I was 30 years old when my mental breakdown happened. In retrospect, I’m thankful it was as early as it was.
I was a missionary in China in my 20s, but I felt called to make a pivot and went to law school. So I was 30 years old with a wife, two young sons, and a new job as a corporate lawyer in a big fancy law firm when it all fell apart.
It was everything that’s now typical of modern America. Panic attacks, insomnia, and suicidal thoughts that eventually led me to be unable to sleep unless I took sleeping pills or had a few drinks. The point is, the missionary had become converted to the nervous medicating lawyer. I was left to wrestle with why.
10 years later: A different life through different habits
I’m now 40. I run my own business law firm, write books on habits and spiritual disciplines, and have four boys. My life is not less complicated or stressful, but I am so much healthier—mentally, physically, and spiritually—than I was 10 years ago.
What’s the difference? Habits. Primarily, my technology habits. But also, all the spiritual and physical disciplines that have now come to replace my unhealthy technology habits.
As a lawyer, husband, father, and author, I cannot overemphasize the spiritual seriousness of getting control of your technology habits. But for pastors, I think this is almost infinitely more important.
Here are five reasons why, and five habits to help you get started:
1. Spiritual formation: Who’s really discipling you?
We cannot disciple others unless we ourselves are being discipled. A mentor once told me that a follower’s greatest need is their leader’s personal holiness. That has forever stuck with me.
Pastors have a high call to make sure they can truly say: “Follow me as I follow Christ.” The problem now is that most of us are discipled by our phones.
I found this to be true early in my law career. I unconsciously developed the habit of scrolling my emails and news every morning. I never meant to put my identity in work, but where your eyes go there your love goes, and I began to be discipled by Twitter and my inbox.
Habit to try: Scripture before phone. For the last 10 years, I’ve made a rule that I’m not allowed to open my phone until after I’ve spent some time in Scripture. I’ve never been freer.
Habits lead the heart. And when your head goes one way but your technology habits go another, your heart will follow the habit.
2. Mental health: The brain wasn’t built for the internet
The human brain wasn’t meant to know all the problems of the world. When we spend most of our days scrolling the world’s problems, the recent tragedies, and the infinite insults that follow on social media, we’re doing something more than just overwhelming our neural capacity. We’re playing God.
We assume we can be omniscient and know everything, omnipresent and communicate with all our people about it at once, and even omnipotent in trying to fix it all. No wonder our mental health falls apart!
We’re limited creatures, meant to worship God—not be Him. In the age of the internet, genuine humility means admitting you cannot save the world, but you can pray. You can talk with your congregation in person. You can take local action.
Pastors have an incredible opportunity to set an example for this. I believe in Karl Barth’s suggestion that we preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. But social media is different than the news.
Habit to try: Don’t browse news sites. Don’t scroll current events on social media. You’ll be tempted to preach to the internet instead of to your own people. Select one to three news sites you trust for fact-based reporting on current events and subscribe to their emails.
Scanning headlines is usually enough. You might decide to glance at social media just enough to know what your people are wrestling with. But both of the above can be 15 minutes a day, max.
Spend most of your time reading old books, the Scriptures, and writing. That’s not just what our brains need to stay mentally healthy; it’s also the kind of thinking the world needs right now.
3. Embodied community: Fighting the epidemic of loneliness
One of the epidemics facing the modern West is the epidemic of loneliness. We’re actually dying younger because of the lack of embodied connection. What’s more, our families are constantly around each other but not present to each other because of screens.
This was a huge problem for me in my early 30s. I constantly brought my work home and multitasked around the family, which meant I wasn’t actually doing good work.
But even worse, I was missing out on the embodied relationships God made me for. And even worse than that, I was training my children that this is what life is like.
Habit to try: My life changed when I started turning my phone off for at least an hour each evening around my family. Not just because it broke the addiction. It was actually much more—it planted a seed of embodied presence that has grown.
We now have rules around the house of where screens can go (the dinner table and bedrooms are “no zones,” for example) and a culture of savoring embodied conversation has replaced constant scrolling.
In a technological age, one of the great witnesses of the church will be to cultivate embodied community. That can start with pastors and trickle down.
4. Physical health: Your body is a spiritual calling
The disembodied nature of technology takes a serious toll on our physical health. This was a major problem for me as a young lawyer. I wasn’t only sacrificing my mental health for the job, but my physical health was starting to go with it.
What I didn’t see coming was that when you sacrifice your body, you sacrifice your family as well, because your wife and kids need your mental and physical well-being.
I used to think working out or eating well was fundamentally a vanity project of idolizing the body. But now I see I was ignoring the body God gave me and calls me to steward (1 Cor. 6:20). And that led to consequences of not being able to fulfill my call to love my family and do good work.
This was such a freeing realization for me that I started a whole book project about it called The Body Teaches the Soul. God made your body and called it good. He has redeemed you by the body of his Son. He is going to resurrect you to a new body. Apparently, He thinks they matter!
As C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God.” Don’t ignore or idolize your physical body. Rather, steward it as a way to love others.
Habit to try: Get one exercise routine into your life. It could be as simple as walking outside a few days a week, as intense as joining a CrossFit gym, or anywhere in between. And do it with the understanding that caring for your physical body is caring for your spiritual soul, because God made you a holistic union of both. It’s hard to love your family or church well if you’re not honoring God in your body.
Grace-filled habits that change everything
How we live is the greatest sermon we’ll ever preach. How you use your phone (or don’t) is at the center of so much of your physicality and spirituality. Take it seriously, but don’t take it legalistically.
Remember, the guy writing this is the one who messed it up so badly that he had a mental health breakdown. Praise God, grace abounds. I changed, and so can you.
None of these technology habits will change God’s love for you. But God’s love for you should definitely change your technology habits.
This story originally appeared at Lifeway Research.
