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Anxiety’s Devastating Effect on Your Health

Anxiety can have a devastating effect upon your health. Imagine you’re a psychiatrist or psychologist. You spend eight or more hours of every workday listening to people pour out their heartaches, problems, and burdens. You listen to the same people share the same thing week after week. And no matter how wise or well-trained you are in your diagnoses and treatments, removing the anxiety isn’t going to happen without God’s help and intervention (Jer. 30:17a).

Today’s medical doctors give you something you can take to quiet down. But God created us to live an abundant life filled with joy, peace, and activity—not quieted all the time.

For the person who is continually troubled with anxiety, it becomes a real disorder in his or her life. Cardiovascular disease, heart disease, hypertension, most headaches, colitis, ulcers, skin disease, psoriasis, eczema, acne, and weakened immune response can all open a person to more serious illness. I can hear you asking, “You mean to tell me that anxiety can cause that?” That’s what the medical profession says. That’s what people who deal with anxiety day in and day out have to say. 

And there are many books in print from godly men and women who’ll tell you about people they’ve counseled and the things that have happened to them physically. So much of it can be traced back to this matter of anxiety. When anxiety clears up, physical things begin to clear up. That’s the way God created our bodies. He made this body to function properly. And when I’m not thinking right and am full of uncertainty, dread, fear, and frustration, it’s going to affect my body.

People are physically sick because of their anxiety. They won’t deal with it, or they don’t know how to deal with it. Therefore, they ignore it. Or they run to the doctor and get prescription after prescription in the hopes these will numb their anxious thoughts and feelings. But I’ve found in my own life that there’s something much easier than that: Find out what God has to say in His Word about anxiety and how He instructs us to think and deal with anxiety, then just put that into practice.

For many people, that’s a lot easier said than done. There are many who’ve given in to anxiety. And as long as they can go to a doctor and get something to calm them down and take the edge off, they’ll stick with that. Before they know it, they’re hooked on it, locked into it, then find themselves dependent upon some other human being to give them something synthetic to help them get through life. That’s absolutely, totally opposite of the kind of life God wants a believer to live (John 10:10). That’s not who we are. There’s not a single verse in Scripture that in any way agrees with that. In His Word, God gives us the solution for anxiety. And tomorrow, we’ll dive in to discover how God wants us to deal with it once and for all.