According to the authors of Atomic Habits and Tiny Habits, you can form new healthy habits and get rid of old ones when you consider your identity, environment, and habit design. Each new year as a family, we usually look at the young Jesus in Luke chapter 2 verse 52 and how he kept growing and increasing in four different areas: favor with God (spiritual), favor with man (social), wisdom (intellectual), and stature (physical). “And Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and people.” Luke 2:52 (NASB).

Becoming Your Identity

I learned from these two books that we were focused more on outcomes than our processes and identity when setting goals. This year, consider focusing on your identity and what you want to BECOME and not just your OUTCOMES. For example, instead of saying, I want to lose X amount of pounds, why not become identity-focused and say, I want to become a healthy fitness practitioner in my eating, exercising, sleeping, and Bible meditation. More simply you can say to yourself, ”I am a healthy fitness practitioner.” Then when faced with the myriad of choices during the day, I could ask myself, “what would a healthy fitness practitioner choose to do right now?”

Identifying Your Identity

May I suggest that you write out the identity you are or want to become for those four areas: spiritual, social, intellectual, and physical. My spiritual identity is: I am a child of God through faith in Jesus. I want to become a child of God filled with God’s Word, Spirit, and love. That’s the spiritual identity I want to realize I am and want to become. An identity could be as simple as ”I am a healthy person” or ”I am a good friend.” After deciding our identity in the four areas, we can design tiny habits to change our behavior. Design tiny habits that are easy to do, take less than two minutes, and are satisfying.

Designing Tiny Habits

The Tiny Habits author provides a formula for designing our habits: B = M.A.P. When all three M.A.P. elements come together, we do a particular behavior. M.A.P. stands for motivation, ability, and prompt. The Fogg behavior curve shows how “prompts” to do a particular behavior only happen when our motivation and ability fall above an action line. The action line separates how easy or hard something is to do based on our ability and how much or little we want to do it based on our motivation. So if something is easy to do, we need to have just enough motivation to do it when prompted. Or if we have a lot of motivation to do something but it’s too hard to do it, we won’t usually do the behavior. That’s why it’s important to make tiny habits that are easy to do. We can remind ourselves to do a new tiny habit by being prompted by a different habit we already do. He gives the example of using the ”prompt” of an existing habit, brushing his teeth, to remind himself to immediately do two pushups. Easy to do and remember. This tiny habit eventually grew into doing more pushups and exercises. The Atomic Habits author points out that you should make the initial habit only take two minutes and give yourself some type of reward, even if it’s just a smile and pat on the back.

Breaking Bad (Habits)

One way to break a bad habit is to substitute a healthy tiny habit when prompted to do an unhealthy habit. Or to eradicate the prompt that leads up to that bad habit. The Apostle Paul talked about this in the letter to the Ephesians when he talks about how we should ”put off” the old way of doing things and ”put on” the new person and behaviors of a child of God. Paul said, “that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.” Ephesians 4:22-24 (NKJV).

Meeting Deep Needs the Wrong Way

Practically speaking, if you are on too much social media, why not remove the app from your phone and read a good book instead. You can just have a good book handy and say I’m just going to read a couple of paragraphs instead of looking at these social media posts. Also, the author of Atomic Habits points out that the habit feedback loop consists of cues (or prompts), cravings, responses, and rewards. He rightly states that our cravings result from deep underlying needs that are tied to our biology, and in my view, our deep-down God-given spiritual needs for love, security, recognition, food, water, approval, the desire and means to physical reproduce, and so on. So you probably don’t want to use a bad habit of smoking a cigarette to meet your deep need for security or confidence because it can’t and won’t to meet those needs. All of our bad habits are doing something similar to us if you think about it. If I do bad habit ,X, to meet some deep need ,Y, then it may meet need ,Y, in the short term but have long-term bad consequences, Z. These bad habits are being influenced by what Paul calls ”deceitful lusts,” our cravings. Still, we can choose to respond with a different, more godly, and healthy action or habit.

From Identity and Habit to Destiny
Another way to change our habits and behavior is by changing our environment, including those we hang out with. Today, we invite people into the ”homes” of our minds that we wouldn’t consider inviting into our physical homes. How do we do this? Through social media, movies, videos, and other virtual means. These influences in our virtual, social environment can influence us for good or evil. Reading Psalm 1 this morning, I was reminded that we are blessed when we don’t walk with the ungodly, stand in the way of sinners, and sit in the seat of the scornful but delight in God and His word and meditate on His Word day and night. Making a consistent effort to change my thought patterns and environment into healthy ones is where all good behaviors and habits start. As the old adage says, ”Sow a thought, reap an action. Sow an action, reap a behavior. Sow a behavior, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.” What’s your identity? What tiny habits can you design and do that coincide with your identity to lead to your destiny.