Too Busy to Pray? What Behavioral Science Can Teach Us About the Life of Prayer

David Allen[^1], the productivity writer, keeps a rule about exercise: if he puts on workout clothes, he exercises; if he does not, he almost certainly will not. The trick, as he describes it, is that the 'smart part' of us sets up conditions the 'not-so-smart part' responds to almost automatically. The New York Times recently held this observation up as a model for getting more movement into a crowded day. The behavioral insight is real. But it opens a question the article does not ask: could the same logic serve the person who is, as the old excuse runs, 'too busy to pray'?

The answer is yes — with one important qualification. The techniques that lower activation energy for exercise can lower it equally for mental prayer. But the techniques are not the goal. They are the door. Interiority has to walk through it.

What the science actually shows

The Times piece draws on a family of findings in behavioral science: environmental cues trigger behavior before the deliberative intellect fully engages; reducing the effort required to begin a practice dramatically increases follow-through; small, consistent starts compound into durable habits. These findings are not trivial. They describe something real about the composite nature of the human person — that we are not pure intellects who act from reasons alone, but embodied creatures whose sensory-perceptual faculties are already in motion before we finish deciding.

Gabor Maté[^3], writing about compulsive behavior and its neurological substrate, recommends that someone building a new practice begin small — five minutes, not fifty — and treat that small success as genuine, because old neural circuits are being retrained one choice at a time. Steven Hayes[^4], in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, adds that a person who has not practiced noticing their own impulses without being governed by them will find that any environmental trick eventually plateaus: the running shoes stay by the door; the person steps over them. What both accounts describe is a limit: behavioral design can open the door, but it cannot supply the interior orientation that makes the practice last.

For exercise, that interior orientation is a commitment to health and bodily flourishing. For prayer, it is something of a different order entirely: the orientation of the whole person toward God.

The 'too busy to pray' problem is ancient

Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, in The Soul of the Apostolate, identified the pattern with clinical precision. The apostolic worker who feels perpetually overwhelmed does not, as a rule, cut out a meeting or a ministry obligation first. He cuts meditation — the half-hour of mental prayer that was supplying the interior energy for everything else. Chautard quotes St. Alphonsus: 'Short of a miracle, a man who does not practice mental prayer will end up in mortal sin.' The claim is strong. The mechanism behind it is not mystical but psychological: without regular interior attention, the will loses its orientation, small neglects multiply unnoticed, and what was once a life of deliberate charity becomes, as Chautard puts it, 'the life of an animal.'[^5]

This is the 'too busy to pray' trap in its classical form. The person is not insincere. He genuinely intends to return to prayer when the project is finished, the children are older, the semester ends. What he does not notice is that the busyness is itself a symptom of the loss of interior order that regular prayer was sustaining.

The exercise-science findings suggest that the trap has a structural feature, not only a moral one: the activation energy required to begin prayer on a given morning is high enough that the decision gets deferred, and deferral becomes habit. That structural feature can be addressed structurally.

Techniques worth borrowing

The following are not substitutes for the interior life. They are ways of lowering the threshold at which a prior commitment to prayer can meet itself each day.

Fix the time and place. The workout-clothes trick works because the clothes are a cue that pre-commits the body before the deliberative mind has time to negotiate. A fixed prayer chair, a fixed hour, a specific book left open to the page where the morning ended — these are the equivalents. Alphonsus Rodriguez, in The Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues, advised that acquiring the science of prayer is less a matter of reading treatises about it than of setting one's hand to work and practicing it over a long time — much as a mother teaches a child to walk not by explaining the mechanics but by guiding his steps until the motion becomes his own.[^6] A fixed external arrangement reduces the time spent in preamble and gets the person to the actual prayer faster.

Start smaller than seems adequate. Maté's advice about five minutes rather than fifty applies directly. A person who has lost the habit of mental prayer and commits to twenty minutes will find many mornings where twenty minutes feels impossible and so prayer is skipped entirely. The same person who commits to five minutes will find that five minutes is almost always achievable — and that on most mornings it extends naturally. Rodriguez observed that even prayer interrupted by distractions is not wasted: the soul that 'comes to itself' after distraction and presses forward in the remaining time 'will always reap fruit from it.'[^6]

Use the examination of conscience as a closing cue. Ignatius of Loyola's practice of the daily examen — twice-daily attention to the movements of consolation and desolation within the soul — serves as both a prayer practice and a behavioral anchor.[^7] The evening examen closes the day with interior reflection and sets the conditions for the morning's mental prayer: what was I drawn toward today? what did I resist? what do I want to bring to God tomorrow? This is the interior equivalent of laying out the workout clothes the night before. The person who does it reliably is already partially in the posture of prayer before morning arrives.

Protect the time as a prior commitment, not a remainder. Allen's insight is that the smart part of us sets up conditions in advance that the rest of us will then follow. Applied to prayer, this means scheduling the prayer time before the day's obligations — not as a reward when the work is done, but as the condition that makes the work worth doing. Chautard's entire argument in The Soul of the Apostolate rests on this sequence: the interior life first, the apostolic action as its fruit.[^5]

What the techniques cannot supply

Hayes argues that psychological flexibility — the capacity to hold a commitment through competing impulses without either suppressing them or being governed by them — is what separates durable habits from techniques that plateau.[^4] In the spiritual life, the equivalent is what the tradition calls affective prayer: prayer in which the person does not merely perform an exercise but is genuinely drawn into an encounter. That quality cannot be scheduled or cued. It is, in the language of John of the Cross[^2], a gift received in the measure that the person empties the faculties of competing attachments.

This is why Chautard insists that the active apostolic worker who cuts meditation has not merely lost a productivity practice but has 'thrown down his arms at the feet of the enemy.'[^5] The meditation was not supplying information about God; it was sustaining the affective orientation of the will toward God. Without it, the will gradually loses its direction, and all the environmental design in the world will not restore what only prayer itself can give.

The behavioral techniques are for people who still have that orientation but are losing it to busyness and scheduling pressure. They are a way of protecting something that is genuinely present. For the person whose prayer life has gone genuinely cold, the techniques are still useful — but the more important first step is the act of will that says: this matters, and I am going to treat it as if it does.

The point of the trick

David Allen's workout-clothes rule is, in the end, a small act of practical wisdom: the person who lays out the clothes the night before has already made a choice that his morning self will find easier to honor. Applied to prayer, the equivalent is not complicated. Fix the chair. Fix the hour. Leave the breviary open. Start with five minutes if that is all that is honest. Use the examen to close the day with your face already turned toward morning.

The tradition is clear that mental prayer is not optional for the person who wishes to grow. What the behavioral science adds is a modest but real piece of encouragement: the difficulty of beginning is not evidence that the practice is beyond you. It is a structural feature of any practice, and structural features yield to structural arrangements. Set up the conditions tonight. Your morning self will be glad you did.

References

[^1]: David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2001).

[^2]: John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Doubleday, 1958).

[^3]: Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2010).

[^4]: Steven C. Hayes, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Oakland: New Harbinger, 2005).

[^5]: Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate (Trappist, KY: Abbey of Gethsemani, 1946).

[^6]: Alphonsus Rodriguez, The Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues, vol. 1, trans. Joseph Rickaby (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1929).

[^7]: Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, trans. George Ganss, SJ (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1992).