How I became free of anxiety Series
The Overview: My teaching series “how I became free of anxiety” is broken down into the 13 areas that I chose to make real change in my life and learned to do consistently to become free of anxiety.
What anxiety was to me, the exhausted life:
I’m not delving into a medical, philosophical, psychological or theological study of anxiety. Plenty of others have done this and information is readily available for further personal education. Here I am going to speak to what anxiety was to me personally.
A sick feeling in my stomach. Tightness in my chest. Tenseness in my muscles. Fog in my brain. A feeling of being frozen inside. A sense of impending calamity. I couldn’t describe where the danger was, but I felt “in danger”. There was deep within me a sensation I’ll call angst. Angst meaning an intense feeling of apprehension, anguish and inner turmoil. The angst seemed to lodge in my stomach and chest creating physical sensations of discomfort, even pain. Can you relate?
No wonder I was always tired, right!
What I had to learn to become free and practice consistently to maintain that freedom:
I had to learn:
- To recognize I was causing the anxiety and panic attacks with my scary, negative and catastrophic thinking.
- To Trust God. To commune with the Holy Spirit. To Choose God, not anxiety.
- To police my thought life and eradicate unlawful thinking.
- To comfort myself, using the Truth. How to tell myself I am going to be okay.
- To stop thinking catastrophically, jumping to the worst possible outcome.
- To choose to view the future with curiosity and ambition, not dread and fearful inaction.
- To evaluate and set realistic, achievable expectations. What if thinking (negative projection vs Planning). The art of confident creative problem solving.
- To understand social anxiety, becoming comfortable with me.
- To realize that anxiety wants to have me.
- That anxiety will NOT tell me who I am, what I have, where I’m at or what I can do.
- To motivate, encourage and push myself to do all I can do, trusting God for the outcome.
- To care for my body.
- To know that there is an anticipatory anxiety that is normal and how to distinguish between a healthy excitement and a destructive anxiety.
The journey to freedom took me a while. I received some immediate relief knowing there were steps I could take to unlearn anxiousness and learn peace. Learning the Truth and to live in intimacy with God was the cure. I will elaborate in the teaching series on each of the 13 things I had to learn/change. We are not meant to travel the road to freedom alone. Invite the Holy Spirit into your anxiousness, get counselling, prayer, fellowship with other believers regularly and KNOW that God has a plan for your life and that plan is a GOOD plan. Get into agreement with His work in your life and ask for help if you need it. LITS would love to walk with you on your journey to freedom, we have programs just for you. We offer one to one ministry, Friday night group meetings and teaching materials on the subject of anxiety and how to become free from it. If we can help you let us know!
Awesome! This will help so many people!