Is Having Anxiety a Lack of Faith?
what happens when you trust God with eternity, but spend your days giving your brain evidence that tomorrow is a dangerous place
Why can sincere Christians trust God and still struggle with anxiety? The answer may have less to do with what you believe and more to do with what your brain sees you repeatedly doing.
Dr. Sam said, “Your body is a fortress.”
“Really? Mine feels more like a prison,” I replied. “I see how a fortress protects the people inside. But my prison “protects” me from ever leaving.”
I mean, I get occasional yard time, a good day here, a little freedom there. But if danger is imminent, and for most of my life it’s felt that way, then it’s back to the safety of my cell for me.
Which raises an interesting question: How does a fortress become a prison?
Slowly, and one reasonable decision at a time. And, not because it stopped protecting you, but because it started protecting you from everything: disappointment, uncertainty, surprise, vulnerability, you name it.
It’s like my mind became obsessed with trying to create a future that couldn’t hurt me, and I happily went along. Turns out prisons are hard to recognize while you’re building ‘em, but build one we did, me and my brain.
But don’t get me wrong, I’m not controlling. I’m just discerning.
At least that’s what I told myself.
After all, somebody has to be thinking about what might go wrong. And, I nominate myself.
The irony of it all is that this power-grab happened while I was sincerely trying to trust God. I mean, I trust Him with my salvation. I trust Him with eternity, I just want a little co-ownership of tomorrow.
The real issue is that I subconsciously think uncertainty is an emergency. And my brain responds exactly the way brains respond to emergencies: it pays hyper-attention. It monitors. It anticipates and prepares. It looks for patterns. It runs simulations, and it gathers evidence, keeping one eye on the present and the other on every possible future that might be headed my way.
Like a helicopter parent, my overprotective brain takes my life into its own hands in order to assure my ultimate safety, and in so doing, it became my destruction.
My brain doesn’t need proof that I’m in danger; all it needs is a sneaking suspicion. I mean, this headache could be happening because I’m getting cancer. That conversation could have just ended the relationship. This business venture might leave me homeless. And worst of all, my child might have to suffer, and I just can’t bear that.
Anxiety keeps my mind living on a tiny plot of land in the savannah, with a hungry predator on my heels, sneaking up on me and chasing me round and round the watering hole until I’m so tired I can’t even sleep, all I can do is keep running.
All this, because my brain thinks, “If I keep checking, there must be a reason I’m checking. And if I keep researching, there must be something urgent I need to figure out. If I’m keeping watch, there must be a predator.”
And when I’m that vigilant, my brain isn’t listening to my theology; it’s listening to my behavior.
This is the exact truth Dr. Sam, and I unpack in The Overprotective Brain: Your brain is always learning from the story you repeatedly tell it. Not the story you claim to believe, but the story you rehearse, talk about, and practice.
Did you know your brain believes your behavior, more than your theology? And that’s why so many believers can trust God and still struggle with anxiety.
I actually find it easy to believe God is in control and still spend three hours rehearsing every possible terrible future.
I can believe He provides and simultaneously obsess over the outcomes I can’t control.
I can even believe God is with my child, while monitoring, anticipating, preparing, and worrying as if her future rests entirely on my shoulders.
And the reason: anxiety became my nature because my brain got confused by the evidence I kept giving it. I mean, I can’t spend all day acting as though the world is a terrifying, unsafe place and then wonder why my brain agrees with me.
But there’s some good news in all of this: if the brain learns danger by experiencing danger, either real or imagined, then it can learn safety the same way.
So I set out to give my overprotective brain evidence that I could stop running and nothing terrible would happen. That I could give up control, and the world wouldn’t implode. To do that, I had to stop giving my nervous system reasons to run, like having more to do than time to do it.
And instead, I allowed myself to just sit and breathe in His presence without an agenda or a place to go, proving to my nervous system that I wasn’t alone on the savannah with a predator, but safe with a Shepherd in green pastures.
This might seem like a no-duh moment, or an oversimplification, but my anxiety needed the easiest and smallest prescription it could get, so that’s what I gave it, because, if suspicion is enough to teach my brain danger, then repeated small experiences of no danger are enough to teach it all is well.
Why doesn’t anybody ever teach us that attention isn’t neutral; it’s the instruction your brain takes on how to think and feel. So the goal isn’t to convince your brain that danger doesn’t exist, but to prove that danger isn’t the only thing that exists.
Have you noticed how the Bible seems remarkably uninterested in making danger the central character of the story? So many people of God lived with real danger, even predators lurking, but they seemed completely convinced that danger wouldn’t have the final word.
In the lion’s den, the danger was real, but there was a presence more powerful than it, and Daniel’s eyes were on Him. And in the fiery furnace, death was imminent, but that danger wasn’t all that existed because there literally was Protection in the fire with them.
The problem with anxiety is that it obscures the real story until all we can see is the lion and the fire. But the lions and the furnace, even death itself, though a part of the story, were not the whole story.
Anxiety has a way of reducing the world to whatever feels most threatening in the moment. But faith expands the picture by remembering that God’s presence, purposes, resources, and faithfulness are still there in spite of all the imminent threats around us.
For years, I assumed that to have faith, I had to convince myself that everything was going to be okay. A feat I rarely achieved. But faith doesn’t give us certainty about the outcome; it gives us confidence in the presence of God.
Which is why I’ve spent the last year completely captivated by the overprotective brain. What started as a conversation with Dr. Sam Tyriver about chronic pain turned into hundreds of hours of neuroscience research and eventually a book, called, not surprisingly, The Overprotective Brain, which releases this August.
But the research didn’t just change how I think about pain. It changed how I think about anxiety, faith, uncertainty, and even my own relationship with God. I started to see how often I was treating uncertainty like an emergency and vigilance like some kind of virtue. And I think I can say that most of my suffering isn’t coming from what I’m experiencing, but from what my brain is trying to keep me from experiencing.
I guess the real question is what story is my attention teaching my brain?
Because if someone followed me around for a week and watched what I monitor, rehearse, research, anticipate, and prepare for, would their conclusion be that I think danger is the main character in my story? Or that God is?