Three Habits That Improve How We Hear from God
How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Dramatically Improve Your Spiritual Receptivity
Recently, I traveled overseas and taught a two-day intensive class at a seminary. During one session, I was asked: How can we improve our ability to hear from God? How can we improve our receptivity to hearing from God? Can we change things in our environment, our practices, or our habits to make a positive difference?
Many of us share this question. Many of us want more communication with God, but we feel stuck and don't know how to move forward. I want to offer three evidence-based spiritual habits for us. I offered these to the class and a powerful result came out of them:
One: Don't sleep with your phone in your room. Buy an alarm clock.
Two: Take a daily walk in nature, ideally in a park or a forest trail. If you don't have that option, walk down a residential street.
Three: Limit your media consumption. We get stuck in loops of media consumption, binging YouTube, Netflix, Prime, that pump constant audio and visual content into our brains.
A month after I taught the class, one student followed up with me and said, "I practiced what you suggested, and immediately I started hearing more from God. I started having dreams. I started recognizing how God was trying to communicate with me." What happened in with this student wasn’t weird, she experienced God in simple, meaningful ways that encouraged her and the people around her. Her prays changed from monologues to dialogues.
Some of us hear that story and we think, "Come on, I don't have to give up my phone for God to talk to me." What happened to this student is not an anomaly, it is the fruit of a simple, productive, evidence-based approach to spiritual growth.
Practice 1: Sleep Without Your Phone to Improve Spiritual Alertness
Research shows that people sleep better when they remove their phone from their bedroom entirely, not just when they stop looking at it, but when they physically place it outside of the bedroom at night when they sleep. When the phone sits on the nightstand, many people, when they wake up, reach for it in the middle of the night and fall into a doom scroll, losing a half hour or more of sleep. Without the phone in the room, they simply roll over and go back to sleep. Almost nobody will get out of bed, wander around the house to find their phone, check it, and then go back to bed, it takes too much effort.
One amazing fact is that not only do we need to put the phone out of reach within the room or promise ourselves that we won’t look at it, physically putting it in a different place removes a cognitive piece of information that wants to stimulate us to look at the phone when we wake up in the middle of the night.
Some of us use the alarm clock function on our phones to wake up in the morning. One resolution is to spend $10 or $15 at a local store and buy an alarm clock. There are rare exceptions that exist for a very limited few where they may need to have their phone by their bedside but most of us do not fall into that category.
When we rest well, we become more spiritually alert. I'm not saying God talks to well-rested people more. I'm saying that when we rest well, we can pay better attention when God communicates with us. Spiritual alertness and adequate rest are directly correlated.
Practice 2: Walk in Nature Daily to Quiet Mental Noise
Walk in nature for 30 to 60 minutes each day. This is not a workout so don't treat it as one. Walking without headphones, without music or podcasts, improves our memory, attention, and thinking. Exposure to nature quiets our internal noise and reduces the competition for our attention.
We concentrate better, lower our stress, plus reduce depression and anxiety. A positive perspective helps us feel grateful for what surrounds us. When we can express thanks for the things around us, we acknowledge God's presence and activity in the world. These benefits overlap and reinforce each other when we can decrease our stress and anxiety while at the same time increase our gratitude and positivity. These are factors that push aside the distractions that keep us from hearing God's voice.
Practice 3: Limit Media Consumption to Avoid Distraction
Science calls it cognitive overload which means that we take in so much information that we can no longer process all of it effectively. I experienced this myself. I used to listen to podcast after podcast, a serial podcast listener, and all with podcasts that had positive input and learning. But I hit cognitive overload. There is no way to process four hours of podcast daily so I shifted my habit to listen to (at most) one podcast a day, write down two or three actionable takeaways, and stop.
Research shows that ongoing stimulus, whether news, movies, YouTube videos, can activate our fight-or-flight response and keeps us in a constant state of low-level anxiety. This is especially true in our current media context because bad news sells and often content focuses on negativity. We can lock ourselves into a doom cycle, feeling compelled to consume more and stay informed about situations we can never actually influence.
Scripture addresses this directly. Philippians 4:8–9 instructs: "Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about these things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me or seen in me, put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you."
When we actively consume content that contradicts these qualities and characteristics, we can’t expect us to be alert and ware to how the God of peace is at work in us and around us. Paul wrote Philippians 4:8–9 to the church precisely because distraction and spiritual drift pull us off course so easily. The availability of distraction in our current culture is overwhelming and the goal of media companies is to retain your attention as long as possible. We have to make decisions that work to limit the content we consume in order to move towards God in a consistent and healthy way.
Three Simple Habits to Start Today
Sleep without your phone in your room — remove it entirely, buy an alarm clock
Walk in nature daily — at least five times a week, without headphones
Limit media consumption to one hour a day — one hour daily or maybe two hours at most, if you watch a full movie
We want intimacy with God, but spiritual intimacy requires concrete action. It takes both pursuing God and clearing away the things that trip us up. When we refuse to act, we stay trapped in the doom cycle, frustrated with the thought that we should be connecting with God more but that we aren't realizing that in our lives. Our spiritual awareness gets clogged.
God wants us to become people who are ready, alert, and attuned to how He moves in us and around us, people He can encourage and who can encourage others. We benefit when we take these three practical spiritual disciplines, even one at a time, put them into action, practice them in our lives, and we will see what God does.
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