Anxiety- Negative Influence Trait #3

Good morning friends! Today’s Negative Influence Trait is Anxiety but before you all rush to beat me up with your words let me clarify. I am not talking about medical anxiety- there are all sorts of medical and physiological reasons for anxiety. If you have to take meds to help with anxiety there is no shame here! Take them. It is what your body needs.

I have been rather forefront with my journey with anxiety due to severe iron deficiency over the last 10 1/2 months. I know there are a lot of people out there who declare it all a spiritual battle but I can honestly tell you they are wrong. Have I seen anxiety related to spiritual battles? ABSOLUTELY. BUT to say it’s all related is a massive misunderstanding of what causes anxiety.

I’m referring to more a spirit thing.

What I am talking about is more of having an anxious spirit. now you can have medical/ physiological anxiety and NOT have an anxious spirit and You can have anxiety AND have an anxious spirit AND you don’t have to have anxiety to have an anxious spirit. ( Hint : we all have something that can trigger an anxious spirit, no one is exempt.)

AKA a worrywart. (hehe something funny just popped into my head).

A worrywart is a person who is inclined to worry unduly. (Merriam-Webster online dictionary)

But I would say it’s even more than that. Have you ever seen someone who frets. Every little thing is a concern.

A recent Example

We have a son with autism . He is an amazing kiddo and we love him so much. But he has a problem. He is a worrier and last night was a great case in point. We were at our older two kids soccer games. and our two younger kiddos were off playing with their friends.

All of a sudden child #3 (autism) comes to ask about a berry he had just eaten (insert facepalm emoji here). As a young child we dealt with PICA with him but he has long since moved passed that- but everyone in a while….So We had a conversation and asked why he didn’t come ask me first BEFORE he ate it. He only ate one and I made the statement “well you might end up with a stomach ache.” Well that was it. Long story short a younger kid told him they were safe and that led to a whole other conversation.

He came back 3 more times Once with a “berry” in his hands. I showed him a bunch of pictures of possibilities -none looked quite right right. He even brought me leaf (which looked familiar but I couldn’t place it). He went from I don’t want to have a stomach ache to I don’t want to die in 3.2 seconds. So to set his mind at ease I went and checked out the plant.

I chuckled as I entered the little space because I COULD SMELL the aroma and it was VERY familiar. He kept saying they were blueberries BUT blueberry season is long gone. I walked over to the vines leaned in took a big whiff and smiled – Concord grapes!!!!

He said “what’s wrong mom?” expecting the worst and I smiled at him and said you will be just fine. They are grapes! A look of relief passed over his face and we moved on with our evening.

The reality

Now I know that anxiety and obsessiveness is part of an autistic person’s life. It is something that we have to work on and give him strategies to help him cope with these issues, however if we don’t practice them with him he becomes a ball of worry and it takes over his life.

Living in peace takes a lot of the same practices. Maybe not to the same extent but very seriously we can practice the same principles.

What the Bible says

2 Timothy 1;7 says “for God gave us a spirit not of fear, but of power and love and self -control.” (ESV)

So often we create our own spirit of fear and anxiety by living in the “what ifs”

So what happens when the fear and worry creeps in?

Ask yourself these questions!

Is it true?
Is it Honorable?
Is it just?
Is it pure?
Is it lovely?
Is it commendable?
Is there any excellence?
Anything worthy of Praise?

Sound familiar? It should those are the things Paul says us to center our minds on in Philippians 4:8-9. BUT then we need to follow the command at the end of verse 9. “THEN THINK ON THESE THINGS”

These concepts are talked about in Elizabeth George’s book Loving God with all Your Mind. I read this book nearly 20 years ago and it is still impacting my life today. I still practice it’s principles on a daily basis. I HIGHLY recommend this book!

Another practice

Quite a number of years ago I adopted the Phrase “Not my circus, not my moneys”. During this time I had a bunch of people who were coming to be with petty “concerns” about other people. Nothing that was my business really though it is amazing how much some people think it’s your business because you are the pastor’s wife. I was beginning to feel fretful about the pressure of “taking care of” these concerns. I’m not really sure how I stumbled upon the phrase, but God used it immediately. I began quoting it. and I even had people who who start to bring something inconsequential up and they would look at me and say—-“oh yeah Not your circus not your monkeys” and that would be the end of it.

A guardrail I set in place

Basically if it is inconsequential I don’t get involved. It’s not my place. But I do have to ask myself Is this my circus? Something I am involved in? And then I have to ask Is it my monkey? Something I am responsible for? And then if the answer is YES then I have to ask a separate set of questions- Will this defame God? (Does it go against God’s laws?) Does this matter? Will this hurt someone? (We once had to deal with a complaint that someone wore too much jewelry to church. We had to ask ourselves what would this profit? Who would this hurt? It was our circus BUT it wasn’t our monkey.)

Dealing with overactive brain

As I was dealing with anxiety over the last 10 months one of the things I struggled with most was overactive brain. As I lay in bed at night my heart would be racing (a physiological problem that just doesn’t “go away”) I would become very fearful of what heart racing could mean. My brain would go nuts with the possibilities. I spent many sleepless nights tossing and turning and being fretful. That is until one night I remembered what I did as a kid when I woke up from a bad dream.

Lessons from My Childhood

In Scouts I had learned an alphabet game. You sat in a circle and you kept rhythm snapping and patting your legs. A topic was picked and you started around the circle to the rhythm and if you broke the rhythm by forgetting what letter you were on or drawing a blank you were out. Well you can’t really play the rhythm part by yourself but you could go in alphabetical order.

As a kid I did all sorts of subjects but as I grew older I gan using names from the Bible. I would switch from people, to cities and countries, I would limit to male names or female names or EVERY name I could think of with that letter. More often than not the concentration would tire me out and I would be asleep before the end of the alphabet. HOWEVER this didn’t always happen. On the really bad nights I could make it through the entire alphabet three or four times.

Why it worked

It wasn’t that this game took away the heart racing and the overactive brain. It was that it focused my mind on God- It replaced the anxious thought pattern. I was focusing on what was good rather than the terrifying. So the symptoms of anxiety were still there I was still dealing with them I was just actively choosing to not give into the anxious spirit. In recent months I have added to the game. If the game isn’t working I use Christian songs- mostly songs I learned in Sunday school or verses that I have learned in the last 10 months which I talked about in the “What I Know” blog post.

What Happens when we live with a constantly anxious spirit?

It negative impacts our family and friends and maybe even a ministry. We become so engrossed in what is going on that we lose sight of the people that are close to us. and we begin to seek to have complete control (and so helicopter parents are born) Having anxiety in the medical sense is terrible because there is nothing you can do about it. There is no controlling it. So we seek to control other aspects of our lives. But we can make decisions to focus on things that will refocus our minds. It will be difficult. As the quote goes “anything worth having is worth fighting for.”

We need to remind ourselves that…

God is in complete control…even if my emotions and feelings are telling me otherwise.

When we choose to set aside our fretting and focus on God it replaces the inward focus that anxiousness is rooted in and it helps us to focus on God. It brings peace.

I in no way have every in and out of this figured out. I know what has worked for our family and the varying levels of anxiety we have dealt with over time. I know that focusing on truth most of all has been the biggest turn around.

Now it’s your tun

What makes you have an anxious spirit? What makes you fret? Is it your circumstances? Your family? Your friends? Or is it not your circus or your monkeys? Ask God to make it clear to you what causes your anxious spirit? And make it a priority to work with him on it. It sometimes takes moment by moment prayer. Because let’s be honest ALL of us have something that triggers that fretfulness to kick in…..It’s just a matter of what!

Have you learned any tricks on dealing with this anxious fretful spirit? I would love to hear about them in the comments below! And if you are dealing with anxiety don’t be afraid to seek medical help. Sometimes our bodies need help in all sorts of ways. Mine happened to be getting iron infusions, yours might be something else. We wouldn’t have shame seeking help for a broken leg so don’t have shame in seeking help for anxiety!