Definition of Worry
While trying to begin this chapter, a few thoughts crossed my mind. I don’t know you’ve experience this also. There’re occasions when I felt so alone; like God has forsaken me on an issue. Truth is, most times, God is actually working on delivering to us, more so than anyone or anything else in our lives.
You know, it’s natural to get worried over issues. But think of what Jesus said; “Can any of you worrying add a single hour to your life” [Matthew 6:27 9 (NIV)]?
As much as we can’t seem to do anything else but to feel pressured sometimes, we must also learn from this question Jesus asked; getting worried will only burn you out and take from your life rather adding to it. Worrying is not only in vain, but it will actually destroy your health and keep you from thinking clearly to solve the problems in front of you. Relaxing in challenging moments will benefit your health and your mind.
Anxiety can sometimes manifest itself in the form of worry. Worry can be defined as a combination of the bodily sense of anxiety (fear without a known risk) and the anxiety-driven thoughts, tales, images, and other cognitive activity.
Everyone has concerns from time to time. It’s a natural reaction to potential issues in the future, but when worry and anxiety gets out of hand, it may become a full-time obsession. If you routinely experience any of the following, you have a major problem with worry:
• Anxiety over potential dangers or threats in the future
• Making negative predictions about the future on a regular basis
• Overestimating the likelihood or severity of bad things happening
• Unable to stop worrying about the same things over and over again
• Avoiding worry by distracting yourself or avoiding certain situations
• Having difficulty using worry constructively to produce solutions to problems
People who encourage you to “simply stop worrying” have no understanding of how the mind works. It’s similar to a well-known psychological problem. Worry isn’t merely a mental process. Worrying sets in motion a cyclical pattern involving your thoughts, body, and behavior.
An example can be an occurrence that triggers worry thoughts, such as seeing an ambulance and thinking about a loved one getting wounded, and you become uneasy. On a physical level, the fight-or-flight response causes your heart to beat faster, your breathing to speed, your skin to sweat, your muscles to tense, and you may experience other physical symptoms. This fight-or-flight response is good when you are in imminent physical danger; however, it does nothing but cause havoc to the body when there is no real threat and the fight-or-flight response continues day after day, year after year. It is meant to cause us to take action when there is a threat to our safety, not to be something that your body continues to go through over the long term when there is no real threat but that which is in your mind.
You can take behavioral steps to avoid the uncomfortable scenario or location. Alternatively, you might start observing behavior, such as contacting to see whether the loved one is okay or rereading a report.
You probably haven’t developed the talent and art of risk assessment if worry is an issue for you. In life, no one is immune to danger. The key is to understand which hazards you can avoid, which you should plan for, and which you don’t need to be concerned about. Probability analysis and Prediction of results are the two main parts of risk assessment.
Probability Analysis
People who are constantly worried tend to overestimate risk. Some people believe that every time they start the care, they will be involved in a traffic collision. Others worry excessively about making a mistake at work, even though they perform their job well and have seldom or never made a big error. Overestimation occurs as a result of a mix of Experience and Belief. How much weight you place on your experience and the amount of belief you have about what could occur, will determine your level of anxiety.
Experience: Your personal past has the potential to affect your worrying in two ways. One approach is if you’ve never had anything bad happen to you, but you dismiss historical evidence. It doesn’t take away your anxiety of forgetting something vital or losing a significant relationship. If you think about it, every day that goes by without a calamity appears to raise the chances of something horrible happening.
Another way personal history effects worrying is if something negative has happened to you in the past and you place too much weight on this historical information. You reason that everything that occurs once is likely to occur again—that lightning not only strikes twice, but prefers to hit the same area repeatedly.
Belief: Beliefs that you deeply held, unquestioned beliefs can exacerbate worry in two ways. To begin, you might feel that concern has predictive potential. A woman who was frightened about her husband leaving her thought that the fact that she was thinking about it so much meant he was about to depart.
The second way belief might imprison you is if you believe in worry’s ability to avoid problems. In this situation, you automatically believe that horrible things haven’t happened to you because your anxiety about them has held them at bay. You have the impression of being a sentry on duty, eternally attentive.
The difficulty with these inaccuracies in risk estimation is that they gradually build your anxiety until it outweighs the threats you’re concerned about.
Prediction of Results
Another thing that affects our anxiety is trying to predict the future. We just assume that we absolutely know what is going to happen, when in reality we have no idea what the future will bring. When we are anxious, we are assuming the worst. What if we chose to think that something positive might happen? Will the outcome be as disastrous as you fear if what you’re worried about happens?
The majority of persons who worry a lot foresee unrealistically bad outcomes. For example, a man may spend all of his time worrying about whether he will lose his job and that he might end up homeless or impoverished. Focusing on this not only causes anxiety, but it will also make the fear more likely to happen due to something that psychologists call the “self-fulfilling prophecy.” However, it may not actually end up happening, just because you fear it will. Most things we fear never end up happening unless we bring them about. It is best to focus on the best possible outcome, in that case, because you will worry less and will be more likely to bring about the positive outcome through the self-fulfilled prophecy.
Worry Exposure
Worry exposure is a technique in which you initially expose yourself to modest or minor worries for few minutes at a time. You progress to more upsetting anxieties once minor worries no longer bring you worry and discomfort. Gradually, you develop the ability to face your major concerns with little or no fear. Worry exposure is very effective because it desensitizes you to the things you fear. This is actually one of the more effective strategies that I used to beat my OCD; I faced one fear at a time and little by little I was able to overcome all of my obsessions and stop doing the compulsive behaviors. They no longer had a hold I me, but I build up my confidence with each fear defeated and got stronger and stronger. I am now in control instead of my fears controlling me.
Worry exposure is a type of protracted imagery exposure in which you are bombarded with frightening images until you become bored of them. Even the most unpleasant material becomes overly familiar and dull with enough time and focused attention, making it less upsetting the next time you encounter it. When you worry on your own, you don’t spend enough time thinking on the worst-case scenario, therefore you don’t get this effect. You try to distract yourself, debate with yourself, retreat into another topic, do ritual checking or avoidance behaviors, and so on when you do “free-form” worrying without a structure, and hence acquire none of the benefits of organized concern exposure.
Worry exposure is also effective since it focuses your worrying time. It’s simpler to free your mind of anxiety for the rest of the day if you know you’ll be worrying a lot during your daily exposure period. There are eight basic methods to exposing yourself to worry:
Step 1: Make a List of Your Concerns
Make a list of the items you’re usually concerned about. Include concerns about success and failure, maintaining relationships, school or work performance, physical risk, health, making mistakes, rejection, and embarrassment over past occurrences, among others.
Step 2: Prioritize Your Concerns
Choose the item on your list of worries that causes you the least worry and write it at the top of a new list. Then write down the second most inconvenient concern. Continue until all of your worries have been reordered.
Step 3: Relax
You’re ready to tackle the first concern on your to-do list. Put yourself in a comfortable position, take a few deep breaths, and practice cue-controlled relaxation. Allow any tightness in your body to go. More on this will be discussed in the next section.
Step 4: Create A Mental Image Of A Worry.
Imagine the first (easiest) thing in your hierarchy of worry in vivid detail. Observe how this circumstance repeats itself. Focus on the worst-case scenario and imagine the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and sensations as if the event were actually happening to you. Using all five senses enhances the realism of your scene. Don’t just look at the scenario from the outside, as if you’re watching a movie. Instead, consider yourself as a participant in the action, right in the middle of it.
Try not to think of any other possibilities. Keep the worst-case scenario in mind. Allowing your thoughts to wander and become distracted is a bad idea. Do this for a total of 25 minutes. To keep track of the time, use a kitchen timer. Even if your anxiousness is high or you’re bored, don’t give up too soon.
A life example (not a real person): Debby pictured herself receiving a call from her Mother, Jane. Jane’s ring tone drew her attention, and she saw her hand reach inside her purse for her phone. As she turned on the phone and held it to her ear, she felt the cool, slippery plastic. “Well hello, stranger,” her mom said, just as she realized, horrified, that Jane’s birthday had passed her by and she hadn’t sent a card, bought a present, or even contacted her. She envisioned Jane sarcastically asking, “So, you’ve been busy, or you just don’t love me anymore?” while she concentrated on the guilt and embarrassment. Debby spent the next twenty-five minutes visualizing this conclusion, going over the scene again and again and adding new elements. She didn’t want to think about other possibilities till the twenty-five minutes were up. If you try this method and find that your worry is mild, nowhere like what it is during a “genuine” worry session, it’s possible that you’re having problems conjuring up vivid imagery. Changing your senses is a good idea. Most people use visual imagery to envision, while some people prefer sounds, textures, or scents. Using visual ideas of being in a vehicle accident.
A life example (not a real person): Elias couldn’t feel very frightened. Then he imagined the noises of screeching tires, metal cracking, glass breaking, and sirens using his other senses. He envisioned the scent of leaking gasoline, blood, and smoke, as well as the texture of asphalt and broken glass. He assessed his anxiety at 95 out of 100 after using these sensory representations.
Step 5: On a Scale Of 0 To 100, Rate Your Peak Anxiety
Rate your highest level of anxiety while imagining. Without ever opening your eyes, you can scribble numbers on a scrap of paper. Use a scale of 0 to 100 to indicate no worry and 100 to indicate the most anxiety you’ve ever had. After the first five minutes, Debby gave her scene a 70. However, later in the action, she became truly terrified and upped the rating to a 90.
Step 6: Consider Different Outcomes
Allow yourself to envision other, less stressful situations after a full twenty-five minutes of visualizing the worst potential outcome. Don’t get started too soon, and once you begin, spend just five minutes picturing a better conclusion than your worst-case scenario. Debby, for example, imagined that she had initiated the call after a full twenty-five minutes of guilt and anguish, and that she had called just one day after her mom’s birthday. She pictured herself apologizing and informing her that a late gift was on its way.
Step 7: Rate Your Anxiety Once More from 0 to 100.
Rate your anxiousness again after five minutes of contemplating different outcomes. It will most likely be significantly lower than your previous score. Debby gave her final scene a perfect score of 30.
Step 8: Repeat Steps 4–7 Twice More.
Repeat steps 4 through 7 with the same worry until your peak anxiety while envisioning the worst potential scenario is 25 or less. Then repeat the process for the following concern in your hierarchy. Every day, do at least one session. You can perform many sessions a day if you have the time and can stomach it. By the time you’ve worked your way through your hierarchy, you should notice a big reduction in your anxiety. Debby worked through her hierarchy in four weeks, averaging one-and-a-half sessions every day.
She was much less nervous throughout that time. She assured herself that if she started to worry, she could put it off until her next scheduled appointment. Debby discovered that her fear of making mistakes and forgetting things was greatly reduced even after she stopped performing frequent worry exposure. When she start to worry, she will recall her exposure sessions, and think to herself, “I’ve already worried this into the ground.”She was typically able to cease worrying or, at the very least, shift to a more balanced appraisal of possible outcomes quite quickly.
Preventing Worry Behavior
To avoid unpleasant things from happening, you may practice or avoid particular actions on a regular basis.
A life example (not a real person): Henry never read the obituaries or drove past the cemetery because he believed that doing so would prevent loved ones from dying. When his mother made a positive prediction, she always knocked on wood.
Such rituals or preventive activities, on the other hand, just serve to increase worry and have no capacity to prevent terrible things from happening. Henry’s purposeful avoidance of the obituaries and the cemetery only served to increase his anxiety about death, despite the fact that he knew logically that such avoidance could not prevent people from dying. The good news is that eliminating these behaviors is a relatively simple five-step process:
1. Keep track of your worrying habits.
2. Choose the easiest behavior to change and forecast the consequences of doing so.
3. Stop or replace the easiest behavior with a new one.
4. Evaluate your anxiety levels before and after the session.
5. Repeat steps 2–4 with the next simplest behavior.
1. Keep Track Of Your Worrying Behavior
Make a list of the things you do or don’t do to avoid the disasters you’re afraid of occurring.
A life example (not a real person): For her events, Jenny chose to prepare an excessive amount of food. “We’d run out of food halfway through the party,” she simply worried.
2. Choose the Easiest Behavior To Change And Forecast The Consequences Of Doing So
Choose the concern behavior that is the easiest to break and write it down. Then write down the expected outcomes.
3. Stop and Replace the Easiest Behavior with a New Behavior
This is the difficult part. You must be a good scientist and conduct the experiment in order to find out if your prediction will come true. Make a promise to yourself that the next time you start worrying, you will not engage in this behavior.
A life example (not a real person): Jenny made the hard decision not to make too much food for her husband’s birthday party. Unfortunately, she couldn’t simply stop worrying; she needed to feed her family. She first considered preparing half the amount of food she normally did. However, judging this was difficult. Finally, she calculated how much food the average party guest at her house ate and how many guests were likely to show up, and then prepared just enough food based on those figures. She resisted the urge to add a fudge factor every time it occurred to her.
If you avoid worrying by not driving past the cemetery or not reading the obituaries, you need to take a different approach, you need to start doing what you’ve been avoiding. Make a habit of driving through the cemetery on your way to work or reading the obituaries with your morning coffee. Even the seemingly easiest behaviors to break aren’t always so simple. In that situation, you’ll need to set up a hierarchy of replacement behaviors that will allow you to gradually reduce your worry.
A life example (not a real person): Lizzy, was a meticulous legal secretary who was concerned about making mistakes on the contracts and briefs of the senior partner. She’d bring a crucial brief home on her laptop and spend hours proofing and reproofing it, fretting over potential errors and altering type sizes and fonts late at night. She ran the entire document through the spell-checker every time she made even the tiniest change.
Lizzy couldn’t bear the concept of spell-checking and proofing a short once and then proclaiming it complete. So she devised this hierarchy and vowed to begin that day with the first (and easiest) thing on her to-do list.
4. Evaluate Your Anxiety Level Before and After The Session
How worried were you when you felt like engaging in your previous behavior but knew you wouldn’t? On a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 indicates no worry, rate your anxiety. Then, using the same scale, judge how worried you felt after doing your new behavior or eliminating your old behavior. Is your anxiousness lessening?
Just before her husband’s birthday party, Jenny, the woman who always prepared too much food for visitors, assessed her worry at a perfect 100. She was relieved to discover that it had shrunk to only 25, by the conclusion of the party, when there was still some food left and the party had been a success. Make careful to pay attention to the actual repercussions as well. What happened as a result of your shift in behavior? Are your doomsday predictions coming true? Jenny’s prophesy did not come true, she did not run out of food in the middle of the celebration. She felt more confident in her abilities to approach a social situation without over thinking it or acting defensively.
5. Repeat Steps 2–4 With The Next Simplest Behavior.
Choose the worry behavior that is the next-easiest to stop from your initial list and repeat the steps, predict what will happen if you don’t do what you’re doing. Then, if appropriate, discontinue it and replace it with a new behavior. Finally, evaluate your degree of worry before and after the trial.
Relaxation
Many of the things individuals do to “relax,” such as watching television, are anything but restful. Your body may be slouched in your chair, but the television has command of your mind, and you are susceptible to all of the pictures it broadcasts. These could make you feel even more stressed.
Relaxation exercise is not the same as what we ordinarily consider to be relaxing. It’s more than just watching a movie to distract you or taking a long, quiet stroll to relax. When psychologists talk about learning to relax, they’re talking about doing one or more of a set of particular relaxation activities on a regular basis. These exercises usually include a combination of deep breathing, muscle relaxation, and visualization techniques that have been shown to relieve muscular tension that the body accumulates during stressful situations. Pay special attention to your forehead, neck, and shoulders when doing any relaxation exercise. Tension can easily manifest itself as a furrowed brow, tight shoulders, and stiff neck.
During your relaxation periods, you’ll notice that your racing thoughts settle down and your sensations of dread, anxiety, and worry diminish significantly. It’s hard to experience fear, anxiety and worry when your body is entirely calm.
Herbert Benson, a cardiologist, investigated in 1975, how the body changes when a person is deeply relaxed. Benson noticed that heart rate, breath rate, blood pressure, skeletal muscle tension, metabolic rate, oxygen consumption, and skin electrical conductivity all decreased during the relaxation reaction. On the other side, the frequency of alpha brain waves, which is connected with a feeling of calm and wellness, increased. Every one of these bodily disorders is the polar opposite of the body’s reactions to anxiety, fear, and worry. Anxiety and deep calm are physiological polar opposites.
This section focuses on very effective relaxation techniques that may be used on a regular basis to achieve deep levels of relaxation.
Breathing from the Abdomen
The muscles in the wall of your abdomen are one group of muscles that typically stiffen up in response to stress. When your abdominal muscles are tight, they press against your diaphragm as it descends to take a breath. This pushing movement limits the amount of air you can inhale while forcing the air you do inhale to stay in the top section of your lungs.
You’ll probably feel as if you’re not getting enough oxygen if your breathing is high and shallow. This is stressful, and it triggers brain warnings that you are in danger. Instead of relaxing your abdominal muscles and taking deeper breaths to compensate for the shortage of oxygen, you may take rapid, shallow breaths.
By relaxing the muscles that press against your diaphragm and reducing your breath rate, abdominal breathing reverses this process. Three or four deep belly breaths might help you relax nearly immediately. Abdominal breathing is typically simple to master. To learn this basic yet highly powerful ability, practice the following exercise for around 10 minutes:
1. Lie down and close your eyes. Take a moment to notice your body’s sensations, especially where you’re holding any stress. Take a few deep breaths and note what you notice about your breathing quality. What is the core of your breath? Are your lungs fully expanded? When you breathe, does your chest move in and out? Do you have a stomach ache?
2. Place one hand on your chest and the other below your waist on your abdomen. Imagine sending your breath as far down into your body as it will go as you breathe in. As your lungs fill with air, feel them expand. The hand on your chest should stay relatively static while the hand on your abdomen rises and falls with each breath. If you’re having trouble moving your hand on your abdomen, or if both hands are moving, gently press down with your hand on your abdomen. Direct the air such that it pushes up against the pressure of your hand, pushing it to rise as you breathe.
3. Continue to gently inhale and exhale. Allow your breath to establish its own rhythm. Maintain your awareness of that sensation while you breathe in and out if your breathing feels unnatural or forced in any way. Any straining or unnaturalness should eventually go away on its own.
4. Start counting each time you exhale after you’ve been breathing deeply for a few breaths. Restart the count with one after ten exhalations. When your mind wanders and you lose sight of the number you’re counting, simply return your focus to the exercise and begin counting from one again. Count your breaths for ten minutes, paying special attention to whether the hand on your abdomen continues to rise with each breath.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Progressive muscular relaxation (PMR) is a relaxation technique in which you contract and relax all of your body’s muscle groups in a precise order. Edmund Jacobson, a physician and psychiatrist, invented the approach in 1929. He discovered that the body stores tension in the muscles in response to anxious and frightening thoughts, and that this tension may be released by purposefully contracting the muscles beyond their typical tension threshold and then relaxing them rapidly. He learned that if he repeated the method with each muscle group in his body, he could achieve a deep level of relaxation.
You’ll get the physical benefits that Herbert Benson characterized as the relaxation response if you practice PMR. More importantly, if you practice PMR on a regular basis for several months, you will see a dramatic reduction in the quantity of anxiety, anger, worry and other negative emotions that arise in your life.
Muscle Relaxation in Shorthand
Although the basic PMR process is a fantastic way to relax, going through all of the different muscle groups sequentially takes so long that it’s not a realistic tool for on-the-spot relaxation. You should master the following shorthand PMR method to swiftly relax your body.
The key to shorthand PMR is learning to relax the muscles in each of the four body parts at the same time. Each muscle group will be tight and held for seven seconds, followed by a twenty-second relaxation period. As you gain experience, you may find that you require less time to tense and relax. The stages for shorthand PMR are as follows:
1. Make fists with your biceps and forearms flexed. Tension should be held for seven seconds before relaxing for twenty seconds.
2. Lean back in your chair as far as you can. Roll it in a complete circle clockwise once, then counterclockwise once. Wrinkle your face while you do this, as though you’re trying to get every part of it to meet at your nose. Relax. Tense your jaw and throat muscles, as well as your shoulders, before relaxing.
3. Take a deep breath while gently arching your back. Hold this stance for a few moments before relaxing. Take another long breath, pushing your stomach out as you inhale, and then relax.
4. Tighten your calf and shin muscles while pointing your toes up toward your face, then relax. Curl your toes while tightening the muscles in your calf, thigh, and buttocks, then relax.
Tension-free relaxation
You should be able to recognize and release muscle tension after seven to fourteen PMR practice sessions. After that, you may not need to contract each muscle group intentionally before relaxing it. Instead, run your focus through the four places of the body in order to check for tension. If any tension arises, simply let it go, just like you did after each contraction in the PMR exercises.
Maintain your focus and pay attention to each sensation. Working with each muscle group until they appear to be completely relaxed is the goal. Tighten that one muscle or muscle group and then release the tension if you come to a region that feels tight and won’t let go. This method is even quicker than using PMR shorthand. It’s also a good technique to relax tense muscles that you don’t want to exacerbate.
Cue-controlled relaxation
Cue-controlled relaxation combines a verbal instruction with abdominal breathing to teach you how to relax your muscles whenever you desire. Get into a comfortable position first, and then release as much tension as you can utilizing the above-mentioned strategy for relaxing without tension. Make your breaths slow and rhythmic, focusing on your tummy as it goes in and out with each breath. Allow yourself to relax more and more with each breath.
Then, with each inhalation, repeat the phrase “breathe in,” and on each exhalation, repeat the phrase “relax.” While letting go of tension throughout your body, repeat to yourself, “Breathe in…Relax…breathe in…Relax.” Repeat the cue words with each breath for a total of five minutes.
The cue-controlled strategy trains your body to identify the word “relax” with a sense of calm. You’ll be able to relax your muscles anytime, anywhere by mentally repeating “breathe in… relax,” and releasing any stiffness throughout your body when you’ve done this technique for a long and the association is strong. Cue-controlled relaxation can relieve stress in less than a minute and is a key component of worry, anxiety, and anger management treatment strategies.
Visualizing a Calm Environment
Another technique to relax is to create a quiet scene in your mind that you may access whenever you’re feeling anxious. The location for your serene scene should be one that you find appealing and interesting. When you visualize it, it will be a place that makes you feel safe and secure, a place where you can let your guard down and truly rest.
Finding your peaceful setting
Take a few minutes to sit or lie down in a comfortable posture and practice cue-controlled relaxation. Visualization works best when you’re completely relaxed, so give yourself plenty of time to unwind.
Simply request that your unconscious show you your serene scene. In your mind’s eye, a picture may begin to shape.
Alternatively, you may imagine a word, phrase, or sound that will begin to bring an image to life. Whatever the case may be, don’t be alarmed if an image appears. Accept this as a setting with a calming effect on you.
If a scenario doesn’t emerge to you right away, pick a place or an activity that interests you. Right now, where would you prefer to be? Is it better to be in the country, the woods, or a meadow? Are you on a boat? Are you staying in a cabin? Where did you grow up? At your childhood home? In a penthouse with a view of Central Park?
After your imagination has settled on a scene, take note of the objects in the scene. Look at the colors and shapes they have. What are the sounds you’re hearing? What scents can you detect in the air? What exactly are you up to? What bodily feelings are you experiencing? Make an effort to take in all of the details of the scene. No matter how hard you attempt to bring portions of your scene into focus, they may stay foggy or obscure. This is quite natural. Don’t expect to be disappointed. You’ll be able to flesh out the details and make your scene more vivid with practice.
Visualization skill
Visualization is a skill. Like many skills, such as drawing, cabinet making, or sewing, some people are initially more adept at it than others. You may be a person who can sit down and re-create a scene so clearly that you feel like you’re actually there. Or you might find it difficult to see anything at all. Even if you aren’t a natural at visualization, you can develop this skill with practice. By visualizing a peaceful and calm scene, it helps to calm down your muscles and relaxation becomes effective.
Peacefulness
People are living in tension, fear, anxiety and worry in an increasingly insecure society. Every day, horrific scenes of death and damage can be observed. However, even in these trying times, God’s children can be at rest, confident and have peace knowing that their future is always safe in God’s hands.
Peace is defined in one way by culture and society, while it is defined in another way by the Bible. The cultural or societal perspective emphasizes the importance of self-actualization and the absence of interpersonal conflict. When people talk of peace, they usually do it in the context of freedom, both for society and for individuals. Although most people recognize that freedom has a price, freedom alone does not guarantee inner peace of mind and spirit.
The word “Peace” is derived from the Hebrew word “Shalom”, which means soundness, prosperity, and complete well-being. Nothing is lacking or damaged in the lives of God’s people, according to Shalom. In the Old Testament, according to (Job 22:21), inner shalom was a gift given to the virtuous who decided to believe in God. (Isaiah 26:3) “You will maintain in complete peace him whose mind is steadfast because he believes in you”. God already promise his children peace above all worries, anxiety, fear and anything that brings unhappiness. All you have to do, is make sure your mind is fixed on God and you completely believe him.
Many of the psalms are concerned with peace; examples are (Psalm 4:8, 29:11, 119:165). Shalom is the serenity that comes from a perfectly at ease spirit, soul, and body as a result of perfect faith in God.
Jesus is called the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6), while God is the God of Peace (Romans 5:1) and (Romans 15:33). Jesus spoke about peace when he said in (John 14:27). ” Peace is what I leave with you, it is my own peace that I give you. I do not give it as the world does. Do not be worried and upset, do not be afraid”.
One of the most powerful verses on how to find and maintain peace is (Philipians 4:6-7)
“Don’t worry about anything, but in all your prayers ask God for what you need, always asking him with a thankful heart. And God’s peace, which is far beyond human understanding, will keep your hearts and minds safe in union with Christ Jesus”.
We understand from Scripture that God’s plan for his children is to have peace, but many people experience the reverse, living in constant tension because they have neglected this part of perfect peace from God, that comes when their hearts and minds is stayed on God.
Peacefulness is important in times of worry and anxiety because peace relaxes your mind and heart, by taking it from your worry and fixing it on God. What relaxation do to your body, peace does the same to your mind and heart.
EXERCISE 2
Re-arrange the prevention of worry behavior below in their right order and add an example to each of the prevention.
– Evaluate your anxiety prior to and after the exercise.
– Select the easiest behavior to avoid and project the results of avoiding it.
– Repeat step 2-4 with the next easiest action.
– Replace the easiest behavior with a new behavior, or stop the easiest behavior.
– Log your worrying activities.
Dr. Amanda Smith 