Look, I’m not the foremost authority on the power of habits or even creating habits. That title belongs to Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit¹². What I do know is this: habits have completely changed my life. They’ve helped me build into my life the things that I know I need to do but would never do if left on my own.

I’d like to give you the very CliffsNotes version.

Quite simply, a habit is something you do without thinking about it too much. It’s kind of an automatic behavior. Most of our habits are unconscious – we don’t even realize we have them. We developed them by watching our parents, our teachers, or our friends. Sometimes these are mostly neutral, like saying “Please,” and “Thank You.” Other times they’re really good, like showering daily.

And sometimes they are not so good, like escalating a disagreement into a shouting match. Or finishing off a half-gallon of ice cream after a bad day. Or using Axe body spray. You look back and ask “How did that happen?”

Fortunately, we can decide what kinds of habits we want in our life. We can establish new, good habits and work to old, bad ones. And once we establish those new, good habits they become automatic.

Charles Duhigg broke down this process into three steps.

1. Trigger
   A trigger is a event or a situation that sparks a response.
2. Action
   An action is the activity you want to do when a specific event or situation occurs.
3. Reward
   A reward is what you receive after you take an action to reinforce the habit loop.

So, here are some examples from my own life:

When I feel edgy or anxious I take a walk or run and then drink a Gatorade.
When I eat breakfast I read scripture and pray then I read Dilbert.
When I notice a conversation getting tense I stop and address the tension then return to the conversation.

Those probably sound like very basic things. And they are, by intention. Habits work best when they are simple to remember and easy to do.

By the way, your unconscious or bad habits follow the same Trigger, Action, Reward pattern. If you have a habit you want to change just identify the trigger, decide to take a different action, and remember to reward yourself. The reward part is important – if there’s no reward, it’s much harder to change.

If you’re new at intentionally establishing habits, it’s best not to try to establish a whole bunch of habits at once. Just start with one or two – like waking up at a certain time and immediately drinking a glass of water. Both of those are easy, and the water thing is kind of like a reward by itself³.

It’s said that it takes about 30 days to establish a new habit. My experience is it takes about 90 days to really get a habit established. These things take time. And don’t worry if you miss every now and then: you’re not trying to be perfect here, you’re trying to establish patterns of behavior. Once a habit takes root it starts to feel wrong when you don’t do it – that’s when you’ll know that whatever it is you’re doing has become a habit.

I’d also suggest you focus on what Duhigg describes as a “keystone habit” – habits which set the stage for other habits to grow. For instance, working out sets the stage for several other habits like drinking water and stretching.

OK, so how does all of this help keep you in alignment with the Kingdom of God?

I think the single most important keystone habit you can establish is spending time with God. If you want to live in alignment with the Kingdom of God then you have to spend time with Him, because the Kingdom of God is primarily a relationship with Him. You can try to muscle your way into behaving in a way that looks like the Kingdom of God, but you’ll eventually explode under the strain. The only way to really get in alignment is to be with the One who will align you with His values.

That last paragraph hints at something much more than what I wrote. Don’t get too caught up in that – we’ll circle back to it later on. What’s important is to know you have habits (conscious and unconscious), there’s a way to establish new habits, and there are some habits which help build more habits.

Onward and Upward!

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash