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Yeeting Bad Habits: Techniques for Your Brain and Soul | Dr. Jibran Khokhar
By focusing on one of the most important acts of worship in Islam – the prayer – Dr. Jibran Khokhar explains how we can use psychology to move away from our worship being mere habit towards having a more mindful experience.
This session was part of the “In the Way of Faith” Yaqeen conference held in Toronto, Canada in 2022.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. JazakumAllahu Khayran to the organizers and for all of you for being such an attentive audience this far. Before I start I'd like to start with a couple of definitions. The first one is for all of us that are above the age of 35 in the audience about what yiit means. I had to look it up myself on Urban Dictionary after Dr. Nader suggested the title and so to yiit means to throw forcefully something that you don't value too much. And then we'll talk about a couple of other definitions as well. Habits, what are habits? Habits are something an action or routine that if you did enough of it your brain automatizes it, makes it automatic. If you think about it, your brain is the most energy requiring organ of your body. Kind of like your air conditioning during the summer. And what does your smart thermostat do? It comes up with a routine to ensure that you use just the right amount of electricity so your bill isn't in the hundreds of dollars. And so that's what your brain tries to do when it comes to habits. If you do something enough, it will make it automatic so that you don't have to use as much energy for it. And as a result, you can focus that energy, that cognitive reserve, that working memory, whatever you want to call it, on something else that's important. The reason I want to describe habits is because it often gets confused with another word that we kind of mentioned, Bhuna also mentioned right now, addiction. Addiction is very different from a habit.
Addiction is described or defined as a chronic relapsing disorder of something that you really are compulsively doing. When you think about it, it's not all that different from our relationship with sinning. As Sheikh Omar was mentioning earlier, we have a chronic relapsing disorder of sinning. Where we'll sin and we'll do tawbah. And we'll sin again and we'll do tawbah. And the withdrawal that he was even speaking about, that's what you see with addiction as well. And so this is very different from habit. Habit is when something goes from being an action-outcome association. So you move into a new house and you learn that there's a switch on the wall that when you hit it, the light turns on or turns off. But if you do it over and over and over again, that goes from an action-outcome association to a stimulus response. Where you are leaving the room and you see the light switch and you hit it. And then you hear your wife screaming, I'm still in here. And you shut off the light. But that's because it's become a habit and you can't help yourself. SubhanAllah, you know, I was supposed to talk about bad habits today. But I want to before touch upon something that we consider a good habit. We talk to our kids about getting into the habit of praying. And we are saying to ourselves, I want to get better with my habit of praying. Unfortunately, calling prayer a habit becomes a problem in itself. Ibn Al-Jawzi, Rahimahullah, in Sayyidil Khatr, describes this. And it can be summed up as that the ibadat ahlul ghaflati, a'dat. Wa a'dat ahlul yaqdati, ibadat.
So the actions of worship of the people of heedlessness are merely habits. Whereas the actions, the habits of those of vigilance, those of enlightenment, are ibadat. And subhanAllah, he goes deeper into it. He talks about it. He said, I meditated and I thought and pondered upon the actions, the ibadat of people. And I realized that for most, akhtar an-nas, they are a'dat. They are habits. But for the arbab, for the people of al-yaqdah, the ones who are vigilant, who are mindful, who are present, their ibadat or their a'dat are the ibadat al-haqiqiyah. They are the ibadah al-haqiqiyah. They are the true acts of worship. And he, subhanAllah, goes into depth. And as somebody who is a scientist, it's amazing the things he covers. He says, you know, they think about the creation of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala around them. They look at the sky. They look at the heaven. They look at the earth. They look at the rumman, the pomegranate, and they see the membrane on it. And they look at the egg and the fetus inside it. And they think about the fetus inside the womb of a mother. And they think about how the flesh is placed on the bones. And all of that makes them say, subhanAllah. Whereas somebody who is a ghafil, he says, subhanAllah, a'datan. For him, it's just an a'dah. That he, as a habitual thing, he says that this is subhanAllah. Whereas somebody who thinks about the world and the creation of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala around them, they are driven. It's from the fruit of their thought, tamratul fikr, that they say, subhanAllah.
And so subhanAllah, when I think about it back to psychology and thinking about how can we now make our habit of prayer more like those people of mindfulness. I'm going to be honest with you first. We all have those six to ten surahs that are our regulars, right? Day ones. We started with those and we're keeping with them. Inna a'taynaka al-kalfar, kul huwa Allahu ahad, kul a'udhu bi rabbin naas. Depending on how much time we have, maybe we'll throw in, itha ja'a nasru Allahu wal-fatih. Or, itha zalzalati al-ardhu zalzalaha. That's us. All of us. But what happens is because we're repeating them so often, our brain, as soon as we say, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Rashidu wa la ilaha illa Allah, as soon as we say the iqama and we say the takbiratul ihraam, our brain just goes, okay, I've seen this before. This is known. This is a repeated action. Let's get into autopilot. And until you do as-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah, you don't know what you did. And autopilot has just passed you through that time. And that's why afterwards we'll be like, did I read two rak'ahs or three? Did I read Fatiha in the last one? Because our brain was on autopilot. But science tells us that it's possible to take something that's become a stimulus response and take it back to an action-outcome association. How? Two things. The first one is a context change. So where you were doing something before, it could be a physical context, it could be a psychological context, a state of mind, and changing that context.
And the second thing being unexpected reward. And subhanAllah, you know, there's a beautiful hadith of Prophet ﷺ that covers this beautifully. And I'm going to give you a solution. And this solution I'm telling myself first. So hopefully the fear of having 2,300 people watching me say this will drive me to do this more often. But Prophet ﷺ says, man qaama bi'ashri a'ayatim minal kitab wa minal qu'an lam yaktum minal ghaafileen That whoever stands in the night prayer for ten ayaat from the Qur'an, they will not be written from what? The categorization that we were just talking about by Ibn al-Jawzi. Ghaafileen or Ahl al-Yaqda, right? So whoever stands in the night prayer for ten ayaat, they will not be written from those that are the heedless. And then that hadith goes on that whoever stands for bi'biyati ayaatim, on ten ayaat, a hundred ayaat from the Qur'an, they will be written from the qanitin. And then alfi ayaat from the muqadthirin. So the devoted ones and then the ones that are just gathering mountains and mountains of goodness. As subhanAllah, through even praying two rak'ahs in which you put together five and five ayaat. This is not something that's out of reach for all of us. We can put together ten ayaat in some way, shape or form. It could be five, ten minutes before the fajr prayer comes in even. We change both the context, but because we've now introduced a few more ayaat into our repertoire, we'll get maybe an unexpected reward. As Sheikh Yusuf was saying, the Qur'an is speaking to each one of us. By reciting a new passage from the Qur'an, we might hear or understand something that we didn't understand before. A new gem that we hadn't experienced before.
And that knocks us back from a stimulus response relationship, back to an action outcome. And makes our prayer then throughout the rest of the day better again. And it's the same thing that would apply to the rest of our prayers as well. If you want to knock your brain out of autopilot, recite something different. Recite something you struggle with. Because then there's twice the reward for you. Recite something that is not from the norm. And then, SubhanAllah, that's the amazing thing about prayer. Even though I'm today supposed to be talking about getting rid of those bad habits, Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala takes care of that in the Qur'an already. Inna al-salatatanhaa nilfahshaa walmunkari walbaghri Right? So once you get your prayer in order, those things that we all know to be bad habits, those things that we all struggle with, will be taken care of themselves. And SubhanAllah, you know, this is a reminder for myself first, but then all of you. Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam says, Ar-rajula layansarif A man tries hard and does an action and works towards something. But then, wama kutiba lahum min salatihi Except what is written from his prayer is, except for ushruha. And he goes into actually the fractions, and you could teach your kids fractions from just this hadith, but it goes into sumnuha, subuhaha, and it goes to basically, except what is written from him is a tenth of it, or an eighth of it, or a seventh of it, and sixth, fifth, half of it. And SubhanAllah, you know, we think of prayer as a checklist. Like five times a day we've got on our to-do list, check, check, check, check, check. And we get complacent that we've done our job.
But imagine for every one of those prayers, that you're getting up when it's minus 20 degrees outside, making wudu with cold water and praying fajr, and you're only getting 10% of the reward for it. That sucks. Like that would suck. So bring yourself back in. Bring yourself back in by using science. Change your context and look for those unexpected rewards in prayer. May Allah make us of those whose habits are acts of worship, instead of it being the other way around. JazakumAllahu Khayran. Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.
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