From brushing your teeth or washing the dishes after every meal to putting on Taylor Swift every time you get in the car, the smallest habits can have an incredibly powerful effect on your life, character, and way of thinking. As we repeatedly practice habits over extended periods of time, their effects compound. They can be incredibly life-giving, or they can be incredibly dangerous. Never underestimate the outcome of doing the same thing every day.

Before recently graduating from high school, our school’s two college advisors gave each member of my 28-strong senior class a copy of Atomic Habits by James Clear. With some extra time on my hands last week, I decided to start reading it.

Clear opens the book with a couple examples of behavior improvements: one from his own life after a major baseball injury and one from the British Cycling team in 2003, led by Dave Brailsford. In both instances, the path to change and improvement was not in embracing one big defining moment, but in making almost minute improvements daily until they compounded into something larger. An atomic habit is one that, like an atom, is almost negligibly small on its own, but compounds to make up almost everything we do and become.

We often try to work against the grain of human nature, but Clear emphasizes that when trying to make changes for the better, we must work with it. He describes the path of behavior change as follows: Cue, Craving, Response, Reward. This is how habits are created, and this is how they stick. He also highlights that focusing on goals and end-points will not bring you forward in life. You need to focus on the systems by which you get there. The system towards putting this into practice is what Clear calls the Four Laws of Behavior Change.

The Four Laws of Behavior Change

1. Make it Obvious.

If a behavior is easy to forget about, the likeliness that you’ll do it is quite low. Making habits obvious starts with acknowledging the habits you already have. What do you every morning and evening without fail? You can arrange these into what Clear calls a “Habit Scorecard,” in which you rate each habit as either positive, negative, or neutral.

If you truly desire a habit, you’ll begin to identify with that habit (If you think, “I am someone who reads every day,” then you’ll find ways to almost never skip a day of reading). When you have a desire to start a good habit, make a concrete plan to implement it in your daily life. This means a specific place and time that you can repeatedly practice a very specific activity, not some vague idea like “I’m going to read more.”

2. Make it Attractive.

What Clear is trying to show with this one is that if you don’t make an effort to make your good habits attractive or desirable in the moment, then you’ll never feel motivated to do them. One way to do this is to pair a needed habit with a habit that you already do and enjoy, so that the new good habit is mentally associated with something you enjoy.

The culture you surround yourself with also influences how you act. People naturally want to feel like they belong in a community. You likely have many behaviors that you picked up from other people around you. One example of this that sometimes causes culture shock to expats is dinner-table etiquette. Growing up in France, I learned that it is customary to be late to dinner parties and to generally keep your arms above the table when eating. My experience in the U.S. suggests that both of these are viewed as quirky at best and rude at worst in American culture.

3. Make it Easy.

In order to decrease the likeliness that you will quit a good habit before it becomes automatic, you need to reduce friction that gets in the way of practicing that habit. Conversely, if you want to quit a bad habit, you have to create friction so that it’s harder to do that thing.

One interesting piece of advice in this section of the book advocated for the “Two-Minute Rule.” The idea is that for any new habit you want to start, limit yourself to two minutes (or more, depending on the habit in question) of doing that thing every day until doing it becomes automatic and easy. Then, you start making it a more complex, difficult, or specialized task. The important thing is to “show up” before anything else. If you’re not willing to go to the gym every day for a meager two minutes, you’re not likely to commit to going for thirty.

4. Make it Satisfying.

The last of the four laws is about what immediately follows the practice of a habit. If there is a reward directly linked to a good behavior, you’re more likely to repeat that behavior in the future. On the other hand, if a behavior leads to a severe enough punishment, then you won’t be interested to behave that way again. This law, like the other three, is about mastering desire. It’s about training yourself to desire good things, and to quit wanting bad things.

We can invent rewards for ourselves to make a good habit satisfying, or we can create punishments that will deter us from bad ones. For some people, tracking their habits is sufficiently satisfying to keep them on track. An Olympic runner wants the record to show that if he skipped one day of training, he never skipped a second. For others, they need additional, more tangible motivation. Clear offers an example to people who are impulsive shoppers:

“Open a savings account and label it for something you want–maybe ‘Leather Jacket.’ Whenever you pass on a purchase, put the same amount of money in the account. Skip your morning latter? Transfer $5. Pass on another month of Netflix? Move $10 over. It’s like creating a loyalty program for yourself.” (p. 191)

Of course, some reward systems are not the best depending on your goals and situation. If you’re trying to improve in one area, don’t reward yourself by indulging in something that will send you in the opposite direction.

Finally, a habit is more likely to stick if it’s satisfying in and of itself. For some habits, like working out, this may require some patience and perseverance. You don’t become ripped from one day in the gym. That takes time and patience. But aside from the results of a habit, any activity can bring satisfaction through the state many psychologists have called flow. This is that perfect state between Boredom and Failure where you lose track of time because your project, work, or activity is just that satisfying.

How we deceive ourselves and forget basic truths when trying to improve

Many of the insights in Atomic Habits seem like they should have been common sense. It seems self-evident that our everyday habits and behaviors affect us in a big way. It should be obvious that if we don’t make a habit desirable, we’re unlikely to follow through with it. Finally, it should be clear to us that if we prefer our bad habits over our good ones, and don’t strongly desire the good ones, we’ll keep the bad ones in the long run. But we forget.

We tell ourselves, “I don’t need to remove that temptation because I can just resist it.” We promise ourselves, “Later, I’ll do my homework, or read my Bible, or go to the gym,” when we know our lack of motivation to do x, y, or z isn’t going to increase any more than what we have right now. We dream of a big defining moment when we all of a sudden start a million-dollar business, write an award-winning book, or become the outgoing extrovert whom everybody loves. But that’s not how life works. You have to work towards those things little by little, and you have to commit to it. No waiting until motivation or inspiration hits. Get your reps in starting now, and keep going tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, until you become the person you desire to be. Work for an identity, not a goal, and then when the goal is reached, you’ll have a reason to keep going.

A central goal of this blog is to consider and discuss what it means to live a faithful Christian life. Let us now consider how we might understand James Clear’s book in light of the Christian worldview.

One point of interest that Clear brings up multiple times is that evolution is behind much of how human nature works. Supposedly, humans are evolutionarily wired to desire certain things and act in certain ways. Scientific studies have shown that certain personality traits, like openness to experience, conscientiousness, and extroversion are linked to variations in genes. Of course, this linkage or slight genetic predisposition does not fatalistically determine the course of someone’s life. However, if we forget the spiritual, rational, and volitional components of human nature, asserting that humans are purely material, then this fatalism seems like a potentially necessary conclusion.

Christians today have diverging opinions on how to view evolutionary science in light of Scripture. There are some who reject it altogether as denying Scripture, and others who try to synthesize the two. Regardless of your position on the evolution-creationism debate, we must grapple with the scientific and psychological observations that underlie Clear’s conclusions about behavior change.

As Christians, we all affirm that humans have free will. We have the capacity to act in accordance with our desires. Simultaneously, we affirm that God is sovereign over the universe. I believe this means more than foreknowledge of future events; nothing ever happens anywhere apart from God’s decretive will (this would ultimately include all our attempts, failures, and successes at building new habits and breaking old ones).

We also believe that humans were created in the image of God. People are capable of greatness through reason. There is a flip-side to this greatness, which is the wretchedness of original sin brought to us by the Fall of Adam and Eve. This wretchedness includes a total corruption of human desires: the bondage of the will.

Some have speculated that this bondage to sin might have been passed down from generation to generation through DNA. Though this risks overly materializing the origin of human sin, there may be some truth to the fact that some sinful predispositions have genetic factors involved.

It is of great value to be able to bring together truths that emerge from different perspectives. Any human perspective is an interpretation of the reality that God created. There is God’s Word, the divinely inspired Scriptures, and there is the natural world, which includes not only the physical realm but also what we can learn about human behavior through observation. Ultimately, all truths complement each other to form the Truth. Before I can say much more about genetics, evolution, etc., I need to do some serious research in science and Scripture, but it seems to me that we needn’t view the truths behind discoveries from different realms of human scholarship as opposed.

Concluding thoughts about Atomic Habits and the Christian life

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to everyone, whether you’re looking to build new, healthy habits or break old, unhealthy ones, or you feel completely satisfied with the habits you currently have. This book will impress upon you the effect that even the smallest daily habits can have on your life. It will give you the tools and the language to understand human nature and how habits are made.

As Christians, we must be ruled by the commands of God and his Word. We must willingly choose to devote ourselves fully to his service and his work in the world. This will invariably involve building habits of spending time with God in prayer, in the study of Scripture, and in various other spiritual disciplines. However, it can also involve less “spiritual” activities like eating healthy food, exercising our bodies, doing our work with excellence, and avoiding vices of laziness, lust, gluttony, etc. For the unbeliever reading Atomic Habits, the ultimate goal might be to live a more pleasurable life. But for the believer, the goal ought to be to live a life of faithfully serving and glorifying God.