Habits, Grace, and Parenting | Justin Whitmel Earley

About this Episode

What if your body is the missing link between what you believe and how you actually live? On this episode of The Brainy Moms podcast, Dr. Amy and Sandy sit down with lawyer and author Justin Whitmel Earley to unpack how embodied habits—breathing, sleep, exercise, and gentle routines—can heal anxiety, transform parenting, and make faith feel lived-in instead of theoretical. Justin’s story moves from panic attacks and late-night legal grind to a practical rule of life where the nervous system and the soul finally align.

We dig into why our hearts follow our habits when our heads and bodies pull apart, and how small, physical rhythms can reset an entire household. Justin shares the moment exercise became spiritual training, the way a coach’s “one more rep” translated into patience with a toddler, and how neuroplasticity offers real hope for anyone who feels stuck. We explore breathwork without the baggage: Genesis as the origin of breath, the science of long exhales calming fight-or-flight, and simple breath prayers that pair Scripture with regulation. If box breathing triggers you, we cover compassionate alternatives and why adapting the practice matters.

Together, we challenge two common traps—ignoring the body or idolizing it—and offer a third way: garden your body. That lens reframes sleep as both sacrifice and stewardship, technology as a temptation to disembodiment, and classic worship practices as powerfully physical. Justin outlines the core themes from his new book, from breathing and eating to sex, technology, worship, and even death, showing how every chapter is really about learning to love with your whole self.

If you’re tired of white-knuckling change with willpower alone, this conversation offers gentle, doable steps to rewire your days: a two-minute breath prayer in the car, a calmer bedtime liturgy, a short walk to reset before you enter the house. Listen, take one habit, and try it this week. If it helps, share the episode with a friend, subscribe for more brain-savvy parenting, and leave a review to tell us which practice you’re starting today.

About Justin

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Read the transcript for this episode:

Sandy 2:40

Justin, we’re so glad you’re here. Why don’t you start with how does an attorney turn into a wellness guru?

Embodied Faith Versus Disembodied Belief

Justin 2:48

By messing their life up, which is what I did. I started my life as a missionary in China in my early 20s until I decided to become a lawyer. And it was in that process that I became a person whose head had a lot of good knowledge and worldview and theology. But my habits became totally assimilated to law school and lawyering. And so in my right about the age of 30, my first year of practicing law, I collapsed into terrible mental unhealth, like anxiety, panic attacks, even at one really bad point, some suicidal thoughts. And I just became a person who in my head, I had this, you know, gospel of peace that I was preaching to myself, but in my body, I was a total wreck of anxiety. And that was the time in my life where I realized that everything was not head knowledge. You know, I’m I’m a lawyer and a reader and a writer, and I’ve always loved the life of the mind. But I realized that there’s a, there’s just a big disconnect, that everything that I knew in my head wasn’t necessarily trickling down to my body. And um, two important things in my life have happened since then. First, I started to realize how important habit was. Um I had all the spiritual disciplines of a modern lawyer. So I did my devotions in my morning email. I fasted because I worked through lunch. Um, I held vigils because I stayed up, you know, till wee hours of the morning working on law projects and waking up early. I mean, my my my body became attuned to legal rhythms and it is uh unhealthy, which is in my profession has like high above the average of anxiety, depression, and suicide and drug and divorce and just all the problems in lawyering are worse than in the general population. And I realized a lot of that was because of I I assimilated to the habits of it. So the first thing I realized was when your head goes one way and your habits go the other, your heart tends to follow the habits. And then, and this was more recent. The second thing I realized, and it’s been a decade of recovering from this, and praise God, you know, I’ve recovered, but but it took a long time. And I think this the second half of that journey was realizing how embodied habit is. Like when I when I talk about spiritual disciplines, um, they function a lot like exercise or like breathing or like sleep. They’re things that you do with your body. And I started to realize that my body was much more spiritual than I thought, and that my spiritual disciplines were much more physical than I thought. And the body teaches the soul is really an examination of that, of why our physical habits are so spiritual and why our spiritual habits are so physical.Dr. Amy 5:30

Yeah, I I love that you had kind of this aha moment where it was all integrated. I want to read a quote from your book and then just have you speak a little bit deeper into that. Um, okay, so you said, um, what if you can’t think your way out of a problem you didn’t think yourself into? What if our real lives are products not just of what our heads think, but what of our of but of what our bodies do? And both are equally spiritual. What if we’re not just products of top-down thinking, but also of bottom-up habit? And this part I love. What if falling out of love with an idol and into love with God is in no small part a project of a project of embodied habits that lead the heart? In other words, what if the body can teach the soul? So beautiful.Justin 6:17

Oh, thank you. Um Yeah, this is I think this has been the real thing that the Lord has worked on me on in the past 10 years. That falling in love with the right things is a matter of embodied habit as much as it is a matter of knowing the truth about those things. And I think family is actually a great example of that. I mean, a big struggle in my life with my children and wife was that here are the people I love the most that often get the worst of me. And it’s not because I don’t know in my head that I don’t love them, it’s because I fall into really unhealthy embodied patterns around them. And some of this is, you know, people might have because of um trauma in their past or bad. Um, you know, my wife and my kids are some of the people I love the most, but often get the worst of me. And a lot of this is about embodied habit. It’s not, it’s not that I don’t love them, right? So when I think about you can’t think your way out of a pattern that you didn’t think your way into. I’ve never looked at my boys and thought, you know what, actually, I don’t think that I love them, but I practice my way into frustration with them often. Um, and this is in one of my books, Habits of the Household, I think a lot about the embodied rhythms of parenting. And a lot of this came from a bedtime gone wrong where I’m snapping at my boys just, you know, through the evening and realizing this is what I do over and over all the time. I yell them to bed. And I, of course, I love them. But why am I in this, this, this pattern? And one of the things that I did, because my pastor recommended it, to write that ship was practicing a bedtime liturgy with them where I asked them some questions and we did some prayers together. And I remember realizing at the time that it wasn’t the circumstances of their behavior that changed. Um, not at all. It was me that had changed. By practicing a new rhythm, I had practiced myself out of the stress responses that I used to have and into more kind, more loving. I even I’d even say more gospel responses. But um, but it wasn’t ahead. I used to try to think myself out of these problems. Now I think, okay, what is the the habit that could help walk me towards the kinds of person that I want to be?

Parenting Patterns And Bedtime Friction

Dr. Amy 8:29

Yeah. So I actually tell a story in my book that I’m finishing right now, um, also of how um our bedtimes used to be, we have three boys, um, used to be so stressful. And it would start as my husband saying, Boys go to sleep and gradually getting louder, boys go to sleep, boys get us go to sleep, until it would end up with me hanging on his arm to keep him from trying to spank one of them, right? Where they at that point were so emotionally dysregulated because of all of the yelling and screaming. Um, and we didn’t know, my boys are all adults now, we didn’t know at the time, we didn’t understand at the time um how that emotion dysregulation is actually in the body, right? Like that sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight response that we were creating by getting angrier and angrier and angrier because our kids would not go to sleep, that we were perpetuating them not being able to go to sleep. Right.Justin 9:34

Yes. And this, I think you said something that’s been really important to me, that that feeling or response was actually in the body. I think one of the things that researching and writing the body teaches the soul did for me was help me get comfortable with the reality that feelings are embodied things, um, and and not feeling like that’s an unspiritual thing to say. Because I I think one of the reasons I came to be the person that collapsed in my early 30s was because I had a misconception of what a human soul is. I I thought that living the spiritual life was, by definition, uh not really an embodied thing. That the body was the part of us that kind of dragged us down into ordinary, maybe, maybe bad, unspiritual stuff. And I came to realize that’s actually um a very common way of thinking, and it’s called a heresy. It’s called the heresy of Gnosticism. Like we have a lot of good philosophy on this, and a lot of the New Testament was written against this idea that matters bad, spiritual realms good, that it’s just not a biblical conception. But a lot of us um have followed cultural waters into a form of Gnosticism that convinces us that really to if you’re really spiritual, you ignore the body. And fortunately, it’s just it’s just wrong. I mean, it’s um it’s it’s just blatantly wrong now. There’s another side of that that people in our modern moment also struggle with, and that would it was just the flip side of saying if you’re really smart, then you understand that everything’s about the body and you ignore all things that are not empirically demonstrated by things that matter and science can test. And that I would call that idolizing the body. So you have these two great errors that happen all the time. You either ignore the body, I was guilty of that, or you idolize it. And actually, I dabbled in this in my mental health crisis when I started to wonder maybe my brain is just dopamine. Like maybe I’m just stuck in this mind with the chemicals that I have, and this is all I get. Um, I had no idea that there’s there’s practices, there’s rhythms, there’s spirituality that can help your brain chemicals. Um, so I I try to, one of the big points in the book that I’m trying to convince people of is don’t ignore your body. You’re not, don’t try to be more spiritual than God. He made you with a body, he loves it, it matters. A lot of the life that he’s called you to live comes out of paying attention to it and caring from it. But don’t idolize it either. There’s a lot more to life than just matter. And so instead, we have this third option of imaging God through the body. And that is the qu that’s asking the question of if God is love and we are the physical image of God, how can we use our bodies to love God and neighbor in the world? And that’s the fundamental question of the body, not what does it look like, but how can it love?Sandy 12:27

What I love about everything you’ve shared so far, Justin, it’s that you know, as much as we want to uh help and you know guide people through and to really listen to their bodies, right? Um, most of us fall into the trap of our our body actually dictating, oh no, it’s time now you need to pay attention.Justin 12:47

Right, right. I mean, my body definitely got my attention eventually. Right.Sandy 12:51

Um so is there any tips or um things that you think would have been helpful to you prior to your crisis where maybe like some little things along the way would have maybe helped guide you to this new place that you’re at in terms of how to think about the body and the soul and building habits that strengthen that connection.

Feelings Live In The Body

Justin 13:13

Yes. Yes. Um a lot of this wisdom I think could be summarized as having much more awareness of my body. And I think two things have really helped there. Um, exercise, which I really didn’t think was spiritual at first. I th I mean I thought it was good and it was a good idea, and generally, you know, good practice. But I kind of looked at exercise as like if you get too into it, you’re probably just like running in this lane of vanity. Um but I realized that by starting to exercise, and I started to seriously exercise about seven years ago when I was 34. I was still like kind of coming out of my crisis, and so it wasn’t in emergency mode, but I still wasn’t very healthy. And I started to exercise, and two things happened. I started to become much more aware of my body because I started, you know, exercise forces you to think about how it feels. Either you’re tired or you’re sore, like, oh, I feel different because I exercised yesterday. Um and it also gave me spiritual awareness. Um, I tell this story in the exercise chapter, but one of the things that happened to me was there was a workout, particularly, where my coach forced me to keep going, even though I was ready to quit. And it was a very, very stressful workout because I wanted to stop. And he was like, no, just pick up the bar one more time. And he kept saying, one more, one more. And I remember collapsing at the end of this workout, just exhausted, and but thinking, oh wow, I thought I’d hit the wall. And I guess there’s a lot more beyond the wall than I thought. And then the next morning, my son knocked over his sippy cup and I pick it up, and my legs are so sore from this workout the day before, and I put it on his table and he knocks it over again, like almost to spite me, right? And I get in that parenting headset of like, you’re, you’re, you’re doing this on purpose. Like he’s a toddler, right? And I’m like, you’re doing this on purpose. You’re trying. And I’m about to, you know, pop off and start yelling at a toddler when I hear this voice in the back of my mind saying, just pick it up, pick it up. And I was like, is my gym coach here? Like, who’s telling me to do this? And I realized, you know, the spirit is prompting me to connect these two things. When I thought the end of my body’s ability to exercise had come, I realized there was actually still more gas in the tank. And you get healthy by pushing beyond your point of comfort. Likewise, in your parenting life or your spiritual life, the place of growth is the place where you think, I don’t have any more patience. I’m done. Like I’m done with this kid. I’m not going to be nice anymore. And yet the Lord is saying, My grace is sufficient for you. Um, I have more, I have patience by virtue of the spirit. And I have more than you have, and I want to give it to you. And I realized there’s this great similarity in our spiritual life that we learn from our embodied life that we not only can we do more than we think we can do, but it’s precisely by undergoing the difficulty of that that we become sanctified. And suffering in exercise is very much like sanctification in real life. And so there’s these connections that I started to make that are new to me, but I’m sure God is smiling like the good father that He is and saying, Isn’t it fun that you’re realizing I designed it like that? Um and and exercise just got me to pay so much attention to my body. The the other one I would say is is breathing really got me to pay attention to my body. But that was kind of a long story, so I’ll pause in case there are any questions on that before we talk about breathing, maybe.Dr. Amy 16:36

I actually wanted to segue into breathing. Oh, good. Um, because I yeah, I think that was a section of your book that resonated with me probably the most. Um so, you know, as a psychologist and counselor, I teach everyone um the importance of breathing exercises to press the brakes on fight or flight. Yes. Right. And part of that conversation is having to reassure Christian clients that this is not an anti-Christian practice.Justin 17:09

That was me, Amy. That was a good thing. Yeah, and you address this, right?

Ignore The Body Or Idolize It

Dr. Amy 17:12

Like I have to say, okay, I’m gonna teach you an exercise right now. I’m gonna teach you, you know, this technique. And I need you to understand that this is God honoring, right? This is not an Eastern practice or a Buddhist practice. This is not anti-Christian at all. Right. And and you actually see people’s countenance change. You actually see their shoulders sort of relaxed, right? Because when you first say, okay, I’m gonna teach you this breathing and grounding exercise, right? People are they bristle, right? Because they’ve been programmed, probably partially by social media, right? Um, that and it’s a legalistic way of thinking. And I love in your book how in at the end of every chapter you have this math equation, right? That grace is greater than legalism. As you recap all of these ideas, I love that. But I would I would love for you to talk about why breath work um is important, b, why it’s not anti-Christian. And honestly, the theological support for it starting in Genesis. I loved how you oh, wonderful.Justin 18:21

My favorite my favorite thing to talk about. This this I wanted to start the book with the brain, because I thought the center, the foundation of all human life is you know that we are rational animals. That’s you know Aristotle. Like we we think. And um, I have to credit my editor, Paul Pastor, with saying, just I don’t think it starts there. I think it starts with breath. And again, I’m thinking exactly what you said, Amy, that it’s a little Eastern, that’s a little weird, um, woo-woo, psycho babble, all the things. Because during my anxiety period, people had told me you need to focus on your breathing. And I’m like, y’all, I’ve got a much bigger problem than that. You know, I just thought like, maybe breathing helps a little. But it was my editor pushing me to think about breath that sent me to Genesis, where you see breath as the foundation of the spiritual life. And this is Genesis 2.7, where it’s God says that he created Adam out of the dust and then breathed the spirit of life into him, and a living soul was born. And this was so striking to me, even though I’ve read Genesis 2 many, many times, I had never really appreciated the three things that are going on there. That God does take dust. Again, we are don’t ignore the body. We are matter, right? So we need to pay attention to what the dust is. But then he breathes into it the spirit of life. That’s the spiritual realm, encountering the physical realm. And a soul, that’s you and me and everybody listening, a soul, a human being, is a divine combination of the spiritual and the physical. But the metaphor for that, of course, is breath, right? Breath is where we become not just matter. And as I started to read about this, let’s just jump to a scientific perspective, I started to realize all the ways that verse is the fundamental truth of everything that we know about the body. I mean, we are breath, right? The the cause of death is always lack of oxygen, finally, right? And blunt trauma might have started the process, or the body, you know, a heart attack might have started the process. But the reason we die is because of lack of oxygen to our tissue. Like we need breath to live. And then I learned, as I’m sure Amy and Sandy, you all well know, and I’m sure talk about a lot on this podcast, how how breathing is the connection between our upper brain and our lower brain. I mean, it is the it is the like the body’s escape hatch. You said, you know, to interrupt the fight or flight, right? It’s the one vital life function that we can take out of the subconscious and bring it into the conscious and control our breath. And so I’m reading all these books about how breath control is central to sort of regulating your lower brain and allowing your front prefrontal cortex to sort of take control again. And I’m I’m realizing, oh my gosh, there are so many wonderful connections here. Why did we let breath work become something that we thought was, I don’t know, Eastern or psycho-babical? We God invented it. Like this is, I mean, all people, Francis Schaeffer was famous for saying all truth is God’s truth, right? Um, of course, people stumble onto the wisdom of breathing. Like it’s it’s it’s hidden in plain sight. But we, I think as Christians, should be holding it up high and saying this is kind of at the essence of what it means to be a spiritual creature. I mean, to to pray is to breathe on purpose, right? It’s to breathe in a certain way and use it to pass your vocal cords and to say certain things. There’s so much about breathing that’s spiritual, and I think a huge practice everybody should be uh incorporating into their spiritual life is breathing as just a physical exercise, and breath prayers as a spiritual way of doing that physical exercise.Dr. Amy 22:00

So, for our listeners who have not heard of breath prayers, walk us through what that looks like and sounds like.

Exercise As Spiritual Formation

Justin 22:05

It can be a lot of different methods, but I’ll just give you my favorite. My favorite way to do breath prayers is to combine it with box breathing. So, box breathing is, as I’m sure many people know, I’ll just recap it. You’re tracing the box in my mind. I often do it with my hand to actually sort of get my body even more involved. I’ll trace the box on my leg, but one side of the box you’re going to breathe in for four seconds, or more if you can do it. But then what the top of the box you’re going to hold and for four seconds, then the the down line you’re going to breathe out for four seconds, then you’re going to hold again, and you just follow the box equal times for in, hold, out, hold. It’s a wonderful way to calm down. It’s a wonderful way to do a breath exercise that just gives all kinds of mental and physical health. But what I really like to do, Amy, is to combine that with a Bible verse in Psalm 23, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want is the my favorite one. It’s what I go to almost daily as a small breathwork meditative practice. It’s often in the car I do it, like on the way to work, because I’m probably freaking about something, freaking out about something that’s about to happen at work. And I think I could podcast, I could listen to music, but I could also do breath prayers. And breath prayers are wonderful on car rides. I love it. So I trace that box and breathe in, the Lord is my shepherd, hold, breathe out, I shall not want, hold. And I could talk about this for hours, and I’d love to, but I will sum it up, Amy, by saying this is one of the practices that has helped me become a person that does not just know that God loves him like a shepherd, but to feel it too, to intuit it in my body. And that’s what we mean when we say to feel it. Many of us know the right things about God. In fact, uncomfortably, even the demons know things about God. They know that He’s one. And yet what? They shudder. How we respond to the truth is a fundamental fact about us. And when we have disintegrated our bodies so much that we look at our spouse or our children or at God, people who we know love us and we’re called to love, and we experience, you know, anxiety or anger or frustration, that should key us into the fact that, oh, something is dysregulated. My knowledge does not match my feeling. And a lot of what I argue in the Body Teaches of the Soul is that God doesn’t want that to be like that either. That’s called disintegration. That’s the opposite of shalom in the Bible. Shalom is the word for peace, but it’s also the Hebrew word connotes all this integration, complex things coming together in a beautiful harmony that we call peace. We should be gardening our bodies towards peace and love. And that takes breathing, amongst other things, sleeping and exercise and eating and all that, but it does take breathing.Sandy 25:00

Now you guys both talk about breathing like it’s simple. It is not simple. I was reading your book and then I was like, I will try it again. But I feel like I’m gonna hyperventilate. I do the box breathing. So now I have you both here talking about breath work. Let’s talk about why that is and how do you get over that?Dr. Amy 25:23

I’m so glad you brought that up because I was actually going to bring, I was going to bring up something similar. So um some people cannot do box breathing because the act of holding the breath activates their sympathetic nervous system. And so finding breath work that works for you is part of the process. And so those people then just need to do a simple breath in and a very long exhale. That has the same parasympathetic nervous system response, um, that act of the longer exhale and a shorter inhale. Because most of the time you have this, you hear this, take a deep breath. Well, no, it’s not actually the inhale. In fact, the inhale can speed up our heart rate.Justin 26:08

Yeah, it’s the long exhale, right? Yeah.Dr. Amy 26:10

It’s the long exhale. So holding the breath for seven, eight breathing, box breathing, sometimes does ramp up that fight or flight response in some people. And it sounds like that might be what was happening with you, Sandy. And so you just need to adapt yours. And breath prayer can be as simple as, like Justin was saying, he’s combining that with box breathing, which is a separate technique. Um, and very cool, by the way. And I love how you talk about tracing it on your leg. When you activate multiple parts of the brain, that actually helps pull us out of fight or flight. Right, right, right. But you activate the language center, you activate the cerebellum, which is the responsible for movement. And so that’s hitting it from multiple sides. And so for a lot of people, that’s super effective. But for you, Sandy, just simply try. If you want to use um, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, just inhale in, the Lord is my shepherd, exhale, I shall not want, making that a longer exhale than inhale. Try that.Justin 27:10

Do you am I getting the name right, Amy? Um, the physiological sigh. Do you ever come across that? That’s a wonderful one too. Just a deep breath in with a sharp extra at the top and then slow breathe out. I think again, a lot of it is it just about that slow breathe out, right?

Breathwork, Theology, And Calm

Dr. Amy 27:27

It is. It is. And um, that is one that I actually will do with clients. Hey, you know what? I I think I need to reset. You want to do that with me? We’re just gonna do um, we’re just gonna I I I call it the sigh, but it is. And you get a sometimes you get a spontaneous um additional exhale with that that’s beautiful.Justin 27:52

Yeah, yeah.Dr. Amy 27:53

Like you just get a spontaneous exhale.Justin 27:56

I one of the things I I like to note here is the the gardening analogy for me, uh i.e. what I like to say, garden your body, is extraordinarily helpful to both the thesis of what I’m talking about, but also the nuance of what Sandy’s bringing in. Because not all plots of garden are the same. Um and I think gardening the body is really helpful because one, for people who have been ignoring the body like me, it gets you to say, this is your plot of garden. This is your body to steward. You’re supposed to honor God with it. Um, you take care of your garden. But for people who have been idolizing the body, um, it reminds you that gardening is not an autonomous process. Like you are not in complete control. There is weather and blight and drought and uh rocky soil and better soil and worse soil. And it reminds you that whatever you think about your health and whatever you’re trying, you have a limited agency and you’re working in connection with two things, the land, the actual body that you have, and your your creator who who, you know, there’s a lot we can’t control here. And I think it helps people when they think about how do we spiritually cultivate our bodies. It gives us a little bit of freedom to remind ourselves that, yeah, I have a sickness that no one else has. It’s very rare. My plot of garden is different, but I do have agency over it. Or my body is different in this way. No one can, you know, we are very diverse plots, and but none of us gets out of being the gardener of that plot. We’re all called to say, uh, steward what you have and make it flourish as best you can. Um and the wonderful thing is that it’s as wonderful for us as it is for anybody, because to honor the body God gave you is I think one of the most fulfilling and wonderful feelings in the world.Sandy 29:55

It’s so hard for moms, though, don’t you think? I’m I feel like sometimes from a mom, from a nurturing perspective, like in my brain, I’m thinking, uh, this is all great, but again, you almost have to give yourself permission to take care of yourself too, to put yourself in front of the lines.

Breath Prayers And Box Breathing

Justin 30:13

I I told um Lauren, my wife, uh when when I was wanted to write this, I was like, I can’t do this right if you don’t write some end notes to the chapters. And fortunately, she agreed. Every other chapter, there’s a um note from Lauren at the end, which is titled Is it from the female perspective, but is it’s as much from the mothering perspective as it is from the female perspective. Because when I write a chapter on sleep, for example, and talk about the health benefits of sleep, any parent, particularly a mother, is going to be like, but what about all the times where like I’m up through the night? And you know, and she I would commend anybody to read The Body Teaches of the Soul simply for Lauren’s excerpts. But but just for that one, for example, Sandy, I think there’s there’s so there’s so much good spirituality and good health to realizing that you are a limited human being. You are a limited creature, you’re not the creator, which means that you, like a young child, sometimes you just need to go to bed and you need to rest and you need a nap. And that’s the most spiritual thing you can do to embrace your limits. And yet, we also have this wonderful example of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane staying up all night for the ones that he loves, us, right? He loses sleep because he sacrifices for us. And there’s this other side of life that when it is a good call, for example, caring for your children, keeping them alive, emergency responders, nurses working through the night, there are times where it is so good to forego sleep for other people. It’s one of the most holy things you can do. Um, both of those are incredibly holy and sanctifying things. But often we become people who never sleep because of an external pressure to hold the world up, and that’s not ours. And I think all of these things can be when people take it seriously, you can really nuance them to see what God has for you in your stage with your particular body. And that’s where the really wonderful things start to happen. Because this is not just about life hacking your way to the most healthy, trendy version of all the wellness spiritual trends. It’s just not. It’s just it’s saying though it’s actually much more than that. You were made with something incredibly precious. It’s called the image of God. It’s your body. And you, only you can steward that. What a high call. And it’s a complicated call, very complicated, particularly during mothering. But Lauren’s notes really help with that.Dr. Amy 32:41

Yeah, I love. I actually wrote this quote down to share. Um, you say foregoing sleep for someone we love is a beautiful and Christ-like thing to do. And I but you also give that caveat, right? Like that there is this balance between selflishness and selfishness, right? That that when we become parents, like we have to be willing to sacrifice for our child who is sick or struggling to fall asleep. But also not to the exclusion of caring for the body that God has given us. We have to care for our garden too, right?Justin 33:15

Yes. I mean, and and I I I think I think uh the you know, put on your mask first in order to help others is, you know, is kind of helpful, but it’s trendy to the point of losing the meeting. What what I really like to think of the way I really like to summarize this is saying you are called to image God in your body. God is love. I said this earlier, I just want to harp on it. That means the goal of your body is not how can you look. The goal is your of your body is how can you love? What how can you steward it to love others well? And if you’re like me, you know, working around the clock and skipping meals and not working out and and reading theology and contracts and all that stuff is actually a way to not, I mean, it’s not a way to love your family because it will drive you into an anxiety crash. And it’s hard to be a loving, patient, present father when you are having constant panic attacks, insomnia, and suicidal thoughts. Um, it I realized that to steward my body was to image God in it. I am far more equipped to love my wife and my children now. That’s why I exercise. You know, I I could go home earlier. I could be home an extra hour with them every day. But they need a really good version of me so I work out. Um, you know, and we we I could make my kids super happy just by eating things, any anything, whatever we wanted around the house. But we eat carefully because we know that eating creates all kinds of desires and um creates all kinds of health impacts. And I want to love them well and I want to love them long, even though my life might be taken from me at any moment. Again, this is a plot of garden that God is in final control of. But I will steward it towards love. As it turns out, a lot of these things also do help it look better. But the point is love.

Adapting Breathing For Regulation

Sandy 35:03

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So I want to transition a little bit. Um, you know, Sandy and I work in the world of neuroplasticity. Um I’m a clinical researcher in neuroplasticity. And so um I loved uh that you say neuroplasticity is God’s grace built into the brain. Talk a little bit about that and what that means.

Garden Your Body, Steward Your Limits

Justin 37:16

I yeah, I mean, I was just so scared in the middle of my anxiety crisis. This is when I came to idolize the body, as I mentioned, thinking maybe it’s true after all that I’m just stuck with my the brain chemicals that I have. And I I think this happens to people in mental crisis. Um it happens to people with trauma, it happens to people with bad patterns, addictions, and I’ve had a lot of these. Um you you get fatalistic about, oh, I’m not in control. Like I’m not driving the ship. And I’m stuck in this body that is rebelling against me. And it’s I I just remember imagining it like this is a one-way track. And because I knew nothing about neuroplasticity at the time, and I also um I think was sinning by by by forgetting that grace is actually real. The wonderful thing about the spiritual realm and the physical realm is that they’re changeable and that God is in control of them. And this is so very important. When I started to realize that the plot of my garden, my body, was far more malleable than I ever knew. Very changeable. In fact, though I couldn’t think my way out of the problems because I didn’t think my way into them, right? I did practice my way there and I could I could practice my way out. And I just, it was both experience and learning of realizing, oh my goodness, I’m not stuck. The brain is so plastic, it is so shapable. And then I just started to realize, you know, this is how the Bible has always talked about you. This is how Christianity always talks about you. You can be made new. Your body wants to regenerate, it wants to adapt to new patterns. Um, but it it will do that, right? It will adapt to patterns. So when you run it in the bad patterns, they go deeper and deeper and deeper. But when you run it in new patterns, you know, it’s like a wagon wheel rut. It starts very shallow, then it gets a little deeper, and then you keep running those patterns, and they get they get quite hard to get out of. I always thought that was just messaging for addiction. Um, but it turns out it’s also about virtue, too. Like you can dig deep wagon wheel ruts in virtues of being patients, of ways that you respond to your kid that you’re like, well, I guess you know, I am really frustrated, but I just always respond like that because that’s what I’ve been practicing. That’s that’s what we call virtue. You know, that’s a good thing where you’re acting out of the good, even when you feel the bad or dysregulated. So you all will be able to probably explain the science of neuroplasticity more than me, but I see it as a big, bright, flashing biological, theological sign that we were made for change. Grace is built into the system. And most importantly, anybody listening, I will tell you this with all courage and conviction: you are not stuck. You’re not stuck with the patterns you have, you’re not stuck with the mental health you have, you’re not stuck with the addiction that you have. God has made you so that biologically and theologically, physically and spiritually, you can change. That is great news for us.Dr. Amy 40:23

Yeah, preach. Yeah, so what I love about it is um it’s not just our thought patterns that we can change, right? And Paul teaches us that all the time. We need to constantly be renewing our mind. But you talk about habits. And that is using the phenomenon of neuroplasticity, right? It’s by creating new neural pathways, right? And our old our old pathways are more efficient, and we will default back unless we’re very intentional about practicing the new ones again and again and again and again so that they become more efficient than the old ones. And so I think that’s the good news for parents to know, yeah, I screwed up bedtime every night for several years until I learned maybe I should be doing it differently. So I created a new habit with this new knowledge and did that again and again and again.Justin 41:23

Yes.Dr. Amy 41:24

And that is the gift of grace, too. Right? Like that God says to us, You can do this differently. I’m going to love you no matter what. Here, try this.Justin 41:38

You know, one of the best summaries of this, I think, is Romans 12, 1 and 2, because there’s so much culminating in this verse. One, it’s that idea, I’ll love you the same. Um, I say over and over the book, habits won’t change God’s love for you. But God’s love for you should change your habits. And this is the idea of Romans 12.1. Therefore, in light of God’s mercies, so we’re not doing, we’re not renewing our lives or renewing our minds in order to get God to be merciful to us. He has been merciful. In light of that, it says, offer your bodies as living sacrifices. And I love that suddenly the body comes into the picture. That’s that is the word for an actual body there. It’s not the word that Paul sometimes uses flesh, which is a more metaphorical understanding of our sinful nature. He’s talking about actually offering our bodies up to God. And then that and then the first gets even more famous after that. Almost everybody knows this part. Don’t be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And what I love there is that it acknowledges that we’re always being formed. It’s either we’re being conformed to the bad patterns that are around us and that we participate in, or we’re being transformed in our renewed understanding of those. And in that verse, you have, I think, almost everything you need to know about a conversation like this. That one, you can be transformed and you need to learn new patterns. And that is an embodied thing. You need to be offering your body as a living sacrifice. And why do we do that? Not because we’re gonna make God love us more, but because he already loves us so much. And I think you put those two things together and you get kind of the heart of Christianity that it’s all for love. It’s all motivated by what God did, not what we can do. And fortunately, it’s not up to us, but it is a response that we give. So that’s what I mean when I say habits won’t change God’s love for you, but God’s love for you should change your habits. They are very spiritual things, and they’re also very embodied things. And I want everybody to think about them that way because that’s where the good life is. It is where God meant for you to live.Dr. Amy 43:45

So um we kind of jumped into the middle of your most recent book. Um, for our listeners, can you give us a quick overview of all of the areas that you actually teach about in this book?

Sacrifice, Sleep, And Motherhood

Justin 43:58

Yes. Um I go through kind of the body breathing, thinking, eating, sleeping, and then sickness. And this part’s really important. And right in the middle of the book, there’s a there’s a chapter on all the ways that we’re broken, all the ways that our body doesn’t work. And you and I don’t think you understand the body until you realize that it’s also fallen, also broken, it’s also dying. So that chapter is really important. But after sickness, it goes to exercise, sex, and then technology worship and death. Sex is a really important chapter for reasons that will be obvious to everybody. Technology is really about the temptations of disembodiment. Um, worship was about all that I learned that about how important it is for our physical selves to worship, why classic spiritual disciplines involve things like hands and knees and and voices singing together. And then death, I would say pair that with the sickness chapter, right in the middle and right at the end, are some really blunt reminders that uh we are dying. And that’s worth lamenting. That’s not how God made us to uh to be, but resurrection is in the most important part of our faith that is talked about, probably the least. The theology of the way God loves the body so much that he made us with one, he redeemed us by the death of his son’s body, and he’s gonna resurrect us to new bodies. That end piece really changes the way you think about your body because you realize wait, this whole project is material. Like God loves matter, he loves bodies so much so that he’s gonna resurrect us to new ones and give us ones that never break and always work. And uh that one is the one that sounds so much like a fairy tale that people don’t like to talk about it. And so that whole chapter is about it.Dr. Amy 45:48

So, as a parent, um wanting to hear more from you and your um advice and wisdom, where would you recommend a parent would start out of all of the resources and books that you have?Justin 46:02

Well, I think this one is a great place to start if you want to think about everything we talked about in this conversation. Um if you want to dive into how does this all apply to parenting, my book, Habits of the Household, is a great place to jump in. But I’ve written, ever since I had that crisis that I told you about and have started writing, I’ve written books on habits and different areas of life. And it starts with the common rule, which is just about the spiritual disciplines and how to embrace them in ordinary life, a lot about technology and spiritual disciplines, and then habits of the household, which is about parenting, and then made for people, which is about habits and rhythms of friendship and community. And then most recently the body teaches the soul, which is the embodied view of it. I do think this is my most developed work so far because I’ve just been learning a lot. And so I think if you if you want to just get started anywhere, start with the body teaches the soul, because it’ll kind of point you to all these areas of habit and spiritual discipline.Dr. Amy 46:58

Love it. Is there anything you want to leave our listeners with that you did not get to talk about today?Justin 47:03

Well, I would love to hear from you and f and you know have you follow along. So Justinwitmorearly.com, you can join my email list there. Or you can follow me on Instagram where I post a lot of reels on stuff like this. So short form is Instagram, but long form is my email list, and I would just I would love to have people following along.Dr. Amy 47:21

Fantastic. We will put links uh to your social media and your website and your books in the show notes uh to make it easy for our listeners to find. Justin, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule and day to be with us, to bless our listeners uh with your wisdom in this conversation. We really enjoyed this hour with you.Justin 47:42

No, you’re so welcome. And thank you for having me. And thanks everybody for listening. It’s been a wonderful conversation.Dr. Amy 47:49

So, listeners, thank you for being with us today. Uh, remember, if you want more from us, sign up for our monthly newsletter at the brainymoms.com. You can find us on social media at the Brainy Moms. Be sure to hop over to TikTok to find more from Sandy at the Brain Trainer Lady. Uh look, that’s all we have for you today. We hope that you feel a little bit smarter after spending this hour with us. We’ll catch you next time.