What Habits Are You Growing?

If you could drop one bad habit today, what would it be? Think about it for a second. If you could just snap your fingers and—BOOM—make a bad habit disappear, what would you get rid of?

Maybe we’d get rid of a nervous habit, like cracking our knuckles or biting our nails.

Maybe we’d drop our junk food snack attacks (except for Twinkies—praise Jesus, am I right?)

Maybe we would finally figure out how to stop touching our face! (Is it just me?)

Unfortunately, kicking our bad habits takes more than just a snap of our fingers. It takes work. It takes consistency. It takes determination. It can be hard to find these things in ourselves on the best of days, but it’s especially challenging when we’ve got a lot on our minds.

Right now, many of us might be seeing some unhealthy patterns showing up in our lives. We might have noticed (on our eighteenth trip to the fridge) that our bad habits are creeping back in. A lot of us are home with time on our hands, and if we’re not careful, that time can get sucked up into some unhealthy habits.

In AA, I learned a lot about habits and what triggers them. When talking about triggers, they use the acronym, H.A.L.T.:

H – Hungry

A – Angry

L – Lonely

T – Tired

Anybody else encountered some of those triggers this week? When we’re hungry, angry about something we saw on social media, struggling in our distance from one another, or just flat out exhausted, we are vulnerable to our bad habits. These four things can easily trigger us into making bad decisions.

We can snap our fingers all day long, and that’s not going to change anything. So what can we do to kick these bad habits?

I don’t usually recommend books that aren’t the Bible (just being real ‘cause it’s the best), but I do recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear. Hands down, the best book I’ve read on this subject! Check it out.

In his book, James Clear talks about the importance of putting our bad habits out of our reach. For example: Let’s say I don’t want to eat cookies anymore. That decision doesn’t start when I’m staring into my cupboard at a bag of cookies. At that point, the bad habit is just too easy to give into. The decision starts when I go to the store. It starts when I choose to walk right by the cookie aisle and head for juice. If there aren’t cookies in my cupboard, I won’t give into that bad habit. If you want to break a bad habit, you have to set yourself up for success!

What do you need to do to set yourself up for success this week? Do you need to set aside a time when the whole family puts their phones away? Do you need to set a timer to remind yourself to exercise, drink water, or just refocus your attention on the Lord? Do you need to install filtering software on your laptop to block pornography?

We are in a season of transformation and resurrection. God is doing a work in all of us, and He wants to help us overcome our bad habits so that we are free to follow Him!

Therefore, we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw aside every weight and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our Faith, who for that was the joy set before Him endured the cross despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of God. Hebrews 12:1-2

Jesus laid aside His Heavenly rights and suffered for us. In the light of love like that, is there anything we wouldn’t lay aside? Brothers and sisters, we don’t have time to be weighed down by our bad habits. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus and run this race.