This is part eight of a Saturday-long Conference I attended with Adam Young and a guest speaker. This was held on February 4, 2025. The Conference was entitled: "On Fear and Failure: From "My life is an Endless Struggle" -- to -- My Life is a Compelling Story." In this lecture, Adam discusses "Anxiety."
Anxiety is different than fear. Fear is a response to danger or perceived danger in your environment. Anxiety is what you feel when you are avoiding important emotions. If you feel something in your body that resembles fear, but you are not endangered at that moment, than you might be feeling anxiety.
Our experiences with anxiety is often linked with earlier experiences with emotion.
Picture an eight-year-old little boy whose father withdrew from him when he felt sad. Or maybe dad got irritated by little boy. Little boy learns to avoid that sadness or to suppress it. And, the sadness can no longer flow through his body. He can't digest that sadness. And in time, little boy will begin to feel anxiety whenever sadness bubbles up.
Why? Two main reasons for this:
1. The neurons in the boy's brain have paired sadness with "Dad withdraws or gets upset with me." When he feels sadness, he braces for Dad's response. Even years later when the danger isn't in the present.
2. Little boy begins to accumulate a reservoir of un-felt sadness in his body because he wasn't allowed to feel it in his home growing up. The cumulative, un-felt sadness in his heart is too much. So now, at 38, it connects him to that reservoir inside his heart.
Anxiety is what you feel when you are avoiding feeling important emotions. Remember: the avoidance of little boy's sadness is not his fault. He's a child with a dad who won't tolerate sadness. Avoiding sadness is his only option. (And this is just one example. There are thousands of examples you could use.) The price little boy pays for not being able to feel this sadness is that lots and lots of sadness begins to accumulate inside of his heart and body. And in time, that leads to anxiety.
The body keeps the score
Many children receive a message that if they are bad or weak for feeling sad. If they feel fear, they are weak. Remember all the No Fear hats from the 90's. That entire sentiment is CRAP. Many children are taught that if they feel anger, they are bad. You aren't supposed to feel anger at your mother or father or sibling. Your emotions aren't welcome.
Unfelt feelings lead to anxiety
Two questions for you:
1. When you felt fear or anger as a kid, were those emotions welcomed by your mother? Your father? Did they make space for it? And did your parents sit with you in your fear or your sorrow and help you process through it? Or, alternatively, did you get the message that your fear or sorrow was bad or weak or just not welcome? Were your emotions allowed? Did they hear you out? How did your primary caregivers respond to you when you felt anger?
2. Another reason we pushed these down was because feeling those things conflicts with other values that are important to us. Oh and Christians were the worst with this! Rejoice in the Lord Always or were you supposed to be Strong and Courageous. Hey, remember don't let the sun go down on your anger. As a result, the emotions are bubbling up inside you and you shove them down into the basement of your heart because it feels ungodly or wrong to feel sadness, fear, or anger.
This leads to anxiety. Why? Because anxiety is caused by avoiding feelings that your body is trying to experience and that your body needs to express. But anger doesn't just go away. Sadness doesn't just go away.
Time doesn't make emotions go away
So what happens when you feel anxiety? How do you respond to that anxiety? What's your posture toward it? Very often we feel guilty about feeling anxious!! How many times is my body filled with anxiety and I respond by saying, "The Bible says don't be anxious about anything." Do not be anxious about anything. Stop feeling anxious! Just trust God!
Here's the problem: you are attempting to do the very thing that is making you feel anxious in the first place. You are attempting to push your real, genuine, authentic feelings down which is what causes anxiety in the first place. You are trying to put your feelings in the basement of your heart -- feelings that you've got inside and need to feel felt.
The Bible is far more complex and cannot be reduced to a single sentence. Yes, Paul tells us not to be anxious about anything. But two chapters earlier he is talking about his own anxiety! Are you serious?? Do they teach you that in Sunday school? Paul is eager to send his friend, because when he sees him again, he will have less anxiety. Paul had anxiety. Paul had fear. He had fears when they came into Macedonia. Paul was human. He felt fear. In II Corinthians he has fear over all the churches he's planting.
For many people, anxiety is caused by the refusal to own and express anger. Many Christians believe that they are not supposed to be angry. At least not that angry. Christian men can have a little. But Christian women? If they turned over tables like Jesus did? The stories they would tell.
Your anger is telling you something important about your present circumstances or about your past story or both
Anxiety is almost always linked to your past. When you feel anxious today, there is a reason for it. And that reason will be found in your story. This is not referring to genuine fear of course. This is referring to anxiety -- the feelings you refuse to feel. Or don't know how to feel.
You may be anxious because your child is being mocked at school or there may not be enough money to pay the bills. So why do we become anxious about different things? Why are some of us anxious about money and others are not? Because wealthy people don't need to worry about money? Nope. Wealthy people are just as anxious about money as someone with no money.
There is a reason that we are anxious about the things we are anxious about
That reason is rooted in your story. Your present anxiety is often connected to un-felt emotions from your past. They are often connecting YOU to unmet emotions from your past.
Anxiety is a light on the dashboard of your heart that says, "Something is not right inside. Something needs tended to. Something needs attention. Something needs care. Something needs to be listened to." You have unmet emotions inside that needs tending.
When most people say, "I am feeling anxious," what they are saying is, "My body is dysregulated." This connects to affect. Affect is your internal sense of your bodily state. We've discussed this chart, below, before, but here it is again:
Most of the time, when people say "I feel anxious," what they mean is, "I'm not in the 4-7 zone." This means that they are hyperaroused. "I'm feeling 8 or 9 or 10!"
Everyone gets dysregulated, however, some people get dysregulated more frequently than others and some get more dysregulated by more subtle stimuli. (This is often the case in people with a history of trauma.)
The double-whammy of trauma is that you will get dysregulated more often than others more frequently, and if that's not hard enough, you will also have a much harder time restoring regulation to your insides. Not everyone's brain/body has the same ability to self-regulate.
So, what do we do?
We show ourselves:
Curiosity
and
Kindness.
Ask yourself:
1. Will I be curious about what this anxiety might be saying to me? (Data and information)
2. What would it look like to be kind to my body right now?
Here is the crux of the issue. What do you think God wants for you when you are feeling anxious? When you are anxious, what that means physiologically is that there are elevated levels of cortisol coursing through your body. This isn't healthy for you. This means we are suffering. God wants:
1. You to experience the comfort that kindness brings and
2. In time, for you to take your body seriously.
What is your body's anxiety trying to tell you about your life and about your story?
Next time you are feeling anxious, try this:
1. Notice the anxiety. Tune into. BeFriend it. Flesh it out. What do you need me to know? What are you trying to tell me?
2. What would kindness to myself look like right now? Even just pressing your feet into the ground will get your body feeling a bit more grounded.
You can respond to anxiety with:
1. Top-Down Approach: Attempting to use your cortex (thinking brain) to calm yourself down. Saying things to yourself etc. However, in that moment, this doesn't often work as well as the Bottom-Up because of the way our brain is wired.
2. Bottom-Up Approach: Focus on your breathing for example. This will start to move you in the right direction. And then you can ask yourself: "What brings my body a sense of calm? Maybe music, smells, nature etc. Once you are slightly calmed down, ask yourself: What might my anxiety be trying to tell me? Are you sad about something? Be curious about what your anxiety might be protecting you from feeling. Are you grieved? Angry? The goal is to let your emotions flow. Experience and express the emotions that are underneath the anxiety.
Especially pay attention to the following emotions: fear, sadness, and anger.
Think of your emotional life as a river. You want the river to flow freely. When rivers can't flow freely, bad things happen. (Like floods.)
Your body can be flooded with anxiety when the river of your emotions is not free to flow.
Very often, when we feel anxiety, there is a part of us that our body wants us to pay attention to it and to take seriously.
There are un-felt feelings in all of us. Many of us, growing up, did not have space to experience emotions and distress. Oftentimes anxiety can be a cue that there is an un-felt emergency right under the surface that needs tending to, care, curiosity.
For more information on Adam Young (and to listen to tons of different podcast episodes on this very topic), visit his website.
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