Eating when you're not hungry. Talking when there's nothing to say. Falling into undesirable behavioral patterns when you're around a particular person. Things don't have to be this way. It's possible to replace unwanted habits with peace and control through prayer.
More and more, I see that effective prayer means awakening to our identity as God's expression. It has the effect of stirring thought to the understanding of God's unflawed goodness, and of ourselves as His reflection. No matter what apparently causes bad habits—nervousness, depression, fear, heredity, stress—the bottom line is that they are wrong notions about our individuality. We get to the root of the trouble and correct it by learning what's true about our identity as God created us. This isn't simply an intellectual exercise, or a process of positive thinking. It's the application of spiritual truth to a mistaken self-image, and the result is healing.
I used to bite my fingernails constantly. I would stop for a while, using will-power to refrain. But soon I would find myself at it again. This went on for years. Then, during a night of prayer and spiritual study, it came to me that I had authority from God to reject anything that separated me from Him, including this annoying habit. I read the definition of God in the Glossary of Science and Health. It speaks of God as the "all-acting." Science and Health, p. 587. From this I concluded that as God's expression I couldn't be manipulated by any involuntary action. If God is all-acting, my action, reflecting God's, must be productive, not self-destructive. And it must be gracious! Recognizing the habit as a wrong suggestion to me, instead of something that was a part of me and over which I had no control, ripped off the habit's disguise. There was no actual power underlying the habit, once I took away my belief in it, which was the only power it ever had. I never bit my fingernails again after that night long ago.
