You’re not just tired. You’re drained, wired, foggy and vaguely detached from reality—but sure, let’s call it “a season.”
Modern Christian culture talks a lot about spiritual health. It talks less about the fact that your spiritual health doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You are not a floating soul with a body tacked on for moral object lessons. You are an integrated human being. And when your body is off, it’s often because something deeper is out of sync.
This isn’t just poetic language. A 2020 study published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality found that people who actively engage in spiritual practices report better physical health, fewer symptoms of depression and higher overall life satisfaction. On the flip side, unresolved spiritual stress—especially internal conflict about belief or worth—can show up in very physical ways: fatigue, tension, immune breakdown, disordered eating.
So if your body is waving red flags, it might not be a “worldly distraction.” It might be the most honest thing about you right now.
Here’s what that could look like.
You’re always tired, and not just because you stayed up scrolling. Chronic fatigue doesn’t just happen when you’re overworked—it happens when you’re misaligned. When you spend your energy performing spiritual strength you don’t feel or serving out of obligation instead of conviction, your body keeps the receipts. Dr. Thomas Plante, a professor at Santa Clara University who studies the intersection of faith and health, says spiritual involvement tends to support resilience—but spiritual strain does the opposite. Translation: burnout is sometimes a theological issue, not just a scheduling one.
You’re tense even when you’re supposed to be at peace. If you’re clenching your jaw during worship or your shoulders haven’t relaxed since last Easter, your body might be reacting to something your theology won’t let you say out loud: you’re anxious, unsure or spiritually disconnected. The research backs this up. Multiple studies in the Handbook of Religion and Health have shown that spiritual conflict—feeling abandoned by God, questioning your beliefs, fearing you’re not good enough—can increase stress and negatively impact immune function. In other words, unresolved spiritual tension doesn’t stay in your mind. It lives in your nervous system.
You’re eating like your faith depends on it—or barely eating at all. Disordered eating can be a coping mechanism when life feels chaotic or meaningless. If your faith life has become performance-based or hollow, your body might be acting out the hunger you’re pretending not to feel. Again, this isn’t just metaphorical. Harvard researchers found that people who describe themselves as “deeply spiritual” but disconnected from supportive community or rituals are more likely to experience chronic inflammation and higher stress markers.
You can’t sit still—even when you want to. Stillness is where clarity lives, which is why we avoid it. If you immediately reach for your phone when things get quiet, that’s not just a habit—it’s avoidance. And it might be the thing keeping you from hearing God in the first place. This doesn’t mean you’re bad at prayer. It means you’re human, and that silence is hard. But your inability to stop moving might be the most spiritual symptom you’ve got.
You’re getting sick all the time, but your labs are normal. People underestimate what stress does to a body—especially spiritual stress. Pushing through burnout for the sake of “serving” or “being faithful” might feel noble, but your immune system disagrees. Repeated illness can be your body’s protest against spiritual self-neglect. It’s not weakness—it’s resistance.
You’re emotionally reactive about random things, but numb in church. This is the emotional rerouting effect. When you suppress difficult spiritual feelings—anger at God, doubt, apathy—they don’t disappear. They just reappear somewhere else, like crying at that one yogurt commercial or snapping at your roommate over dishes. If you can’t feel anything during worship but feel everything everywhere else, your body is probably telling the truth your faith life is avoiding.
The point isn’t to over-spiritualize your headaches or psychoanalyze your back pain. It’s to stop ignoring your body when it’s telling you something is wrong.
Jesus didn’t ignore His body. He napped. He wept. He asked for help. He took time away from crowds. The incarnation wasn’t just about saving souls—it was a declaration that bodies matter. So if your discipleship involves overriding or silencing your physical experience, it’s probably not as Christlike as you think.
God might not be asking you to push through. He might be asking you to pay attention. Your spiritual life doesn’t have to fall apart to be taken seriously. Sometimes it just looks like noticing what your body has been trying to say all along.
