Managing Worry and Anxiety By Jean HolthausSample

  Day 2

Tend to Spiritual Factors

Biology, thoughts, feelings, social environment, and spiritual factors all influence whether someone will struggle with worry or an anxiety disorder. These same components must be integrated into any healthy plan for addressing these challenges. You might want to explore what this means with your doctor, a counselor, or a psychiatrist. It’s important to seek professional assistance because anxiety disorders have symptoms similar to other medical conditions, so it’s vital to accurately determine what’s causing the symptoms. For the purposes of this YouVersion reading plan, I’ll be focusing on spiritual components of reducing feelings of worry.

Spirituality and health were linked to one another from the beginning of recorded history until the late seventeenth century, when the Enlightenment movement began, and remain linked in many developing nations. Prior to the Enlightenment, physicians were often clergy. Religious institutions were responsible for licensing physicians to practice medicine and for building and staffing hospitals to treat the ill. During the Enlightenment, however, reason came to be identified as valid while tradition, feeling, and faith were treated with suspicion and regarded as crutches utilized by the uneducated. 

The intricate connection between faith and medicine sometimes led to horrendous practices such as performing exorcisms to treat conditions like epilepsy. However, completely separating faith from medicine created problems that have been just as devastating. As the research examining the influence of religion and spirituality on health has expanded, faith is consistently proving to be an important part of both the prevention and treatment of illness—including anxiety. Studies have shown people with regular spiritual practices tend to live longer and have lower levels of chemicals within the body linked to disease development. 

In addition to helping prevent illness, faith has been shown to positively impact how individuals who become ill cope with their illness and recover. An individual’s belief in God also affects the amount of anxiety they experience when coping with the mistakes they make. Studies show people who believe in God and think about God when they are in stressful situations or make mistakes physiologically experience lower levels of anxiety and report feeling calmer than atheists under the same circumstances.

Why might strong faith in God have such a positive effect on anxiety?