Habits that Form the Soul

In this episode of Ordered Reality, we explore how small, repeated actions of daily life shape who we become. From discipline and routine to the quiet choices made when no one is watching, we break down the spiritual and practical power of habits — and how they either build order or invite chaos into the soul.

Whether you’re trying to grow in faith, strengthen your character, or reclaim direction in your life, this episode helps you understand the habits that truly matter and how they transform the interior life over time.

Transcript

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Welcome to Ordered Reality. This podcast explores the deeper patterns shaping our world through history, philosophy, and the moral framework of the Christian faith. In a culture driven by speed, noise, and constant reaction, this show takes a slower approach. Each episode examines a single idea truth, power, memory, responsibility, and asks how these principles shape both civilizations and the lives we live today. Because understanding reality clearly is the first step towards living faithfully within it. Formation doesn't happen all at once. It doesn't arrive through a single decision, a moment of clarity, or even a strong intention. It happens slowly, through what we do repeatedly. In the last episode, we talked about formation in a broader sense. How societies shaped people through families, communities, and shared moral frameworks, and how much of that structure has weakened in the modern world. Which leaves us with a responsibility that is both simple and demanding. If formation is no longer something we can assume, then it becomes something we must build. And that doesn't begin with big decisions, it begins with small ones. The way we start our day, what we give our attention to, how we respond to frustration, what we choose to avoid, and what we practice consistently, even when it feels insignificant. These things may seem minor in isolation, but over time they shape something much deeper. They shape our habits. And our habits in turn shape who we become. This is something both classical philosophy and Christian tradition have always understood. Long before modern discussions about productivity or self-improvement, thinkers recognize that the repeated patterns of daily life form the foundation of character. Not through intensity, but through consistency. And in many ways, one of the challenges of modern life is that we tend to overlook this. We look for transformation in large, visible changes, while ignoring the quiet patterns that are already forming us every day. So today we're gonna take a closer look at habits, not as a tool for efficiency, but as a framework for formation. We'll talk about how habits shape the soul, why small actions carry long-term weight, and how intentional practices, especially within the Christian tradition, can begin to restore order in a life that feels scattered or distracted. Because over time, the life we build is simply the result of what we do again and again. Hello, my name is Kellen. Welcome back to episode 10. This is episode two of season two, Habits That Form the Soul. Thank you for sticking it out. We made it to episode 10. This is incredible. I appreciate you all for listening. Um, hopefully you got a chance to listen to the other nine episodes. I am your host, Kellen. Thank you for joining me on Ordered Reality. We're just here to think a little bit deeper, more critically, and to slow things down a little bit in such a fast-paced environment. So let's jump right in. So let's look at first that habits shape who we become. Because they're not just routines, they're formational forces. They shape certain things like character, judgment, desires, and identity over time. So when we dive right into habits forming the person, not just the behavior, but generally people today believe that habits help us stay productive or to be organized, following the same routine, providing stability. But habit building in a positive way can provide so much more than just that. Like we touched on in the previous episode, habits reinforce specific neural pathways and over time support creating subconscious routines that define daily action, thoughts, and emotional responses. This in a time, or this over time, shapes long-term character and identity rather than the baseline behavior itself. It becomes less of what you do and how your habit shapes who you become. And in terms, this shapes who we become. The more we build on positive habits, the more we are likely to repeat these same habits even under stress. Taking a look at James Clear's book, uh Atomic Habits, if we can focus on the person we want to become, not just achieving a specific outcome, building habits can become easier to obtain. It's about forming ourselves within our habits. Excuse me, to be the person we want to be, or in this case, more modeled after Christ Himself. When we're building our habits, repetition creates direction. It's important to realize that all of our habits push us further into order or into more disorder. There are no neutral habits, nothing that you do on a daily basis consistently is going to just keep you the same. Again, if we take a look at atomic habits, it hits on this idea of a habit loop of cue, routine, and reward. And it makes repeated behaviors faster, easier, and more likely to be repeated. So kind of diving a little bit into this, there's a cue, something that triggers the habit. There's the habit itself or the routine, and then there's the reward you get from doing that routine. Whether it be, you know, every time, you know, you get a craving or something like that for a suite, you do 10 push-ups in order to get a cookie. It's a terrible example, but there's a cue, you know, whatever, whatever the desire is, the routine before you get the reward. It's a terrible example, and I apologize, but that's all I could think of at the moment. Habits can also create direction by reducing cognitive load. The more we strengthen our habits, the easier those actions become. Consistency over intensity by creating habits we do on a daily basis is so crucial to making habits stick. The reality is when we want to try and form a habit, doing it consistently over time rather than extremely intense for a short period of time is going to help the habit stick. Now, also as important as doing these actions for good habits are there are bad habits that we can lead our life that can lead our lives down a pathway of suffering. Remember, we're striving to find habits such as prayer, exercise, being overall healthier through better eating to enhance our lives. We want to break negative habits by forming simple, morally good ones aimed towards the truth. And just kind of, we already just sit on it, but the small habits carry long-term weight. It doesn't take rocket science to understand that doing small, consistent actions will be easier to do than larger ones. For example, say your goal is to read the Bible this year. Instead of being your overall goal is just to read the Bible this year, break it down into something like, I want to read three pages of the Bible each day. You simplify your goal, you make it obtainable using actions, small actions, repetitive actions to complete that Bible in a year. When you look at the whole goal of I want to read the Bible this year, that can be extremely daunting. It's a very intense goal to meet, but if you break it down to two, I'm gonna read three pages of the Bible each day, you're essentially completing the massive goal while also building small, repetitive, um, repetitive behaviors you could do to accomplish that goal. And before you know it, you're reading three pages a day and you've read the Bible in a year. And don't forget to reward yourself every day you complete the task. And this ultimately helps you build those habits over time. If you reward yourself for doing something that you set your mind to, your mind is going to want to be driven back to doing that habit more often. Small habits such as walking 15-minute sheets a day or reading five pages a day compound over time. Building small goals into larger ones. It also makes more intense goals easier to achieve if you start small and build up. Little actions compound much like interest in the stock market. At first, it may not feel as if you're doing life-changing work, but with repetition over time, it truly is. Ultimately, Thomas Aquinas puts it like this our faith, habits, um in our faith, habits are crucial in moral life and allow us to promptly, consistently, with pleasure or ease, go in a certain direction. They can be either virtues or vices, depending on good or bad, and help form us as who we are, as morally good or bad individuals. In summary, habits performed over time form the person. Repetition provides direction either towards or away from the morally good, and small habits repeated over time carry long-term weight shaping who we become over time. So we just kind of shaped or we just kind of finished uh habits shaping who we become. So let's take a look at how the direction of habits can either form us or deform us. So habits don't just build, they also distort. They either order the soul or gradually disorder it. And let's take a look into what I'm saying here, which is essentially just um they can either form or deform. They either have positive lasting effects or negative lasting effects. And as discussed before, habits can be compounding over time. So realistically, if we build good habits, they'll compound their rewards over time, or vice versa. If we're building negative habits, the detrimental effects will compound exponentially as we get through life or as we as we continue to do those bad habits. Realistically, these habits that we're doing will either push us towards a more moral goodness or corruptness. And habits that form us can cause us to become more efficient, build new skills, or enhance current skills, or help develop our character. It can assist in rewiring our brains to make repeated positive behaviors easier to make in the future. Habits can deform us by automating us making difficult habits to stop. Habits can deform us by causing dopamine manipulation. It provides instant rewards, causing the brain to seek these behaviors over habits that create long-term well-being. These habits can diminish cognitive thought, and the more we act on repeated, or the more we reinforce negative habits, the less likely our brain is going to tell us that there's a consequence associated with it. And finally, it can shape misguided desires into what is immoral, reinforcing destructive behavior. So, what does this mean in regards to how modern life treats habits? Do modern institutions and systems promote formation or deformation? Well, the reality in today's world is modern life encourages deforming habits. Do you ever find yourself doom-scrolling social media for what feels like five minutes, and then all of a sudden you look up and half an hour's gone by or an hour's gone by? Corporations are looking for ways to keep you hooked by tapping into your dopamine response. It's good for them, it keeps you engaged and makes some money, but it's not really a habit that forms you and in a sense can rob you of your productivity. I should know I found myself doing this far too often. I mean, I everyone knows, or a lot of people who would would know, the doom scrolling through mindless videos on Instagram, and it's enjoyable for the moment, but you can lose so much product uh productive time. Um, partially why I wanted to start this podcast was to help break that habit of doom scrolling. And instead of doom scrolling for, you know, three hours a day over time, now I get to spend time researching for these episodes, and it's really cut back on the negative habit while hopefully building a positive one. I would like to think this podcast has been a positive impact on my life. Take another example of triggering headlines that are meant to grab your attention. They sell you the story, not the truth, but they want you to accept it as the truth without having the wherewithal to fact-check or even the patience to dig just a little deeper to find the truth. Modern culture wants us to be consumed by information. Rapid consumption without critical thinking deforms us into making reactive decisions based on opinion, not rooting ourselves in the truth. And again, this is just a product of we have so much access to information. And the reality is people are trying to buy our attention in a sense by throwing up these flashy articles or flashy um news text or shock value factor. When the reality is it's not really truthful, us as human beings have to have the moral aptitude to seek the truth and make sure that we're doing our due diligence and aligning ourselves appropriately on whatever stance we come across, just making sure that we are being smart, slowing things down, and thinking more critical, just like this whole podcast kind of reinforces. Neil Postman, an influential American author, argued that prior to television slash image culture, print culture fostered a culture of logical argument, sustained attention, and rational thought. Think of it, you need focus to read, especially longer passages, chapters, or even whole books. He argued that visual media, in other words, television, social media, TikTok, etc., uh, has changed this to quick dopamine hits and a quick reward, entertaining stimpets of information. He argued the contrary to George Orwell's 1984, that instead it wouldn't be oppressive regimes controlling controlling society, but rather by our own, quote, almost infinite appetite for distractions. And I thought that this was just so interesting to think that we're always so worried in modern life about oppression and these regimes coming in and controlling our lives and taking our rights away. But the reality is, is to some degree, we are constantly bombarded by information. It's just a massive distraction. And the more that media can control our ability to process information and to only accept titles or article titles as true and not doing our own critical thinking, we're already controlled just in a different way. There's so much information with a lower desire to process or seek the truth, and that can lead to just constant information overload and distractions, uh, distraction-seeking habits to fill the void. Let's look at how habits shape desire. Initially, habits change behavior over time. It shapes what we want and what we seek and what we ultimately strive for. It transforms repetitive actions or the behavior into anticipated rewards. We begin seeking the habits that define who we are and shape our identity. Or who we want to be. This in time makes the craving of the reward more enjoyable than the reward itself. Just like the saying, it's about the journey, not the destination. That makes it feel more and more real. Um, just that phrase of when we continue to form ourselves in good rooted habits, it's not necessarily about the outcome, but rather the process. Augustine of Hippo believed habits can bend our loves and thus our character towards God or towards lower goods. Do we desire to do good and follow the teachings of Christ? Or do we desire to follow earthly tangible goods that lead to deformation despite providing an immediate comfort and gratification? For example, are you someone who immediately feels a need to check their phone right when you wake up? Social media, the first is social media the first app you go to? Are you seeking validation or information from social media? You may have a habit of needing to know what's going on in the world or with others around you instead of having the peace and stillness in the morning, or perhaps waking up and choosing prayer prior to tangible goods. You may have a desire to be closer to God, or even your loved one next to you, or your family, but your internal gravity is pulling you towards social validation, putting that higher than your relationship with God or direct family. It's just kind of thinking about the nuances of how we choose to do things. And I'm no stranger to this. Sometimes, you know, that pull to how often do you wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is grab your phone right off the countertop. Um, just being more cognizant of that can help you make choices that may help push you towards the morally good, or even not, and not saying that grabbing your phone in the morning makes you an immoral person, not at all what I'm saying. But we do have these habits that are ingrained in our lives that they become so rooted in who we are, we don't realize that they can be destructive. And sometimes helping to just recognize that we're doing them can help form us in a positive way. So let's talk about why small disciplines matter more than big intentions. Transformation doesn't come from intensity, it comes from consistency. The more we can do something, no matter how small it is, the more likely it is to become a habit. So you're probably saying at this point, Kellen, I get it, we can either build positive or negative life-altering habits, and I'm ready to make a drastic large change in my life, but where do I start? Well, again, just hitting on it, we start small. Small disciplines matter more than those big intentions. Transformation doesn't come from intensity, but that consistency. Big intentions fade quickly. Now, I'm not going to sit here and say that if you have this amazing goal that no one could ever possibly reach that goal, that's not what I'm trying to say. I would encourage anyone to shoot for the stars and build these on these big intentions, but the reality is smaller, more manageable goals will have compounding effects and have the same effect as accomplishing a large goal, just easier to obtain scientifically, basically, with your brain power. So these big intentions, what do they do? They rely on this finite willpower and initial excitement rather than sustainable systems. Large goals can overwhelm the brain once the initial emotional drive wears off, causing ourselves to want to revert back to our normally established routines and habits rather than forming new ones. Lasting change requires small, consistent actions and emotional design. The best example I can give here is diet culture in America. We have a fascination with finding the quote perfect diet to help us lose weight and be healthier versions of ourselves. These diets often cause us to do drastic things in order to see a change in weight on a scale. But the reality is sometimes it's not about the scale itself. Generally, these diets are often so intense that once our willpower to continue runs out, we revert right back to our established habits and our diets, quote, fail. And good examples of this is like if you're going to starve yourself for two weeks, yes, you may get a drastic change on the scale for a short period of time, but that's not sustainable throughout your entire life, and you're miserable while doing it. And then you revert right back once your body runs out of that willpower to. Continue to starve yourself just to see this change on a scale, and you revert right back to your old comfort zone habits, which then leads you to getting your weight right back to where it was. Rather, in this situation, if we focus on making small changes to our lifestyle, we can alter our diet for good with consistency, leading to a greater success rate of altering our overall health in the long run. It takes a lifestyle change, not just a diet. Small disciplines also build stability. They create small, mundane tasks and compound them over time. And that creates structure and resilience long term. Initial efforts may seem invisible, but doing small, consistent actions build momentum over time, yielding success and progress. And the easiest example to kind of envision this is truthfully your retirement portfolio. When you start investing in yourself over time, you're putting in, you know, $10, $20, $50, whatever it is, and it's you're taking a look at it year over year, and it's like, oh, I got $1,000, or oh, I have $2,000, whatever it may be. And it just feels like those first couple of years, you haven't really made much ground. Well, the reality is through compound interest over time, you're going to turn $5,000 over the next 30 years into something like $300,000, $400,000, $500, you know, and so on thousand dollars. It's a small exponential effect, not a straight line. Discipline provides structure that keeps progress steady even when motivation declines. Tackling smaller tasks such as 10-minute workouts instead of hours-long ones or even hours-long ones will allow you to quickly incorporate that event into your life without making large, unrealistic sacrifices. So if I set a goal for myself that I want to do 200 push-ups today, that is a huge intense goal. And while it may not seem like a ton, the reality is this 200 is hard to hit. But if I break that down into every hour, I'm going to do 20 push-ups. Well, across my entire day, I've done my 200 push-ups, but I've broken it down. It's easier to do that and it's more consistent to do that. Also, keeping yourself in your habit will build confidence, proving to yourself that you can make a change. Discipline also frees oneself. It does not restrict. It replaces chaotic, impulsive choices with structured, purposeful action. This then frees you from the confines of the drive for immediate desires such as laziness, poor health, and debt. It allows you to consistently make choices that set you up for success in the long run. So many people today have been sold this lie that true freedom is just doing whatever you want whenever you want it. It's about you and only you. It puts this idea of instant gratification at the top of the checklist, regardless of future consequences. You do you, YOLO, the whole one has heard all of those sayings before. The reality is building habits involving discipline and direction for the truth and moral good allows you to strive towards self-mastery and ultimate control, thusly freeing you from the clutches of impulsivity and therefore allowing you to build the life you actually want. It's the clarity we all need to build healthier lives rooted in truth, focused towards God. So we talked about several different things about habits, how they're formed, how discipline provides structure, different things about habits and kind of orienting ourselves towards building life-changing, healthy habits for positive positive gains. Let's look at it from a Catholic perspective on habits that order the soul. And it's this core idea that Christian habits are not about optimization, but they're about alignment with truth and God. So spiritual, excuse me. So again, um, just making sure we kind of cover it again. We hit on how habits shape who we are, the differences between formation and deformation, and how each habit we choose to build pushes us one way or another. And we just wrapped up how small disciplines matter more than large intentions. And so, how do we relate this to our Catholic faith, or even our Christian faith? It's important to remember that Christian habits are not about optimization, they're about alignment with the truth and God. Spiritual practices help form the soul. Actions such as prayer, sacraments, and acts of charity help form the soul by nourishing it with sanctifying grace, helping align the human will with God's will. And these practices help transform a person to become more like Christ and prepare the soul for eternal communion with God. So, what is sanctifying grace? Well, sanctifying grace is defined as a habitual, supernatural gift from God that permanently indwells in the soul, perfecting it to live with God and act by his love. These practices help form the soul to be less self-centered or less self-serving and more centered around God. Habits also help create this interior order. Building habits around prayer, sacraments, charity, and others help quiet the noise and information overload we receive on a daily basis. These habits provide a foundation to help weather the ever-changing world we live in. One constant, God provides the stability necessary and needed to live in peace as we strive for life everlasting with Him. Building habits on spiritual practice trains attention and gives us focus on what truly matters, deepening our relationship with God. It also helps strengthen conscience by consistently aligning thoughts and actions with higher moral values, cultivating inner awareness and refining moral sensitivity. Regular practices like meditation, prayer, scripture study, and self-reflection expose, confront, and reduce flaws in character while fostering virtues like empathy and humility. A great scripture example is in Luke chapter 9, verse 23, where Jesus encourages a daily commitment to self-denial, sacrificial living, and obedience to him over selfish ambition. It reads, If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. More so, it's not necessarily about ourselves, it's about aligning ourselves with Christ. And therefore, in turn, we build a healthier, more spiritual being, uh, supporting our soul and getting it prepared for everlasting life with Christ. It's choosing to follow God and get closer with Him every day, and Jesus encourages that in this scripture. Faithful habits also build long-term stability. As we briefly touched on earlier, faithful habits to God and his teachings help as a framework to tackle everyday life, especially in times of uncertainty. We live in a society that seems to shift what is valued or what is popular on an almost daily basis, but the value of a strong relationship with God is priceless. It provides peace and love that transcends all earthly things and helps to ground us in such a fast-paced world. The teachings of Christ have stood the test of time over thousands of years, and there's no teaching from the Bible or through scripture or through Christ that would negatively or has negatively impacted your life. And maybe that's a stretch there, but I would argue that building habits rooted in faith creates structure, strengthens conscience, and drives us towards morally good decisions and objective truth daily. But we have to continue to cultivate these habits through persistent repetitive, uh, excuse me, persistent repetition and discipline. Faith is not sustained by intention, but by practice. When we talk about habits, it's easy to think in terms of improvement, becoming more productive, more efficient, more disciplined. But what we've been talking about here is something deeper. Habits are not just about improving performance, they are about forming the person. And whether we realize it or not, that formation is already happening every day through what we give our attention to, what we repeat, and what we allow to shape us over time. Which means the question is not whether we have habits, the question is whether our habits are forming us towards order or quietly leading us into disorder. The challenge is that most of these patterns feel small. They don't seem significant in the moment. Skipping something, avoiding something, choosing distraction instead of attention, none of it feels divisive or decisive. But over time, those small decisions accumulate, and they begin to shape how we think, how we respond, and ultimately who we become. The same is true in the other direction. Small acts of discipline, done consistently, begin to build something stable. Attention becomes clearer, judgment becomes steadier, and responsibility becomes easier to carry. Not because life becomes easier, but become uh but because we become more formed. The Christian tradition understands this well. Faith is not sustained by moments of intensity, it is sustained by practice, by returning day after day to what is true, even when it feels ordinary, even when it feels repetitive, and even when it feels unnoticed. And over time, that quiet consistency begins to shape something deeper than behavior. It shapes the soul. So the goal is not to change everything at once, it's to begin paying attention to what is already forming you and to start making small, intentional decisions that move you in the right direction. Because in the end, the life we build is not the result of a few big choices, it's a result of what we do consistently. And those small, repeated actions are what form us slowly but decisively over time. Formation doesn't happen all at once, it happens one habit at a time. Again, my name is Kellen. Welcome back again to Ordered Reality. Thank you for listening to episode 10. I appreciate you all coming to this space, taking a little bit of time to slow things down, think more critically about life, and help us orient ourselves closer to God. If you like what you're hearing so far, again, we made it through episode 10. I do have a page on Buy Me a Coffee that helps support this podcast. Um, I appreciate you all. Uh, thank you so much for being here with me this week. And I hope you guys have a blessed week and we'll welcome you back next week for episode 11. Have a fantastic day and enjoy the rest of your week. We'll see you next time.