A Healthy Writer – Caring for Your Body Is Caring for Your Pen
If I don’t care for my body, writing becomes much more difficult. The outside of the body always affects the inside. What happens to your body works its way into your heart and mind. And that means being a “healthy writer” involves more than intellectual vigor and creativity. It means more than reading widely and inspecting deeply. These things are important, but they focus on the inside. And healthy writers don’t just care for their insides; they care for their outsides. The inside and the outside are bound up together. Downplaying one is a disservice to the other. Or, if you want to think of it this way, caring for your body is caring for your pen.
For a while, people have told me that I’m a “productive” or “prolific” writer. I’ve written over twenty books to date (most of them published), and I’m not yet forty. So, I guess there’s some truth to that. But what people don’t know is that I don’t feel overexerted or burnt out by that productivity. I don’t feel sapped by writing. Quite the contrary: writing energizes me. It helps me see more of the world and my place within it. But I also have a physical routine I follow to help me stay productive. I’ve learned the hard way that if I don’t care for my body, writing becomes much more difficult.
Let me set out a biblical principle I’ve picked up from reading Scripture, and then offer some details on how it applies to my routine as someone who strives to be a healthy writer.
The Inside-Outside Principle in the Bible
One of the teachings throughout the Bible is that the outside affects the inside, and vice versa. What happens outside of and to your body has an effect on your soul. And what happens in your soul has an effect on your body. We’ll focus on the movement of the outside to the inside for this article. We can call it the inside-outside principle.
The inside-outside principle comes out clearly in the way the Bible talks about food, even in the first few chapters of Genesis. Before sin struck the world, God had made the trees in his new creation bear fruit that was “pleasant to the sight and good” (Gen. 2:9). Adam and Eve would be refreshed when they ate, given new energy to do the good work of gardening. What they took inside would bless their work on the outside. The fall, interestingly, is also a matter of food. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:6). They took inside themselves what God told them should remain outside. And there were dramatic and drastic spiritual and physical implications.
After sin entered our world, food and drink remained central to the welfare of humanity. The Levitical dietary laws, given to God’s people, reinforced the inside-outside principle. Some things were to be taken inside the body and thus kept the people ceremonially clean on the outside. Even though such laws had a limited purpose in the story of the Bible and are not binding for Christians today, they still serve as a reminder that God cares about what we put inside ourselves.
When the Israelites enter the Promised Land of Canaan, it is described in similar inside-outside terms, by what it offered regarding food and drink: it was a land flowing with milk and honey (Exod. 3:8, 17; 13:5; 33:3). The external blessing of the land was expressed by what it provided for the insides of the Israelites.
In the New Testament, we find the apex of the inside-outside principle in the sacrament of communion. The bread and wine, symbolizing the body and blood of Christ, is something we swallow, bringing the external reality of Christ’s atoning death to our insides. This has the purpose of bringing to our remembrance the fellowship we have with Christ. Jesus gives himself to our insides so that we might have communion with him on the inside and the outside—full and eternal fellowship. As the Dutch theologian Geerhardus Vos wrote about Jesus’s broken body, “He gives it away, gives it away to us, in order that soon we would also truly have fellowship with him by faith” (Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, 1058). Jesus gives his outsides to our insides so that our outsides and insides might find a home inside himself, in our fellowship with God. This is the inside-outside principle in its most beautiful form.
The inside-outside principle applies not only to what we take into our bodies, but to what we do with them. The book of Proverbs, for instance, has much to say about sloth and laziness. “Slothfulness casts into a deep sleep, and an idle person will suffer hunger” (Prov. 19:15). Doing nothing with your body for extensive periods of time leads not to rest but to suffering. Once again, what we do with the outside (our bodies) has effects on our insides.
In short, what you put into your body, and what you do to it, has a profound effect on your soul, on what goes on inside your body. And the same is true in reverse order.
The Inside-Outside Principle for Writers
How can this principle apply to our lives as writers? Let me give you three applications that I’ve noted over time in my own writing life. There are plenty of other applications you can make on your own. The important thing is to consider how what you’re doing on the outside is affecting your life on the inside.
1. Be careful with sugar intake.
I have a stubborn and strong sweet tooth. It makes me feel ravenous at times. And that means I’m prone to gorge on candy and dessert. I know this ends up making me feel horrible, but it happens anyway, as I’m sure it does for many. What I put inside myself ends up causing pain and discomfort, not to mention a crash in energy and a rise in destabilized moods. If I want to be a healthy writer, I have to (1) try to limit my sugar intake, and (2) balance sugar intake with protein. I also need to stay hydrated, since sugar takes a lot of water out of you. As a Boston University MD explains it, “Once the sugar particles reach your blood, water moves out of your cells and into your blood, to restore balance in your blood. As your cells lose water, they send signals to the brain indicating that they need more water.” There are countless reasons why hydration is important for our bodies. My response to a fixation on sugar is just one of them.
2. Fix your caffeine intake and note when it gets excessive.
I’m an early riser and an early writer. I get up with the robins. My best work happens before lunchtime. That means I love having my coffee when I wake up. But that can quickly lead to having too much, especially if I lag later in the day and want some more energy. Excessive caffeine intake has a direct effect on my anxiety level, which is something I have to be very careful about. Anxiety is part of how my body expresses its high sensitivity, and I’ve written at length about my struggles there and how they relate to the formation of my soul. I can have up to two cups of coffee in a day. But even that toes a dangerous line. If I go heavier than that, I suffer, unless I exercise more frequently, which leads to the last application.
3. Maintain regular cardio exercise 3–5 times a week.
I am, like many writers, a “highly sensitive person” (HSP). My body and mind are often on hyperdrive, and my doctor actually wrote me a medicine script years ago that simply says, “30 minutes of cardio, 5 times a week.” This has served as a great reminder that going for a run is part of my medicinal care. For me, being a healthy writer means being a faithful runner.
There are lots of ways you can apply the inside-outside principle to your own regiments as a healthy writer. The key is to remember each day that what happens outside of and to your body has an effect on your soul. And what happens in your soul has an effect on your body. You’ll have a host of little choices each day. Some will lead you towards being a healthy writer, and others will sap your vigor and lead to some sort of mental or physical suffering. This is just part of what it means to grow as a writer and take strides forward in the craft. If you want to care for your pen, you have to care for your body.
About the Author
Pierce Taylor Hibbs (MAR, ThM Westminster Theological Seminary) serves as Senior Writer and Communication Specialist at Westminster Theological Seminary. He is the author of over 20 books, including the Illumination Award-winning titles Struck Down but Not Destroyed, The Book of Giving, The Great Lie, and One with God. His latest book is called Insider-Outsider: How God Makes Insiders from Outsiders & Helps Us Talk about Our Faith. He also writes regularly for Westminster Media (wm.wts.edu) and at piercetaylorhibbs.com.