The Qur'an and Sunnah Assalamualaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. This is Justin for Yaqeen Institute and I'm here to talk to you a little bit about having good habits and how to establish a good habit. So many of us may have experienced this. We want to do the night prayer for example, the voluntary night prayer. We might want to read four juz of the Qur'an at night. We might want to adopt some other good habit and then we can do it for a little bit but then we just burn out, right? We just can't keep up with it. And how do we get over that burnout? So the key to that is to start small. So the messenger of Allah, salallahu alayhi wasalam, said Inna ahabbal a'mali ila Allahi ma damma wa in qalb He said, peace and blessings be upon him. Verily the most beloved deeds to Allah are those that are constant even if they are small. And another narration, even if they are easy. So these small good habits, they build up over time. Think about that. So if a plane is flying its course or a ship is plotting its course or you're trying to plot a course on a map, if you're off by just a degree or half a degree, over time you're going to be way off by the end of your destination, right? So these small habits that we have, they build up over time and they make big changes over time, not at the beginning. The bad habits as well. The bad habits will unfortunately accumulate bad things for you over time. So we can't belittle the small habits, right? So we need to start small whenever we're doing something. Inna Aisha radiallahu anha, may Allah be pleased with her, she said Kana Rasulallah, salallahu alayhi wasalam, idha amila amalan athbatahun She said, the messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, if he wanted to do a deed, he would athbatahun, he would be firm in it, he would resolve to make it a habit.
So if he was going to do the night prayer, he was going to read Quran every night or he was going to do some voluntary act of worship or some habit, he would go in with the intention of making it a habit, right? And then he told us to start small. And there's a lot of narrations where the sahaba, the companions would come to him and they would say, oh messenger of Allah, what can I do, what can I add to my daily routine, and he would give them something small, right? Okay, so if you want to do the night prayer, begin with witr prayer, right? Just one voluntary witr prayer, you can do one raka'ah, as little as one or three or more, okay? And if you make it a habit to pray witr prayer, three raka'at at night, then you do what is called habit stacking. Then you can do five, then you can do seven, then you can do nine, then you can do eleven, then you can do the full-blown night prayer just like the messenger of Allah, salallahu alayhi wa sallam, did. Same thing with the Quran. If you want to read the Quran every night, you want to make it a habit every night, one juz is a lot, right, for a beginner, right? So just begin with one surah or one page or a couple pages, right, even five minutes, right? But once you get into the habit of that and you do it for five minutes, then do it for ten minutes, do it for ten minutes, then do it for fifteen minutes. And then you habit stack, you build this habit and you build more and more and more upon it. The same thing works with exercise, okay? If you need to exercise and it's really hard for you, don't start out exercising an hour at a time. Go out walking for ten minutes, fifteen minutes. Make that a habit to walk for ten minutes. Then when you're done with that, when you've established that, right, then walk for fifteen minutes or walk for twenty minutes or twenty-five and go more and more and more until you get a good routine, right, and you're exercising in the most optimal way.
But we want to avoid this burnout because the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said to one of his companions, لا تكون مثل فلان كان يقوم الليل فترك قيام الليل Don't be like this person who he was praying in the night, he was standing to pray at night and then later he abandoned the prayer. He burned out, right? Don't be like that person, okay? When you want to start something, you start it small and then you build upon it and then you stack habits, good habits around that. So I hope that tip helps you. We ask Allah ﷻ to bless us in this month and to endow us with good habits that are pleasing to Him. And I hope all of you are staying safe. As-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-rahmatullāhi wa-barakātuh.
