How much does your physical environment affect you? How much does your physical body affect you?
Sometimes, as Christians, we can focus completely on the spiritual aspect of our relationship with God. We focus on the internal mechanisms like our souls, our emotions, our thoughts. These are great things to focus on! They are the heart and breath of who we are.
But what is amazing about how human beings were created is that every part of us affects almost every other part of our being. Our emotional health affects our physical, relational, spiritual, and financial health, for example. Just think about the decisions you make when you are happy and joyful versus the decisions you make when you are angry, sad, or grumpy.
In a similar way, the physical things in our lives massively impact our internal mechanisms. How our bodies feel and operate, and what our physical space looks like affects our minds and emotions. How chaotic or balanced our daily schedules are, how clean or disorganized our houses are, how much water we drink in a day, how many hours we sleep a night, how messy our rooms are—all of these can have massive impacts on our emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being.
Psychologists have found that having a cluttered office or room can increase anxiety. They have found that people sleep better in clean rooms. People are less stressed when they are working out and eating better.
Sometimes the answer to a cloudy, enraged, grumpy, tired, or overwhelmed mind isn’t to only pray more, sometimes the answer is to clean your room, go for a run, eat a good meal, organize your schedule. God has gifted us with bodies and with a world that we live in. By stewarding those things well, we can connect deeper with ourselves, with God, and with others as well.