing a bad habit. You must replace bad habits with good habits. Paul puts it this way in Ephesians 4:22-24, “to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (emphasis mine). If you merely delete bad habits, then it creates a vacuum that could be filled with the negative habit again, but this time even more entrenched.
Lastly, be patient. The returns from your habits build up exponentially, like compound interest, but it takes time. Even very slight adjustments in your habits can add up over the years. It’s only later you see how it has absolutely changed your life. But, like compound interest, it takes time, patience, and perseverance, and constant deposits.
“Delaying gratification, doing what’s right, surrendering your will. It might seem like teeth-gritting, white-knuckling stuff. But it isn’t. As we’ll discover, though building self-control requires effort, it gets easier as you go. Eventually, it can feel like gliding. In a beautiful twist of biblical irony, submission leads to victory. Surrender produces freedom. As you are liberated from the tyranny of self, you’re able to experience God’s best for your life.” -Dyck
And you don’t need to start with something big. Little wins keep you moving forward. That’s all you need. And even the little wins add up. If you have trouble cultivating a habit of daily prayer, set a reminder on your phone everyday to pray the Lord’s Prayer at noon. It probably will only take you 20 seconds, but even that small of a daily habit can start to shape you and eventually, you can add to it.
“If you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.” -Clear
I’ve really only scratched the surface of these concepts. If you’d like to dive deeper and find out how you can better shape your habits and your affections, the following books are great places to start.
You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, by James K. A. Smith
Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, by James K. A. Smith
The Common Rule of Life: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction, by Justin Whitmel Earley
The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World, by John Mark Comer
The Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, by Tish Harrison Warren
What I’m Watching
Percy Jackson and the Olympians (Disney+)
It’s a kid’s show, I never read the books, and I thought the movies were “meh” but Rebecca and I are loving it so far. There was more emotional depth in the first fifteen minutes of the series than in all the movies combined. The casting is great and even the special effects are good (a surprise if you had to suffer through some of the more recent Marvel Disney+ shows). A bit too scary for younger kids, but I think older families will really enjoy watching this show together.
My one qualm, which Rebecca is tired of me complaining about, is that it has all of these figures from Greek mythology living in the U.S. How does that make sense? They all just decided to leave Greece for the land of cheeseburgers and Walmart? The entrance to the Underworld is in Los Angeles?8 I guess I just have to get over it and enjoy the ride.
That’s an insane amount of books, especially in our social-media-addicted age.
Earley, Justin Whitmel. The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction. United States: InterVarsity Press, 2023, 7.
Ahrens, Sönke. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking. Germany: Sönke Ahrens, 2022, 72.
In fact, our culture’s obsession with productivity is not that good for us, see my article, Severance and the Religion of Work.
Although he could have been labeled as “Catholic-curious.”
You probably won’t even need to look far, just at their Twitter account.
It takes 74 hrs, 28 mins to read through the whole Bible for the average reader.
Okay, that is funny.
Grateful that Rebecca still uses the phone to call. I really enjoyed this article.