Atomic Habits by James Clear has become the go-to book for building healthy habits. The book has spent 65 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List and has sold over 2 million copies. The author promises that tiny changes will produce remarkable results. He offers a science-backed strategy for building good habits and breaking the bad ones. But does Atomic Habits live up to the hype? Can a person of faith find solutions from this self-help guide? 

Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results?

The big idea behind Atomic Habits is the power of tiny change, the effect of an 1% improvement (27). While most people focus on setting exceptional goals over a short period of time, Clear’s message is that getting 1% better each day for one year results in being 37 times better at something than when you first started (15). Clear’s compilation of research shows that focusing on the results is overrated. The secret is looking at the trajectory of your current habits, your repeated behaviors. He lays out practical, science-backed tips to implement positive habits and lose the unhealthy ones. 

The key, according to Clear, is understanding and incorporating the habit process. First, recognize cues to build better habits. A cue is a trigger that tells your brain to initiate a behavior. The goal is to make the cue of your desired habit obvious. Second, recognize a craving, a motivational force behind a habit. You have to make that craving attractive. Third is crafting a response, the actual habit you will perform, whether a thought or action. The response should be easy for a good habit to form. Finally, there is a reward, an end goal that satisfies or teaches us. We must make the reward satisfying to implement a habit (48-54). 

Clear, Engaging, and Practical

It’s easy to see why Clear’s book has attracted such a following. Atomic Habits is clear, engaging, and immensely practical. The book’s structure is based around his four laws of behavior change (i.e. make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying) in an easy-to-follow format. His writing style takes complex ideas and psychological studies and makes them easily understood. His bulleted chapter summaries at the end of each chapter helps the reader capture the major takeaways. Atomic Habit’s greatest strength is the sheer number of practical, simple suggestions that the reader can implement immediately to start a good habit or end a bad one. 

Three Helpful Tips

While each chapter contains a plethora of practical takeaways, here are three that I found most helpful.  

1. Habit stacking

Habit stacking is adding a desired habit to an already existing habit (74). For example, I heard Pastor Mark Batterson, pastor at National Community Church in Washington, D.C., explain in a podcast that he has put this suggestion into practice by stacking reading the Bible to his habit of drinking coffee. Each morning, he wakes up, pours himself a cup of coffee, and begins reading the Bible. The coffee-pouring is his automatic cue to get in His Word. 

2. Control the Environment

To me, the most surprising of all of Clear’s claims was that environment often matters more than motivation. Clear tells the story of Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam installing small stickers that looked like flies near the center of each urinal in their men’s restrooms. The fly stickers gave men something to aim at and reduced cleaning cost by 8%. He suggests that controlling the environment is one way to make a habit easy. For example, if you want to drink more water, place multiple bottles of water around the house so you have multiple cues to remind you to drink water. Make a habit simple by controlling your environment. 

3. Community/Accountability

Clear utilizes a very powerful Christian concept – the importance of community and accountability. He advises to “join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior” (117). For example, if you want to run more, join a runners’ club. If you want to learn the guitar, start hanging out with musicians. Later in the book, he adds that accountability creates an immediate cost to any bad habit (207). Personally, I’ve seen the power of this principle recently. After deciding to give up social media for a designated time period and failing to break the habit of checking my accounts, I told two small groups of men about my goal. After telling these groups, immediately, I had no desire to check my Instagram and Facebook. I knew that these two groups would see my activity if I did check social media and that was enough of a deterrent. 

Compatible for a Christian? 

How should a Christian engage with Clear’s guide to forming good habits and destroying the bad ones? While Clear doesn’t claim to be a Christian in his book, I see very little in his book that is counter to a Christian worldview. If anything, he offers specific, evidence-backed ideas that I plan to implement to create God-glorifying habits and lose destructive and distracting ones.

While Clear’s book has laid out habit-building hacks to help us be more disciplined and productive, are his principles enough to transform a human soul? The Christian worldview reveals that our problem is deeper than a need for new habits. We as humans are born into sin, we are prone to do what is often easy, wrong, and destructive. If we could trust our personal resolve, would we need a book like Clear’s? His book has become an international bestseller precisely because we rarely live up to our convictions. We recognize our need for outside help. Yet the outside help we need is more than what Atomic Habit’s methods (as helpful as they are) can offer. We need a Savior. Scripture promises a type of transformation that not even Clear’s best-selling book can produce. 

“We need more than Atomic Habit’s methods (as helpful as they are), we need a Savior. Scripture promises a type of transformation that not even Clear’s best-selling book can produce.”

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come (2 Corinthians 5:17). 

The power of God available to those who put their faith in Jesus can resurrect dead hearts, completely change sinful desires, and destroy addictions and harmful habits. The ultimate hope of the Christian to change is not in his or her own ability to incorporate enough good habits to overcome destructive behaviors. Our hope is in God himself, the Holy Spirit, dwelling inside us and bringing inward transformation as we cooperate with His leading. 

Atomic Habits is sure to help any person who reads it, including Christians, build better habits. I have already begun to implement some of its principles. However, the chance our own efforts produce the change we ultimately need is not even atomically small… it’s impossible. Our only hope for transformation is in Jesus saving us from our hopeless state and the Holy Spirit empowering us to lead lives pleasing to God.