Dealing With Anxietyಮಾದರಿ

How do you bounce back after your life gets wrecked?  

“Anxiety and fear are cousins but not twins. Fear sees a threat. Anxiety imagines one. Fear screams, Get out! Anxiety ponders, What if? Fear results in fight or flight. Anxiety creates doom and gloom. Fear is the pulse that pounds when you see a coiled rattlesnake in your front yard. Anxiety is the voice that tells you, Never, ever, for the rest of your life, walk barefooted through the grass. There might be a rattlesnake … somewhere.” – Max Lucado

Have you ever experienced that? Something happens, something pretty bad, and you start wondering how long it is going to take for that thing to happen again? Or maybe not that specific thing, but something like it? 

You might expect that every friend is going to turn their back on you just like that one time someone you trusted did. Or maybe, every time someone tries to get close to you, the only thing you can think is, what if they leave? Because someone that was supposed to be there for you isn’t any more. Your anxiety might kick in every day on your way to school because you bombed that test and you’re constantly asking the question, “What if I fail the next one? Will my parents be mad at me? Will I be mad at myself?” 

How do you bounce back from something like that? Where your anxiety is born out of something real and painful? Where anxiety is so normal it starts to feel like it’s a part of who you are? 

In the book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Dr. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff outline several “terrible ideas” that have become common in society today and are influencing people for the worse. One of those ideas is: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. 

That idea has led to so many people trying to live safe and easy lives. The problem? Safe and easy lives don’t make us better and they don’t make us stronger. The things that have happened to you can absolutely be used to make you stronger, more confident, and better equipped to handle everything else that will come at you in your life. 

A second “terrible idea” they address is this: Always trust your feelings. Your feelings are real, and your feelings are valid, but your feelings aren’t always true, and your feelings are not you. 

Those are ideas illustrated beautifully in the story of Job. This is a guy whose life truly got wrecked in a massive way. But he never let what happened to him make him weaker, and he never let his feelings lead him into negative behaviors. He chose to let what happened to him fuel him to be better, and he chose to trust God even when his feelings were screaming at him to give up and give in to the anxiety he must have been feeling. 

Also, don’t get too weirded out by the conversations between God and Satan in this story. The point of Job is not about whether or not that conversation literally happened. The story of Job is about wrestling with the complexities of life, the reality of suffering, and how we relate to God through all of it. 

Challenge: Reflect and recognize. Reflect on the negative experiences of your life. How have those made you stronger? Recognize that your emotions are not you, and they do not control you. What is one way you can start owning your emotions instead of letting your emotions own you?