What Steps Can I Take to Break Negative Habits?

READ: EXODUS 16

After the exodus out of Egypt, the Hebrews’ lives were upended. While many aspects of their previous lives had been harsh, they missed others, such as knowing where their next meal would come from.

Like all humans, the Hebrew people were creatures of habit. So God changed their behavior in the desert by forcing them to develop habits of trust in His provision (Exodus 16:4–5). 

Habits drive our behavior, which in turn forms our character.

This is why understanding how to make and break habits is such an important skill for spiritual formation.

For our purposes, we can classify habits into four broad categories: positive, negative, virtuous, and sinful. Positive habits improve our lives in a general way (brushing our teeth), while virtuous habits make us more Christlike (prayer and Scripture reading). Both types are formed using the same method.

Negative habits generally have negative effects on our lives (eating junk food), while sinful habits lead us away from God and to our destruction. How we deal with these two types of habits is quite different, so we’ll consider sinful habits separately.

Following are six steps to help break negative habits: 

1. Identify your own negative habits: While some negative habits are bad for anyone, the effects on many others vary from person to person. For example, staying up too late at night might be a negative habit if you have to wake up early, and it prevents you from getting enough sleep. But for other people, staying up late might be a benefit because it allows them to get more done at a time of day when there are fewer distractions. To identify your own negative habits, make a list of the recurring troubles in your life, then identify patterns of behavior that might cause or contribute to the problem.
2. Isolate the habit loop: Every habit, positive or negative, starts with a behavioral pattern called a “habit loop.” This loop consists of three parts: a cue, routine, and reward. The cue is a type of trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and begin the routine, which is the behavior itself. The final step is the reward, an internal or external stimulus that satisfies your brain and helps it remember the habit loop.*
3. Change the trigger: Some negative habits can be overcome simply by changing the trigger. Take, for example, the negative habit of checking your email when you are trying to engage in another activity, such as Bible reading. The cue for this habit is likely some sort of notification (either visual or audio) that you have a new email. Negative habits generally have negative effects on our lives (such as eating junk food), while sinful habits lead us away from God and to our destruction. This triggers the behavior (checking your email) that your brain has been conditioned to reward (the brain likes novelty, and reading an email temporarily satisfies your curiosity). By simply turning off such notifications, you can remove the trigger that activates the behavior.
4. Modify the context: Along with the three parts of the habit loop, negative habits also tend to include a strong contextual element. Specifically, we are more likely to engage in negative habits when we are bored, stressed, or seeking to avoid an activity (such as procrastinating from work).
5. Replace the negative habit with a positive one: Eliminating negative habits is extremely difficult. But the process can be much easier if we simply replace the habit with a better one. Once you’ve identified the negative habit, consider how you can “reengineer” the habit loop to replace the negative habit with a more positive routine.
6. Plan for setbacks: Negative habits are difficult to overcome. Expect that it will take numerous attempts and lots of trial and error before you are able to replace a negative habit with one that aids in your flourishing. Ask God to give you the strength and ability to persevere.

* Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit (New York: Random House, 2011). 

Excerpted with permission from A Guide to a Better You by Joe Carter, copyright Joe Carter.

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Your Turn

What negative habits do you want to break? If you don’t have a plan of attack, it’s unlikely that you’ll succeed. But, if you lean on the Holy Spirit and take some assertive steps to tackle those bad habits, you’ll make progress! What’s holding you back? ~ Devotionals Daily