Your heart rate starts to rise, your shoulders tense up, you just can’t seem to shake the feeling of dread that comes over you...if these feelings are familiar, chances are you’ve experienced some type of anxiety. Now, there are helpful and unhelpful forms of anxiety and by the end of this one-week standalone talk, students will learn the differences between these and be encouraged to take steps through the difficult feelings that so many of us face. We know anxiety is at an all-time high but what, if anything, does God do to help us? Let’s talk about it as we raise the bar on the conversation about anxiety.
Here’s what we all know: Anxiety is something a lot of people are dealing with. But from my own experience, and most likely from some of your own experiences, the feelings of anxiety we face can make us feel like we’re all alone. Feeling alone, or like no one else can understand our anxieties, might be the reason why so many of us try to find ways to avoid dealing with our anxiety. What I mean is, we try to cut corners instead of facing our anxieties head-on. Instead of figuring out how to really deal with unhelpful anxiety in a way that gets it under control or at least helps us manage it effectively, we do all sorts of other things to try to get around having to take the really hard steps of dealing with it. Here’s the issue with the way so many of us typically approach anxiety: Trying to avoid, fix, eliminate, and go around anxiety doesn’t seem to be helping. If pushing through, avoiding, or ignoring aren’t working, is there a better way to deal with
anxiety?