411 | The Daily 15, Brain Science Behind Morning Routines, and Why Sabbath Is Your Family's Secret Weapon – Part 2 (Chris Cirullo)

Rhythms & HabitsAdventure & Creating Memorable MomentsPrayer & Hearing God's Voice
Written By Jeff Zaugg

Episode Description

What if the first thing you did each day was sleep—and trust God with it? In this episode, Chris Cirullo unpacks the brain science behind why your morning and evening routines carry exponential power, and how a simple 15-minute daily practice can transform your faith, health, and focus over time. Plus, he shares how his family has made Sabbath the most anticipated day of the week—complete with chains hitting the floor and kids fighting over who gets to throw them.

  • Chris Cirullo is a former Army Ranger with four combat tours in Afghanistan, a former collegiate football player, fitness coach, and tech startup leader. He now coaches men through Mission Fit and serves on the team at Forming Men. Chris and his wife Justine homeschool their five sons in Eugene, Oregon, and are expecting their sixth child.

    • The Daily 15 is a sustainable morning routine that anchors your day in hydration, scripture, prayer, prioritization, and movement—all in just 15 minutes.

    • Your brain is most "plastic" during wake-up and bedtime windows, meaning small, consistent inputs during those times create outsized transformation.

    • In Jewish tradition, evening begins the new day—so the first act of every day is actually resting and trusting God for the first eight hours.

    • Sabbath is the only commandment we boast about breaking, yet God designed it for human flourishing—not as a burden but as a gift.

    • Start your Sabbath practice small and sustainable (even takeout Thai food counts), then expand it over time with sensory anchors your kids will crave.

  • Jeff: Welcome back to Dad Awesome. Guys, this is the second half of my conversation with Chris Cirullo. This is episode 411. We're in the month of December, the final runway before we kick off next year. So I want to invite you guys—let's be prayerful in this season. What are we going to put as some of our big rocks, some of our vision for next year? Now is the time. And this two-part series with Chris is so helpful in thinking about what I'm going to step into next year—not with a short-term goal, but with long-term, sustainable thinking.

    I want to encourage you, if you missed last week, get back and listen to episode 410, the setup for today's conversation. But today we're going to talk about Sabbath rest, brain science, the way the brain works as far as the first part of the day and the last part of the day, and the powerful multiplied impact if we put intentionality there. So I'm so glad you're listening.

    I want to remind you, Dad Awesome offers six-week coaching cohorts—the deep dive. We've had ten cohorts that have already graduated. 87 dads are graduates of the Dad Awesome Accelerator. But we're kicking off the next cohort in the second week of January. You can go to our website to find all that information out. You can also email me directly with questions. Awesome@dadawesome.org is the email address for me. Ping me with your questions. And I can't wait to have 10 more dads join us to kick off the year 2026.

    So this is the second half of my conversation with Chris Cirullo.

    Jeff: Daily 15—this is 15 minutes. What can we bring every single day, 365 days of the year, that anchors us to impact the rest of our day? And then you actually break it down to three core categories and then these steps like, "Do this before I even get my coffee," and you've got the rewards built in. Would you give us—there's so many angles I want to take from this—but just a flyover of why did you, how did you discover the Daily 15? You've been coaching guys a long time on this. Congrats again on the launch of the book. Mine's coming. It's in the mail.

    Chris: Love it.

    Jeff: Yeah. I'd love to just hear the backstory.

    Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Well, you're a father of four, and so you know that life has a way of trying to take over our best intentions. I've always been someone that is drawn towards theological depth. So for many years, my morning routine was like an hour in the Word and some prayer—it was pretty robust. And I would find myself at times getting totally derailed again by like a kid's sickness or traveling for work or whatever it is. And I realized I'm biting off way more than I can chew in some of these seasons and it's causing it to be all or nothing again.

    And so I developed this routine for myself and it was 15 minutes long. I did some things that helped my physical health, some scripture reading, some certain kinds of prayer and prioritization for my day—all of those things. And I could get it done in 15 minutes. And I realized I can do 15 minutes every day. I could do it when I'm traveling, when I'm sick, when family's visiting, when it's the holidays—all the stuff. And so if that's true, then I can create this foundational piece.

    Now, if I want to study more of the Word, I can do it after my 15 minutes. If I want to pray more than what's included, I can do it after my 15 minutes. But as long as I don't expand that, then that becomes something I can do literally anywhere at any time, no matter what. I could be sick and still do my 15-minute morning routine.

    And the beauty of that then is you look up in 10 years and you've read the Word 3,650 times. You've prayed 3,650 times. In one year, you're doing—geez, I forget what it is—10,000 ounces of water and the pushups. I got a handwritten note from a client, and he's going through and he's like, "The 15 minutes changed my life. I've now done it 365 days in a row," and he's reporting all the numbers of everything that he's done. And I'm just like, you know?

    Jeff: Add them up. Woo!

    Chris: So yeah, that was kind of where it came from. And now I have every one of my clients install this into their lives and it's super fruitful.

    Jeff: So you mentioned water, you mentioned scripture. Can you give us a flyover of how you spend the 15?

    Chris: Yeah. So I start with hydration with electrolytes, primarily. I'm getting in—I use Element—because just high sodium, the right balance of magnesium, potassium, sodium, chloride. I jump right into scripture. I've developed a reading plan that takes people through 10 to 20 verse sections. Then you are responding with a particular prayer function, strategy, order—however you want to call it. So you're just going through kind of a four-part movement of prayer that takes about three minutes. And so you're essentially praying the scriptures back to the Lord and asking the Holy Spirit to do those things in your life that you're recognizing and noticing.

    Then you're setting your priority for the day. And there's two parts to that. One is coming from an evening routine that is also talked about in the Daily 15. And then the other part is the number one most important priority. And I kind of talk about how you discover what that is because sometimes people do that wrong and they choose the wrong kinds of things. They're not prioritizing well.

    Then they're doing 25 pushups and then you're rewarding yourself with coffee. And the coffee particularly is a dopamine response that is created from the coffee that tells your body, "Whatever you just did, do more of that because I get a reward." And so, yeah, it helps reinforce the whole routine.

    Jeff: So you actually start with—if I have electrolytes in my water, I feel like that's a reward. It's funny, part of the family budget, the electrolytes we were doing were just really expensive, so I need to get my own mix. Do you have any hacks with less money on electrolytes?

    Chris: I don't. Sadly, I pay an arm and a leg too.

    Jeff: I mean, what it's bringing is worth it. And you get to bookmark the whole thing with a great electrolyte drink and a coffee in 15 minutes. Where do you find the most pushback against the Daily 15? Where are guys saying no? Is it that it's not enough or that it's missing core things? "You should be reading the Bible longer." Like, where are you getting some pushback against this?

    Chris: Yeah, I think you're hitting on all the spots. It's typically this inner sense—because of the culture we live in that is incredibly ambitious, this drive to achieve, more is better—it's really hard to wrap your mind around the benefits of 15 minutes. Because you're not gonna feel it on day one. You're probably not gonna feel it after a week. You might feel a little bit more stable and routine oriented, but it's like compound interest at a bank.

    And so there is a point in your life—and this guy who wrote this handwritten note, he's experiencing it—at some point it hockey sticks and you're like, "I'm now reaping the fruit because I'm living an examined life and I'm looking back at what the last year held and I'm like, I'm a different person now."

    So that's probably the biggest pushback—it's not enough, I want to do more—especially from guys like me who love to read the Word a lot, who love to pray a lot. And I'm like, it's okay. You can still do that.

    Jeff: The plus strategy. What's your current time the kids are waking up, roughly, and then what time are you doing your Daily 15 to start the day?

    Chris: Well, this goes back to a question you asked earlier—which is great, I'm glad you brought this up—any of those key things for fathers that they can train in. So we have explicitly and intentionally trained very hard on bedtime and wake time. And so our kids go to bed at 7:30. I pray with them and the older ones are in there and they're awake for a little while. And I'm like, that's okay. It's okay to be bored, to lay in your bed, to rest.

    But mom and I, we need some time to connect, we need some time to be together, and we want to go to bed at an appropriate hour, which for us is like 9 PM because we're like old people.

    Jeff: Yes.

    Chris: So we get up at five then and we've trained them. They're not allowed to come out of their room except maybe to pee or get a drink of water until seven. And so they have a digital clock and I've trained them on how to identify—if they're small—which number is the one they need to see a seven on.

    Jeff: You have an hour and a half in the evening of time with your wife without the kids. And then you have two hours in the morning before dad mode kicks in. Is this right?

    Chris: Yep.

    Jeff: That's amazing. Okay, that's helpful. But just knowing that you're anchoring—you're not sneaking in the 15 right as the kids are waking up. You're anchoring that to give plenty of margin to do all—I use the phrase "the plus this" or "plus that." You've got all kinds of margin for other things after, other intentional areas. What's the additional time in the morning?

    Chris: Yeah. So I'll do the routine and I'll usually read a little bit more in the Word and then I read a few minutes of a book—so, you know, 10 pages or whatever—and then I'll work out. And so I'll get a full workout, which for me is usually 30 to 45 minutes.

    Jeff: Okay, yeah, that's super, super helpful. The approach on, man, crafting with intentionality how we head to bed—that's actually beginning our next day. That's the first block, right? There's science though around the last hour, first hour. Can you share a little bit of the science?

    Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And just to note on what you're describing too, if you look at the way that God created in the first six and seven days of creation, there was evening and then there was morning on the first day. And so in Jewish culture, the evening is actually the start of the new day, which to me is really instructive.

    This could maybe connect to Sabbath here in a minute because the first thing that we do technically in our day is we go to sleep and we trust the Lord for the first eight hours of our day. And then we wake up and we do after we've rested. So God kind of designed this order. And so the evening, I think, is actually the beginning of our day and how we use it is very important.

    And the brain is most what's called plastic. There's a term in neuroscience—it's neuroplasticity. Just the way that the brain waves function in the wake up and the bedtime windows are such that you can create exponential change in the way that your brain functions in those hours compared to other hours of the day.

    And so if we want to take the practical approach to Romans 12:1-2, where Paul says to be transformed by the renewing of your mind, we need to be strategic about where we try to renew the mind during the day because we can get outsized results during certain times of the day compared to others.

    Jeff: Well, let's journey into why we would follow God's lead and His command and pause. With all the demands of life, why would we do that? I'd love to hear your family's approach to the why, but also the how.

    Chris: Well, the why is multifaceted. I think if we want to go just the crudest thing, it's one of the Ten Commandments. And it's the only one that for whatever reason, we're okay boasting about breaking. You know, like the hustle culture and the always going—we talk about, "Man, I worked so much this week, 70 hours, and it was this and I had to work over the weekend." And it's crazy how people approach that. And I'm like, you would never say that about committing adultery or murdering or having idols in your life or whatever.

    And yes, we're not saved by obeying the Ten Commandments. Christ is the one that has taken care of that for us. But He also said not a dot or iota is going to be removed from the law. The law is the mirror that shows us our need for Christ.

    And the beauty of that then too is that we see in Hebrews that there is this eternal Sabbath that we experience because of Christ's finished work for us. But the writer of Hebrews, potentially Paul, says to make every effort to enter that rest. Colossians 2 says we're not to be judged whether or not we hold to the Sabbath or festivals. And so there's no judgment or condemnation, but we should be asking the question: Why would God put it into the Ten Commandments? Do all of the other Ten Commandments bring human flourishing? Yes.

    And so when Jesus says Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath—it was the first day of existence for man was a Sabbath day—you start putting the puzzle pieces together. You're like, I think there's something here. I think God made this for me and for my soul and for my goodness and for my blessing. I should probably lean into it.

    Jeff: Yes, yes.

    Chris: And then there's been societies that have tried to disrupt this. I think the French Revolution was one of the last times when they tried to do a 10-day work week. So they would do 10 full days and then they would take their weekend. And it was like domestic disputes and depression and suicide and all this stuff skyrocketed as a result of trying to change the nature of God's design around the week and this rhythm of work and rest.

    So that's why we do it. And it's been a huge blessing. We can dive into practical or we can fish around in there for a little while.

    Jeff: Well, I think probably moving into how your family has created constraints—which we know that flourishing comes from, right? And then how, like what causes this looking forward to versus it's something we do that's boredom. I know there's a looking forward to that's part of your heart with this.

    Chris: Yeah, well, so I was speaking at a men's conference down in California in—gosh, maybe February or March, I can't remember. And my second oldest goes with me—or he went with me; I always try to take a son on trips. And he's at the back of the room, and I'm teaching on something adjacent to the Sabbath. And I just, you know, I was like, "You know what, hey, Solomon, what's your favorite day of the week?" And he said, "Shabbat." And I was like, "Good answer, son. That's great."

    And so what we've done to make this enjoyable is we try to stack a lot of things that the kids just love into this. So we start every Friday night with a Shabbat dinner, a traditional kind of Jewish Shabbat. My wife lights candles, says a blessing. I pray over the next 24 hours. We do communion together. We have some songs that we do. And the boys—they just love it. They get a special dinner. They get to do bread and wine, which is grape juice.

    And then when we sing songs, one of the songs we sing—I stole this from a friend of mine—is the "Amazing Grace, My Chains Are Gone" version from Chris Tomlin. And so when we hit that point, I went to Home Depot and I cut this big old chunk of chain. And so they hold it and "our chains are gone"—wham—and they slam it on the ground as loud as they can.

    Jeff: Wow.

    Chris: So it's just like they're fighting over who gets to throw the chains today. So these kinetic things that just create—

    Jeff: Tech out.

    Chris: Yeah, and then I give my wife a mom break because she's running hard all week. And so I take the boys on Saturday morning and we go do fun stuff as men. Sometimes that's, you know, this special donut shop and go to the airport and watch planes take off and land, or we go to the park or whatever. So my wife is getting a moment to rest and breathe. The kids get to do something fun with dad. We get to enjoy some food that we would normally never eat outside of Sabbath—those kinds of things—to really make sure that it's this kind of encapsulated thing that they get to look forward to.

    If you let that stuff bleed into the rest of the week, then it takes the meaning stacking out of it.

    And the last thing I'll note is we haven't done this particularly, but it's an idea for guys. One of my friends and mentors, 20 years ago they started doing this, and he went to the candle shop, the Yankee Candle shop, and he said, "Hey, which of the candles do you think is always gonna be around? It's not like one of your seasonal things. It's gonna be a staple." And so they told him it was like sage and something—I can't remember what it was. So he bought that candle and every Sabbath they light it at the table, and then it goes for the full 24 hours, it just burns. And so that smell is actually triggering the brain.

    And when they were—his kids were 18, 20 years old—they were walking by a candle shop or something like that and they smelled it and they were like, "I feel so rested. It feels like Sabbath."

    Jeff: Yes.

    Chris: And so this sensory, you know, manipulation in a way, if you will.

    Jeff: Yes, sounds, those chains being the smell, yeah, the taste of food and communion, touch as far as the play with dad. Yeah, these all—thank you for describing just some of it. It's not a one size fits all. I do know, we've been back and forth on is it Sunday, is it Saturday, when works for our family. We don't have heavy sports commitments right now with our rhythm for our family, but I'm thinking of the families who have some, yeah, they approach the weekend trying to like, man, we want to honor, we want to step into this fully and experience the fullness. But how—do you have any just guidance for how a family would just take steps if they feel like it's a long ways away from it?

    Chris: Yeah. Well, I think even the meal—if you could start with a meal like that to just say, "Hey, we're signifying and representing for ourselves this period of time that God kind of ordained for the human soul to have rest"—that in and of itself is a great rhythm and practice for people to do. And start easy.

    I mean, when we started this probably almost eight years ago, we had almost a two-year-old and a newborn. And we did takeout Thai food.

    Jeff: Sure.

    Chris: And so we had a table runner, we had two candles, we'd light the candles and we'd open up the to-go boxes and we just, you know, we'd sing the songs and eat and then we'd throw everything away. There was no prep. There was no cleanup. It was like, for a small young family, sustainability is key. So start as small as you can in order to make sure that it happens every week. And then you can expand it from there. It's similar to the Daily 15.

    And so if you've got sports, that's okay. That's a decision that your family has made. And you can also unmake that decision at some point, right? There's no requirement to be in sports. So if you guys deemed, "Hey, my family culture is one that I'd like to look like this, and that competes with that," that's okay to be weird and it's okay to make those decisions. You don't have to go along any cultural norm lines.

    But if you have that, also don't feel condemned. Just enjoy the pockets that you do have and create moments to rest and worship and have joy and fun outside of the sports commitments or whatever it is that you're doing.

    Jeff: Yeah, that's helpful. I think of back to scorecard. We mentioned what do we measure, and that sports have given parents this measurement. And we can create our own. And you shared your weekly scorecard with the Built for Life framework. I'm looking at it right now. I am so inspired with a tool that gives us this look back, look forward. I know it's tied with—I think you even have it as one of the areas—the 30-year vision. So you're going way out. My wife and I just did our 31-year. That'll take us to being married for 50 years. So we're like, let's go 31.

    But just as a flyover, is that available to all dads or only if you buy the book? Is the scorecard available just on the website? I can't recall.

    Chris: Yeah. MissionFit.co/scorecard should take you there.

    Jeff: Perfect, and I'll link it. Yeah, so that's amazing. But these areas of a God-tuned mindset, sustainable health, and mission-driven fatherhood—we're not gonna walk through all of them right now because we're gonna kind of land this in the next five or so minutes—but is there anything that you're drawn to want to share with our Dad Awesome dads from the scorecard that would just bring hope, also give us a project, give us an assignment?

    Chris: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the first one. I'd be remiss if we didn't kind of hang out there for a minute. God-tuned mindset is the first of the three categories for a purpose, because I really think that if you—and one of the three things we do inside of the God-tuned mindset is training on how to hear the Lord's voice more clearly and more regularly. Because if you can't hear or there's too much noise or distraction or lack of intentionality, and you're not really walking with the leading of the Holy Spirit, it becomes very hard to then identify: What is our family designed to do? Who are we supposed to be?

    So the other things kind of come out of that. And when we design a fitness plan for dads, we're designing fitness plans to be aligned with the family mission that they're called to. Is this gonna be a distraction, a deterrence? Is it gonna be aiding and helpful? How do we design something that's fitting for the season, for the schedule, for the mission that you have? But it all has to start with—we have to derive that from the Lord. Otherwise, we run the risk of being like every other ungodly, ambitious American who's coming up with these brilliant ideas and chasing after them at a potential cost to the kingdom expansion that God has called us to be a part of.

    And so that's a huge part of what we spend a lot of time with. I did a survey that I sent out to like 3,000 guys maybe eight months ago, 10 months ago. And 93% of them said that they wanted to grow in how to identify and have confidence that they were hearing the Lord's voice. And I think that's just—to me, some would say, "Well, maybe He's not talking."

    And I would say, no, I think we just live in such a distracted and such a fast-moving age that we're not creating the space and the time. And if you look at the occurrences of that in scripture, it's a still small voice. God is not usually like booming in on your life to say, "Hey, wake up. I'm trying to talk to you." He's like, "Come to me and I'll give you this rest."

    Jeff: Yeah. What an invitation and what a loving "come to me" versus "do this and this and this"—all the other religions, right? Just come to me and, you know, the John 15—we're just spending time like, "Apart from me, no fruit"—fit to be thrown in the fire to burn, right? I mean, it's not a threatening, but it's like, do we want to be fruitful? And even the family tree visual of these kids and their fruitfulness ties with our abiding. A gift.

    Chris, any last—if there was a last charge for our crew of dads, any last words for us?

    Chris: Yeah, I would say where God gives responsibility, He will come and aid you in the ability. And so as a father, we talked about from the very beginning, this theological background of responsibility. And I love the way that Doug Wilson talks about fatherhood. He said, "The glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility."

    And so you do have this responsibility. You are the head of a kingdom outpost. And the hard truth, which I'll start with, is that you're the head whether you like it or not, and you're responsible. And so you're either a good head or you're a bad head.

    But the beauty of God's grace and mercy is that it's not like, "Well, you're just bad, you gotta get better." He's like, "No, if you invite me, if you come to me, if we do this together, I will give you by the power of my Spirit the ability to fulfill this role and calling as father."

    And so both having an awareness that there are standards and there's a point of excellence as a father that we want to get to—but we're not doing that in our own strength. And if you are, it's a fool's errand. Stop it and go to the Lord because He will help you.

    Jeff: Thank you, Chris. And I will—I'll mention this later—but the specific resources you've created, it's gonna all be in the show notes for dads, because we just wanna send as many of our dads to connect deeper, to get the scorecard tool, to get your book, and we'll do that. But I'd love to invite you to say a short prayer, a short prayer over all the dads listening.

    Chris: Absolutely. Thanks, man.

    Heavenly Father, we are just so grateful that we get to speak with You, Lord, that because of Your Son, we have access to the throne room to come as innocent children before Your throne of grace. And Lord, I just ask on behalf of all the fathers that are listening to this, Lord, that You would—twofold—You would stir them up to righteous works, Lord, that You would stir them up to a desire to grow in their role as father and as a husband, Lord, and that You by Your Spirit would come right now.

    And to every man that's listening and to every man that was convicted by what I said there at the end, that needs to kind of turn away from his own self-sufficiency and just rest in You, Lord—that Holy Spirit, You would come upon him right now. That You would empower him to be the father that You have designed him to be, Lord. And that You would give him a sense of hope, but that they would not walk away from this with undue expectations that lead them towards cycling back into that all or nothing, Lord.

    Give these men the ability to have an incrementally faithful life for the next several decades, Lord, so that they can pass this on to their children and their children's children. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

    Jeff: Thank you for joining us for this second half of my conversation with Chris Cirullo. He's offering as a gift to all of our Dad Awesome community his book, The Daily 15, just recently launched—How to Build Lifelong Health, Faith, and Focus in Just 15 Minutes Each Morning. The book he's offering as a free download. It's in the show notes. So go to dadawesome.org/podcast to download the book.

    We want to encourage you though—I bought the book and it's a short read. It's not expensive. So show your support, but you can certainly download the free copy to get an idea for the content. And he actually has so many other free resources that I've listed in the show notes to help us design a family mission, to help us step more into rest and Sabbath, and then his coaching cohort as well.

    So I want to encourage you guys to check out those resources. Let's be dads who take action. The Dad Awesome way is we take action. We prioritize. We don't just think or ponder, but we move forward.

    So I'm cheering for you guys this week. Have a great week, guys.

    End of Transcript

    • "Where God gives responsibility, He will come and aid you in the ability."

    • "The first thing we do in our day is go to sleep and trust the Lord for the first eight hours. Then we wake up and we do—after we've rested."

    • "You can create exponential change in the way your brain functions in those wake-up and bedtime windows compared to other hours of the day."

    • "Sabbath is the only one of the Ten Commandments that we're okay boasting about breaking."

    • "It's like compound interest. At some point it hockey sticks and you look back and realize—I'm a different person now."

 

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