Anxiety and Faith (Part 1)
I’ve been contemplating “anxiety” for much of the past few months. I’m a person who craves clarity and control—and I think most Americans do. It’s in our cultural DNA. But I’ve also realized that my personality and life experiences have only intensified that craving. The shadow sides of those traits are like gasoline on the anxiety fire.
And then my wife found out she had cancer. Forget gasoline on the fire—this was like a bomb going off.
This summer, I’ve had weeks of spiraling, chronic anxiety. But something clicked for me recently. Through a series of conversations with Karrie, my friend Joel, and my counselor, I’ve started to study my anxiety. This isn’t a new problem. I’ve been wrestling with it for years.
“Anxiety, most simply described, is our response to threat, whether real or perceived. The response is physiological; it is chemical. It occurs because of brain activity that is outside our awareness; we never even have to think about it. Thankfully, we can respond to threat in the blink of an eye. Our Creator has hardwired this capacity into our brains and bodies. We experience anxiety in two forms: acute and chronic.
Acute anxiety is our reaction to a threat that is real and time-limited. We react to the threat, respond to it, and then eventually return to a normal state of mind and body. At its most basic level, our response to a perceived threat prepares us either to fight for our lives or to run for our lives. In a critical moment when the threat is real, the anxious response can be lifesaving.
When we are experiencing chronic anxiety, however, we merely imagine or distort the threat. It is not real. Consequently, it is not time-limited either; it does not simply go away.”
—Jim Herrington
I’m learning to pry my anxiety away and place it somewhere. My friend Joel described this process as prying it off, setting it on the floor, and then climbing the stairs to look down on it from a balcony. For some reason, that metaphor clicked with me. Anxiety felt like it was stuck to me like a magnet. I felt instant relief in that moment with him.
Now I need time to investigate my anxiety—to be curious about it. For years, I’ve simply let it control me. For someone who longs for clarity and control, chronic anxiety has clouded my life and held the reins.
As a Christian, I believe my life is not my own, so I want clarity on what it truly looks like to follow Christ. And I want Christ to be King…not Anxiety.
A critical part of these realizations has come from investigating my emotions. Edwin Friedman (was an ordained rabbi, family therapist, and leadership consultant) once wrote, “Leadership is essentially an emotional process.”
That’s why it’s so dangerous to let emotions control us—or to bury them. Instead, we need to recognize them, contemplate them, and study them.
Two practices that have helped me do this:
1. Christian Community – My wife, my friends, my counselor. I’m a big believer that truth is discovered through community. You can’t arrive at truth or navigate truth alone. This realization flies in the face of the rugged “Live Your Truth” individuality that reigns in our culture.
2. Rest – I’ve been aggressively protecting one day of rest each week. On that day, I don’t run errands, I don’t shop, I don’t stream media, and I stay off social media. I intentionally step away from the forces that drive so much of our culture: consumerism, constant information, responsibility, and busyness. I replace them with people and activities that bring me joy, and I spend time in contemplation and journaling.
Later this week or next, I’ll share some thoughts on Anxiety Being A Modern Day Plague — the collective habits I see in our chronically anxious American culture—and what we might do about them.