Does anyone else do this? Whenever I don’t know what to do next, or I’m bored, or I’m procrastinating, I look in the refrigerator for something to eat. I seem to have convinced myself that finding something to eat – and then eating it – counts as doing something productive.
This is ridiculous, I know, but that hasn’t stopped me. And now it’s a monkey-mind habit.
When I realized it was a habit, it gave me the idea to reverse engineer “habit-stacking” to change it.
Productivity gurus love to teach habit-stacking. You find something you do every day and something you want to do every day and “stack,” or do, the “I wanna” thing every time you do the automatic one, and, voila! You create a new habit!
I decided to stack my refrigerator habit with a reminder to stop it. But what reminder? And that’s when I remembered Stevie Wonder.
Stevie’s album, Songs in the Key of Life, is considered one of the greatest albums of all time. And one of its best tracks is “Have a Talk with God.”
“Many of us feel we walk alone without a friend,
Never communicating with the One who lives within.
Forgetting all about the One who never, ever lets you down,
And you can talk to Him anytime, He’s always around.”
Talk to Him anytime? Even while looking in the refrigerator to feel productive? So often we save those talks for “the big things,” even knowing that Jesus told Helen: “You have to remember to ask me to take charge of all minutiae.” (CE.T.1.25.4)
Looking in the refrigerator out of boredom probably counts as minutiae. And guess what? Habit-stacking a talk with God every time is a whole lot more fun with a soundtrack: