The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

by Curtis Chang

Meeting Jesus is the starting point of all Christian spiritual growth.

Anxiety is about tomorrow, the future. Anxiety tries to make us fear something that could happen later. It is not about something happening right now. Consider again the specific worry you just identified. Ask yourself, To which time frame is this anxiety taking me? Is it the past, the present, or the future? Jesus would say every one of your anxieties abducts you from the present and carries you into some imagined future scenario. Even if the anxiety was triggered by a past event—for example, a disagreement with a supervisor last week—anxiety harasses you by projecting you into the future with an imagined scenario like, What if my supervisor gives me a bad review next quarter?

The blueprint came to life in my mind. Its imaginary future of loss became my current reality—which is why my body responded as if I were actually losing my daughters, my wife, and even my life, and I started hyperventilating.

When Jesus teaches about anxiety in Matthew 6, he realizes his listeners are fixated on getting the blueprint of our future as it pertains to things—what you will eat, what you will drink, what you will wear (verse 25). Notice what he does. He seeks to shift his listeners to the who. He redirects them to the present reality and character of their Father God. He summarizes this shift in verse 32: “For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all” (ESV, emphasis added).

If we remain fixated on the what, the blueprint, we will gradually lose the Who of God. We will lose our access to the personal presence of God not because he will reject us or abandon us. He won’t do that. But we will lose the personal presence of God because from our end, we will increasingly treat God as an impersonal mechanism. We will relate to our Father God the way we might relate to a computer printer that generates blueprints for the future.

You cannot feel anxious when you are fully present.

People struggling with anxiety naturally look for such outs.

There is a critical difference between a thought present within us and a thought becoming us. Anxiety inescapably afflicts the human condition, but we are not meant to bond with our anxiety. Paul’s encouragement in Philippians 4:6—“Do not be anxious”—implies it is possible to differentiate ourselves from anxiety. It is possible to “not be your anxious thoughts.” Anxious thoughts will come, but we do not become them. We can differentiate. You also can recognize that you are not your hijacker.

“My name is Legion.” What a startling answer. Legion was the name of the basic unit of the Roman army, the force oppressing the land of Israel at the time (the unit numbered two thousand men, which explains Mark’s inclusion of the number of pigs listed in Mark 5:13). There are multiple possible layers to this revelation. Certainly, this name confirms the biblical worldview that dark spiritual forces are behind human forms of oppression, and these spiritual forces can hijack an individual’s very identity. Does the revelation of “Legion” mean this hijacking occurred because this man was himself a victim of Roman brutality? Or perhaps this man was one of the many native militants who was obsessively consumed by a hatred of the Roman invaders, such that over time he had fused himself with a narrative of violent retribution? In other words, was he an ancient and extreme version of those today who have given over their identities to our political conflicts? We aren’t given the full backstory, so these are just conjectures.

The analogy between the demon-possessed Gerasene and our anxiety only goes so far. While specific anxious thoughts can be cast out (often over time), our underlying anxious nature cannot be sent over a cliff and banished forever. Anxiety is part of the human condition. To banish KFEAR entirely is to reject something of my humanity. KFEAR exists within me, and I am more human when I recognize this reality.

While anxiety can lurk unnoticed by our conscious mind, many telltale bodily signs can allow us to grow our recognition skills. Here are some common physical symptoms of anxiety: stomach discomfort headache pounding heart rapid breathing tight chest trouble sleeping muscle tension or pain trembling or shaking We can have some or all of these symptoms when we’re anxious. These physical reactions are the product of our body’s natural fight-or-flight system. God designed this system so that human beings could respond to real and present threats.

All of these symptoms stem from some way our bodies are mobilizing to help us in that real and present moment. For example, let’s go back to my eight-year-old latchkey self. Why did I always feel a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach? It was because my digestive system was shutting down in order to direct maximal blood flow to my large muscle groups. I envisioned a threat, so my body reacted by getting my muscles fully oxygenated to fight a hidden threat. My heart pounded in order to keep my blood flow going. Or why did I fire my pitches all over the place on the Little League mound? Because I imagined the future and anticipated the shame. I wanted to flee that feeling, so my body tensed my muscles to help me flee a threat. Those tense muscles were incapable of the fluid motions needed for pitching. Ironically, by imagining a future fear I wanted to flee, my body reacted in a way that hastened its arrival. Anxiety is counterproductive because it causes our body to engage in fight-or-flight mode for an imagined future threat, not a real and present danger.

When we worry, we stay locked in those bodily reactions because we are locked into the future. Because the imagined future is always ahead of us, our bodies stay locked in the fight-or-flight mode continually, long past what they can sustain healthily. In other words, while anxiety hijacks your mind into the future, it also hijacks your body into the future. Anxiety is commandeering your natural fight-or-flight system for its “Not Yetness” when God designed it just for his Now. The more we pay attention to those bodily symptoms, the faster we will recognize anxiety as something happening inside us.

Neither of us could recognize our underlying anxiety. I was in fight mode, and she was in flight mode—and we were missing each other. I misinterpreted her “flight” behavior as a lack of care. She understood my “fight” behavior as unwarranted hostility, not as a cry for shared presence. We hurt each other out of unrecognized anxiety. Recognition is so very important. Unrecognized anxiety hijacks our minds, our bodies, and even our most important relationships.

My wife and I have been realizing that some of our marital conflicts are driven by the underlying difference in our respective fight-or-flight reactions. A particularly challenging aspect of this process involves recognizing our different reactions as morally neutral. Neither is a sin. Nor is one reaction intrinsically better than the other. We need both because sometimes it is better to flee from the wolf and sometimes we’ve got to fight the fire. But as a hijacker of relationships, anxiety deviously cloaks itself in moral clothing. When we don’t recognize a common anxiety underneath differing reaction patterns, we lock in on surface differences and place a moral label on them. We judge and blame the other. The fight person labels the flight person as “lazy” or “inattentive.” The flight person labels the fight person as “rude” or “nagging.”

affected persons to catch it. In other words, our emotions affect others in mysterious but significant ways. That’s why it is important to think seriously about your anxiety, because whether you know it or not, it is affecting others in your company, your friendship group, and your family.

CEOs tend to have high-functioning anxiety, like I do. Also like me, they tend to default to fight mode. They often plunge forward with their own versions of firing off long emails to their staff at three in the morning. Too often, their colleagues don’t push back. Team members don’t realize their leader’s behavior is anxiety-driven. Instead, they feel confused, insecure, guilty, and blamed. Anxiety spreads like a contagion throughout the entire organization.

one likely causal factor behind the long-term increase of anxiety in our society is the extent to which mental labor has replaced physical labor in the workforce.

Anxiety = Loss tells us that anxiety is generated by loss or, more specifically, by our fear of loss. Every anxiety is the fear of some future loss.

Love: We suffer anxiety because we are vulnerable to losing what we most love. This further explains why anxiety is unavoidable for anyone who is truly human. To be free of anxiety is to be free of any love (which is capable of being lost), which in turn would mean becoming inhuman.

there is a critical difference between anxiety (which is inevitable) and anxiety disorders (which stem from dysfunctional responses to anxiety). And what is the most prevalent kind of dysfunctional response? It is avoidance. This truth is captured in the second half of the Anxiety Formula: Anxiety = Loss x Avoidance Avoidance creates a multiplier effect. When we try to avoid the unavoidable, we are grabbing for something that will always be out of reach.

Jesus was continually asking questions. Biblical scholar Martin Copenhaver showed that Jesus asked question after question (in fact, 307 of them in the Gospels). This method of co-fashioning truth far surpassed how often he answered questions with declarative statements.1 Question asking is how the Spirit of Jesus frequently comes alongside us to guide us—and not force us—toward the truth.

Avoidance habits, like any addiction, become ingrained in our minds. Neuroscience has shown actual physical ingraining happens constantly in our brains. Any action establishes a neural pathway in our brain; repeated actions deepen that pathway. Addictions are like destructive pathways where the grooves have gotten etched deeply over time, and we become mired in those ruts.

A key to breaking any addiction is stopping that etching process as much as we can and replacing it with new actions that lay alternative—and healthier—neural pathways. This “stop and replace” work rarely happens suddenly, which is why the practical goal is to decrease (versus immediately eliminate) avoidance habits over time.

Let’s clarify one more time the relationship between anxiety and sin. Anxiety itself is not sin. It is an inevitable part of what it means to be humans living in the Now and Not Yet. And most avoidance habits—as dysfunctional as they are—are more accurately understood as “bad habits” than as outright sin. However, it is possible in some cases that the sin of idolatry can be lurking underneath anxious thoughts. This is precisely why the author of Psalm 139 asks God to “search my anxious thoughts” in order to ascertain if there is “any idolatrous way in me” (CEB).

When it comes to anxiety, we face a challenge far more momentous in consequences but similar in nature. We are called to hold on through the experience of loss. The secret to conquering this far weightier challenge is no different—we have to believe we get back what we lose. To hold on through loss, we must be able to anticipate the future restoration on the other side of loss. This is why holding a correct vision of eternity matters for anxiety. Eternity is when we get back what we lose. For Christians, the ultimate answer to life’s anxiety is holding on to the promise of that future restoration.

Mathematically, I represented the implication of this truth in the Anxiety Formula: Anxiety = Loss × Avoidance. Because loss is inevitable, anxiety is inevitable.

Now let’s use a metaphor. A farmer in Jesus’ day would naturally be anxious in the long wait before the harvest because he had “buried” resources and energy into this field. He could lose all of it. Suppose he received a rock-solid prediction that the coming harvest would be abundant. He would naturally experience far less anxiety in the interim, but only if he believed this news. We have good news too, if you can believe it: the historical resurrection of Jesus, along with his promise that we will follow in his footsteps. Jesus was referring to you when, after he showed his own resurrected body to the distraught Thomas, he predicted, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29). If you can faithfully hold on to the news of the resurrection, you will experience decreased anxiety and many other blessings.

Avoidance moves multiply Loss; Holding moves divide it. The more we hold on to the core promise of the resurrection—we will get back what we lose—the more we directly reduce the power of Loss. That’s why I spent the last chapters clarifying the various misconceptions of eternity. To cancel the power of Loss, the nature of the restoration we hold must match the nature of the Loss we fear. This is why it is necessary to understand that the resurrection is bodily in nature just like our losses are.

Strictly speaking, reducing the Anxiety quotient to zero is impossible.2 Increasing the Holding quotient in the denominator to a large amount significantly reduces the impact of Loss but never eliminates it. Loss will still generate some amount of anxiety. Some fraction will remain. Stated more plainly, even a fully accurate picture of resurrection will leave some remainder of Anxiety.

Ordinary days matter. The everyday losses in our ordinary days are opportunities for training and tending.

Spiritually, we take a step closer toward idolatry where we’re supplanting God’s desires with our own self-defined desires. We are also highly vulnerable to losing our faith in God when we insist that a “loving and just God” must act a certain way.

Grieving is not just reserved for the Loss of all losses. Grieving is an important way to hold all the lesser losses in our life. When we deliberately practice grieving in the face of lesser losses, we train ourselves to recognize all loss is holdable.

Consultant Dad makes them anxious because Consultant Dad is anxious. When I’m anxiously trying to avoid my own loss, I’m not making room for theirs. Grieving Dad creates a space for their loss—which means I must more fully experience my loss of everything’s okay. We have to hold the loss together. In the process, I nurture my holding capacity for similar losses caused by other less-than-ideal happenings in my world. The shift from avoidance to holding involves an emotional exchange. Grieving Dad feels more sadness than Consultant Dad. But Grieving Dad feels—and causes—much less anxiety than Consultant Dad. This is a trade worth making.