Why Anxiety Doesn't Have to Control Your Life Anymore

So we are trying to control things that we just need to surrender. You can't change your husband. You can't change that kid. You cannot change necessarily the health diagnosis today. Like, you got to pray about it. You got to ask for miraculous healing and intervention. You got to do what you're supposed to do and then just keep giving it back to them. You can't always immediately change your financial situation. There are certain things you just got to give over. Y'all, Inside Out 2 threw me for a whole loop. If you have not seen that movie, you should see that movie. If you haven't seen Inside Out 1, watch Inside Out 1 before you watch Inside Out 2. But I'm so grateful that we can have basically like 3 to 6 months worth of therapy in 2 movies and only pay under $20 for it. If you have not seen 1 and 2, go see them both. But in Inside Out 2, y'all, Anxiety was losing her mind. And there's this scene where she, because of Anxiety, wants to control everything. And her control spins out of control, so much so that she is spinning and can't stop the spinning. She just is going in figure eights and she can't stop. And everybody outside of her is looking at like, "Oh my gosh, she's having a whole experience and she cannot stop herself. And we're gonna have to intervene." For some of us, that is worry. For some of that is control. For some of it, it is working too hard. For some of it is pleasuring too hard. There's something in our lives that left to our own devices, we cannot stop. When you cannot stop feeling anxious and operating from an anxious place, it can throw your whole life out of whack. So on "Inside Out 2," she doesn't just show us what anxiety is. She shows us what happens when anxiety hijacks somebody's emotional overall wellbeing, and then the anxiety feeds itself and you have to have it interrupted from the inside out, literally, or from the outside in. Someone else, maybe it's a therapist, maybe it's a friend, people see you spiraling out and they have to say, "Wake up, girl. Uh-uh." We're not going to do that today. Or sometimes it's medicine, or sometimes it is someone who loves you, like literally saying, "It's okay." Like they're shaking you awake. Sometimes we have to do this with children, right? I've had children that are throwing a tantrum on the floor or they're so worried. So recently, JT, my only grandson out of the 5 grandchildren, he came over to spend the night. And when he crawled into the bed, he said, "Are you sure this is safe?" I was like, "Yes, it is safe." He said, "But are you sure? Because this ladder seems kind of thin." And I'm like, "Yes, it's okay. Your uncles crawled up in this bed from the time they were little itty-bitty until the time they were big, big, big." And he said, "But Chrissy, are you sure?" Then he crawled on the bed and the bed shook. He said, "Chrissy, the bed shook." And I was like, "Yes, it's okay. It's always shaking like that." "Are you sure it's not going to fall down? Because Josie, his little sister, Josie is down there. I don't want—" I mean, he was having a whole situation. He was having a whole experience. And I had to say, "JT," and I put my hand on his leg. I said, "I would not put you up here." If I thought that there was any chance that you would fall, you have to trust me. But he was having a situation. Anxiety can rob you of your peace. Anxiety can rob you of your ability to make decisions. Anxiety can rob you of moving forward. And so I want to talk a little bit about anxiety because even though I am not naturally an anxious person, I have definitely had circumstances in my life that because they seem so beyond my control, or maybe too many things were stacked at the same time, I have felt a stone on my chest, my mind racing, my heart racing, the inability to make decisions. I have felt my body trying to keep up with all the things my mind was worried about. Normally for me, anxiety shows up in my body. That's how I know anxiety can make us overwork. Anxiety can make us overfunction. It can make us irritated. It can make us controlling. Anxiety can make us want to order our world in a way that we can't keep up with, and the people in our world can't keep up with two. Anxiety will make us shut other people out, not engage with community, not utilize support. Anxiety can give us physical symptoms, stomach ache, fatigue, headaches, physical aches. So identifying anxiety in your life, the kind where it's just a little feeling for today, or maybe it is a big feeling that you can't unravel from, it's important because anxiety, the only thing that it does is serve a purpose to alert you that you are more concerned with something than you should be. And the immediate reaction Action should be, how do I reduce anxiety? Because anxiety is going to make your cortisol run wild. It's going to make your adrenaline function. And that, that can be good. The Lord has woken me up in the middle of the night to pray for someone, and it was associated with a feeling of anxiety. One of my children— called him in the middle of the night, where are you? He was out. And I said, well, the Lord woke me up to pray for you, so that must mean you need to get your tail home. It can be a tool. God can work in your body to use anxiety as a tool. I'm talking about living there. So you have to know how to pay attention to it because being affected by anxiety can be information. But when it becomes over, over, then it can show up in unacceptable, socially unacceptable ways. You can become difficult to engage with at work because you're always just trying so hard to protect your peace that it it throws other people into having to serve your peace, not serve the shared mission. It can also show up as you being Type A or doing too much because you have to make sure that every little i is dotted and every little t is crossed. It can look like inserting yourself into situations with people that you love because if you don't tell them how to do it, they're not going to be able to do it right. That's called helicopter parenting, and helicopter parenting does not necessarily serve your children well. So anxiety, which is the inability to shake off a concern or a worry, the inability to take a next step— that's how Chrystal Hurst defines it. Let me look up how the dictionary defines it. That's me. You can't get rid of it. It is a feeling of worry, nervousness, or dis-ease, unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. Anxiety is a feeling of worry that then compounds. So when I think about anxiety, I'm thinking about the compounding worry and the impact of that on your life. So the question is, what do you do with it? Well, I think first of all, you need to look at the root. Where is this coming from and why am I feeling this way? Anxiety could be physical. I'm worried about my health. Anxiety could come from medications. It could come from lack of self-care. You're not getting enough sleep. You're not eating the right foods. It could be a physical symptom that's telling you something that's happening with your physical body. Or maybe the source is emotional because maybe life is hard and maybe you have anxiety about experiencing something again. Like, you know, he already cheated on you once. So if you call him and he doesn't call you back, you have anxiety because you, you know, hell and high water, he ain't gonna cheat on you again. So before you get to mad, you get to anxiety. Anxiety could be, you know, being around the pool. If you had someone in your family drown in a pool, you're gonna have a lot of anxiety with your kids being around the pool. So Anxiety can come from emotional things that are attached to the reality of your life. It can be current circumstances, past circumstances, or just you needing to have certain things organized in a certain way to be able to function. It can be spiritual and an orientation about the future where you can't lay your future at the feet of Jesus and trust that he has it. You feel like if you don't know what's happening, God knowing isn't enough. It's where you play the what-if game, not where you're not saying to the Lord, like, if the Lord wills, if this day comes, it's like What if the day comes? What if I'm not here to raise my kids? What if I don't have enough money in the bank? What if, what if? And it orients itself around negative possibilities. You mentally and spiritually are organizing yourself around negative possibilities. And the truth is some of the what-ifs could happen. But when you get the what-if, if you take the what-if and if you hand it to the Lord, because he tells us he wants us to experience peace, he wants us to bring everything to him in prayer. He doesn't want you to live with the rumination of it. And that's the issue with the figuring-ating of the anxiety emotion in Inside Out 2. She didn't just feel it, she then had to control every little thing or she was going to lose her mind. So giving God your anxiety, no matter where it comes from, is always going to be a part of the solution. Philippians 4:5-7, be anxious for nothing, but in everything, every situation, by prayer and petition, make your requests known unto God with thanksgiving. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guide your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus. Because prayer and gratitude are a part of God's exchange. Just because you experience anxiety doesn't mean you have to live with anxiety. It doesn't mean you have to accept that it's an ongoing part of your life. It's an exchange. And the better you get at bringing those concerns before the Lord and saying, I'm feeling this all in my body, I'm worried about this, I can't shake this, I keep struggling with this— you keep bringing it back to him. And the more you bring it back, the That exchange allows you to feel it and release it. Prayer allows you to express your fears and concerns and your needs to God and ask for his help. And gratitude helps to steer your focus on the gifts he's already given you. And this exchange sets you up for a better experience with whatever you happen to be worried about. Moving through anxiety means you have to address the roots. You have to ask yourself, am I doing what I need to do to take care of myself physically? You need to ask Am I dealing with emotions? Is anxiety a buildup of some things that I just haven't dealt with? Is anxiety a sign that you need help? There's actually too much for you to do, and trying to hold on to everything and keep things in a certain order is because you can't afford for it to be out of order. Because if, by golly, you got to clean it up, you need to keep it a certain way. Maybe the answer isn't that you have to keep it in a certain way. Maybe it's that you need to hire help. Maybe it's certain things just don't get done. Anxiety will ruin your life because it will take everything that's going to already come at you and and it will send it to you at 120 miles an hour unnecessarily. You're worried about it before it gets there, and your body is absorbing all that concern, and your body is not designed to live that way. So if you don't forcefully and intentionally make that exchange— I'm worried about this, Lord. I'm still worried about this. Can you help me with this? Can you give me a scripture that brings you peace? I'm going to talk about this and ask other people to pray for me— if you're not exchanging that worry, it shortcuts your life. And in Inside Out 2, that's what they were so worried about, was the shortcutting of the young human girl's life because she wasn't able to make an exchange. So my encouragement for you today is to not allow anxiety to take control, to allow it to put you in a cycle of fear and thinking. To exchange for what God offers and let him exchange for you to have peace for the anxiety that he wants you to give him. Now, again, this may not be a one-time deal. And often for me, it's not. Anxiety is, you know, every 10 minutes sometimes. Anxiety is I'm feeling it rising up and I need to take a deep breath and calm my sympathetic nervous system. It might be that I need to slow down. Some of us are raising anxious kids because we're always rushing. I want you to understand that any negative emotion that you have, Any negative emotion is strictly there so you can know where the pain point is. You don't have pain in your body just because you have pain in your body. You have pain in your body to alert you to give something a chance to heal. And if you ignore it, the damage goes deeper. Anxiety is the same way. It just is supposed to let you know there's something that I need to heal. But for you to live there, constantly. You need to figure it out. Melanie Walker, one of our Inner Circle members, said in our chat, 2024 was one of my most anxious years ever. And that resonated with me. And I think that that's probably been the case. I have had the most responsibility with the least amount of support this year. I have had the most amount of decision-making to make with the least amount of excess cash. This year. I have had the most amount of things that I've been trying to get to with the least amount of progress this year. And the anxiety of, can I move forward? How do I move forward? Should I even keep trying to move forward? What does moving forward even look like? Do I flip the whole thing on its head? In my home, um, was just trying to get things in order. I'm like, my mother has been gone for 5 years and there are still some things I should have done that I haven't done. Feeling behind gives me a great sense of anxiety. And I've walked with that every day of this year. And I have had to remind myself of a few things, but one thing most importantly, my God owns a cattle on a thousand hills. Whatever I need, he can supply. I've had to keep telling myself that over and over again. And he's like a good father. And a good father won't give his son a stone if he asks for fish. My God is a good father who is a God of abundance. Who likes to give to me. He— I gotta work, I gotta obey, I've got to prioritize his kingdom, but he is invested in partnering with me in my life. It's not about me, but as I work to give him glory, that glory sure does coat me in good. And I've had too many times just lay in bed a little longer. I've had to many times sit in my car for a little bit. Many times I've just had to lay there and breathe. I've needed to journal, I've needed to throw up, I've needed to talk. I've needed to ask for wise counsel. I've needed to go get a doggone massage and just practice releasing because anxiety is not supposed to be a ball of figure eights going off in your system all the time. And I know so many of us are disposed at varying depths to anxiety, but I'm saying If anxiety is where you're living, in Inside Out 2, she needed external interruption to break the cycle. And the best way that I know for you to break the cycle with external interruption is find somebody to pray with. Get on the phone every morning, do a prayer call, the old school prayer call, you know, or once a week and say, I need prayer to give this back to the Lord again. You know, we have in the Inner Circle, y'all, we have a prayer group, we have a spiritual growth group so people can study their word. We have a prayer group so you can come and get it off your chest. You just need to say, y'all, I don't— I ask for prayer for this every day. Can somebody pray for me? I need prayer. We are walking through and studying through, uh, you know, Priscilla's book at church. But y'all, a lot of it is that we haven't done this. We haven't surrendered So we are trying to control things that we just need to surrender. You can't change your husband. You can't change that kid. You cannot change necessarily the health diagnosis today. Like, you got to pray about it. You got to ask for miraculous healing and intervention. You got to do what you're supposed to do and then just keep giving it back to them. You can't always immediately change your financial situation. There are certain things you just got to give over, because if you keep doing this, things are going to blow. You're going to shave years off of your life. You're going to give yourself a migraine. You're not going to be a good person to be around. You're going to trade relationship for this feeling that I have to do it. I have to do it right. And I have to do it right now. And when you come and you say, Lord, I have done everything I know how to do with this kid. I've done everything I know how to do with this marriage. I'm doing everything I know how to do with my finances. If there's something else for me to do, Would you show me? I trust that you'll show me. And in the meantime, would you give me grace to navigate the season that I'm in? I need more money. I'm looking for a side hustle, a part-time job. I need a raise. God, would you guide me towards the right option? And then would you make it in plain sight? I wish I could change my husband. I wish I could change our marriage. I wish I could figure out how to reach his heart, reach his soul, and reach his mind. Is he cheating on me? Is he doing what, you know, is he doing that this or that other again? Is he gambling away our money? Is he out there substance abusing? There's so much I wish I could control, but he's a grown man. He's not sharing his location. And there's only so much I could do. Bring to light everything that I need to know. I put him and my relationship with him in your hands. Do you see the difference? And you just keep giving it over. You just keep giving it over. You just keep giving it over. Anxiety is worry compounded. Anxiety is your body engaged. Anxiety not dealt with is years from your life. So in order for you to do well, you can't live there. If you live with doubt, you'll never accomplish anything. If you live in fear, you'll never go in and take the land. And if you live with anxiety, you will shorten your time, because your body wasn't made to carry that level of angst all the time. So my call to you today is to release anxiety and release it over and over and over again if that's what you have to do. Why? Because where God wants to take you and what he wants to do in your life, he needs you to trust him in order for him to do it. And a person that's in full-on anxiety will not trust and hold anxiety simultaneously. But if you choose to trust, you can release some of the anxiety that you're holding onto. It may not be all of it, but it definitely will be some of it. And it'll change the way you interact with the world.