Transforming Habits Through Belief and Community

Ezra Sullivan has written a book called habits and holiness, and writes about the idea of what Ezra calls a limiting belief that is terribly important. A limiting belief that stems from habits and dispositions is the conviction that these traits cannot change because they are natural to the individual. [00:01:20]

We then erroneously equate what is secondary with what is primary in ourselves. We conclude that these traits are identical with our very nature. We come to identify ourselves with them, and we label ourselves by them. "I'm lazy," one person says, or "I'm just attracted to that sort of person, that's the way that I am," another might insist. [00:02:00]

If I actually take responsibility, if I come to believe that it's possible for me to change, I will have to do the hard work of self-knowledge and look at things in me that I would rather not look at. And I will have to be open to the possibility that change might happen. [00:03:46]

Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit, fascinating section here, he's talking about habit replacement therapy. We've discussed this where the golden rule of habit transformation, habit formation is not that you try to break an old habit. You have that old cue and you have the old reward, but you can replace it with a new behavior. [00:04:21]

Researchers began finding habit replacement works pretty well for many people until the stresses of life, finding out your mom has cancer or your marriage is coming apart, get too high, at which point alcoholics often fell off the wagon. Researchers ask why if habit replacement is so effective, it seemed to fail at such critical moments. [00:04:55]

The replacement habits only become durable new behaviors when they are accompanied by something else. One group of researchers at the alcohol research group in California noticed a pattern in interviews. Over and over, alcoholics said the same thing: identifying cues, choosing new routines is important, but without another ingredient, the new habits never fully took hold. [00:05:17]

The secret, the alcoholics said, was God. Researchers hated that explanation. God and spirituality are not testable hypotheses, or so they thought. Churches are filled with drunks who continued drinking despite a quiet faith, and that's true. In conversations with addicts, though, spirituality kept coming up again and again. [00:05:44]

Even if you give people better habits, it doesn't repair why they stop drinking in the first place. Eventually, they'll have a bad day, and no new routine is going to make everything seem okay. What can make a difference is believing. Now the word for that is faith, believing that they can cope with that stress without alcohol. [00:06:09]

AAA trains people in how to believe in something until they believe in the program and themselves. It lets people practice believing that things will eventually get better until things actually do. At some point, people in AAA look around the room and think, if it worked for that guy, it can work for me. [00:06:29]

What happens is when we become part of a community of faith, I believe that when the text talks about people being strengthened in their faith, it is that they believe they have faith. They actually trust God can change me, God can remake me, God is in the process of doing that partly by changing my habits. [00:08:38]

The main thing God gets out of my life is the person I become. That's what I'm after. So in the face of that same cue, I can substitute a different response, a different behavior. I can move toward, I can seek to love, I can try to be honest, I can try to bring encouragement, I can try to serve. [00:10:16]

We can be part of that community for each other as we interact with each other, as we talk, as we comment, as we text. You got somebody in your life, you have somebody there, that's what the church is about. Who, when you're with them, like people getting together in an AAA room, like a team when it begins to come together, who help you believe that change is possible. [00:11:06]