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Anxiety, depression, and hopelessness are real.
They affect everybody differently, and they often come out of the blue. Whether it’s you or a loved one who is struggling with these things, the fact is they are a very real part of our broken world.
But we can fight back.
The first step is to know three things:
* You are not crazy.
* You are not alone.
* This will end.
However, knowledge is only part of the battle. If we want to win this war, there aren’t just things we need to know — there are also things we have to start. At some point, we have to decide that enough is enough, put our foot down, and get to work. Anxiety and depression will attack, but eventually, we need to make the conscious decision to attack back.
God has so much more for us, and the day we decide to start fighting for it, the battle for abundant life begins.
The secret to winning any war is equipping ourselves with the correct weapons. Remember the four ways of attacking back:
- Worship. When you consistently spend time worshiping God, things will begin to change.
- Pray. There is no right or wrong way to talk to God. Tell Him about what you are feeling. Speak to Him about the things going on in your head and your heart. Ask Him for what you need and thank Him for what He’s already done. He is our loving Father who just wants to talk to us.
- Remind yourself of all the victories in the past. When your heart starts feeling heavy with depression or your mind begins racing with anxious thoughts, the next way to attack back is to actively and intentionally remind yourself of what God has already promised you and already brought you through and that he’s with you right now.
- Assemble an army to fight with you. Surround yourself with people who love you enough to be in the fight with you, and then stop hiding from them the depths of your depression and the scattered feelings of your anxiety.
Now it’s time to talk about what to stop.
When it comes to battling anxiety and depression, there are some dos, but there are also a lot of don’ts. This section is about the don’ts. It’s about the things in your life that you need to get rid of. We’ve been talking about all the things we need to add to our lives, but now let’s talk about the things we need to subtract.
- It’s time to take a stand for your freedom, draw a line in the sand, and eliminate all the unhealthy habits in your life that are causing anxiety and depression.
The problem is that you may not know what those things are. When my life was spiraling, I didn’t know why. Sometimes it is difficult to identify the items in our own lives that need to go. If it were easy to know what needs to go, we would’ve gotten rid of those things by now.
That’s why rock bottom can sometimes be helpful. Rock bottom forces us to stop the show. It’s where we realize we aren’t good enough, strong enough, or smart enough to overcome anxiety or depression on our own. It reveals what needs to change in our lives and forces us to face the reality of our issues and get desperate enough to do something about them.
To help identify some of the things you need to stop, I’d like to start by sharing a conversation I had with a good friend of mine about his rock bottom. We’ve both had to learn these lessons the hard way, and we are sharing our experiences in the hopes that you decide to learn these lessons the easy way.
A Necessary Ending
A week or so into my time in Alabama, I felt like I was beginning to make some progress. My wife and I were going into the war room every single day, battling with worship and prayer. I was making my lists and reminding myself of all the things God had already brought me through. Plus, I had already had a couple of honest and open conversations with loved ones and people close to me.
But something was still missing.
And it wasn’t until I sat down for a conversation with a man named Dino that I knew what that something was.
By the time I hung out with Dino, my new pastor friend, I was done trying to cover up how screwed up I was. I was well past the point of no return and had no energy left to try to hide it. Instead, I took the opposite approach and told him everything.
I told him about losing it in my truck.
All the anxiety and depression I had been dealing with for years.
How overwhelmed I felt at work and just with life in general.
I even told him how hopeless I felt at times that things would ever get any better.
That’s quite a way to start a conversation with a new friend, but I had been trying to keep up an appearance for years, and the only fruit I was feeling was exhaustion, so instead, I just let it fly.
Dino listened patiently, letting me get it all out before interjecting. When I finished, I figured he’d be looking for the exit. But instead, he did one of the best things you could ever do for somebody struggling with this stuff: he began to tell me about his own struggles.
He told me about a time in his life when his career was at an all-time high. He was being asked to speak at large churches all around the country and conferences all around the world. He had never been so successful. On paper, he was living the dream.
However, what no one would’ve guessed in a million years was that as his career was on the rise, his mental health was quickly falling.
He began to tell me about all his anxiety, his fight with depression, and the heaviness of his hopelessness. Then at one point, he told me it got so bad that he didn’t want to keep on living. When his career was at a high point, his mental health was at a low point.
Dino hit rock bottom.
And it was at that moment he realized something profound.
God could have stopped him from going so low, but he didn’t. God allowed him to hit rock bottom.
Think about that for a second. Why would such a loving God allow him to go so low? Because rock bottom was the place Dino realized just how desperate the situation was. Rock bottom was the place Dino decided things needed to change. Rock bottom was the place Dino knew he had to stop pretending he was okay. He couldn’t continue living this way — it was time to cut some things out of his life.
What was shocking to me was that Dino said rock bottom was the place he realized just how much God loved him. God loved him enough to let him get to the end of his own strength so that he could realize how much he needed to rely on God’s strength.
As Dino continued to explain his rock bottom experience to me, I knew God was speaking to me about mine. Dino told me rock bottom is where we stop denying that we have a problem and stop pretending that we have enough power to overcome that problem on our own. He told me there is no more use for our pride or our feeble attempts at pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps at rock bottom. And then he said something I’ll never forget: “God showed me it was time for a necessary ending.”
A necessary ending.
Those three words resonated with me deeply. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but I knew it was for me. He could tell I was a bit puzzled, so he went on to explain that he had some unhealthy things in his life that had to go. Some of them had only been happening for a small amount of time, but others had been there for several years. And each one of them was making him anxious and pulling him into bouts of depression. Rock bottom revealed how deadly they were and that they needed to change.
Some of the things were obvious; they were staring him right in the eye. Other things were harder to see. But regardless, one thing was clear as day: the way he had been living life wasn’t going to work anymore. He needed to change, and he needed that change to begin immediately. He knew the change wasn’t going to be easy, and it wasn’t going to be immediate. But he also knew the change was going to be inevitable.
This was a necessary ending.
At that point in the conversation, Dino had a huge smile on his face. He explained that as difficult as his necessary ending had been, he had also never felt so free. He had never had more peace or experienced more joy because he was finally ready to stop the things in his life that weren’t supposed to be there so that he could step up and become the person God was calling him to be.
He went on to admit that he doesn’t recognize his old self anymore. The transformation was real. The freedom, the victory, and the peace in his life today all began when he realized something had to change. It was time for certain things to go, other things to change, and a few things to be put to death once and for all.
As I sat across from my new friend, I could feel something begin to shift in my soul. “Shawn,” he said confidently, “that’s exactly where God has you right now. God loves you too much to let you keep going the way you are. You’re at a necessary ending.”
As I sat there listening to Dino, I knew his story was really my story, and I realized that I was going to have to stop pretending. Because I had been pretending for a long time.
My pretending to be okay became a lifestyle. I knew deep down I was headed in the wrong direction; I knew it was getting worse. I knew I needed help. But I was deathly afraid to share my struggles with anyone around me. So I just kept pretending. And, somehow, I thought if I pretended well enough, maybe it would all go away.
Do you ever do that in your life? Know you need to face a person, a situation, an issue, but the pain it might cause or the discomfort you might feel seems overwhelming, so you just pretend the issue isn’t there? You put your hands over your eyes and act like everything is somehow going to be okay? The problem is, eventually you remove your hands from your eyes and discover that whatever was there, is still there.
Dino’s story made me realize that I couldn’t keep pretending my anxiety and depression hadn’t reached debilitating levels.
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I had to stop pretending that:
- I was okay when I wasn’t;
- I had dealt with the past when I hadn’t;
- I was strong enough to get through this stuff on my own;
- I didn’t need God’s help;
- I didn’t need other people’s help;
- I was going to be okay the way I was.
My talk with Dino about a necessary ending was the nail in the coffin to my pretending. I realized I had to put pretending to death. I needed to acknowledge the severity of what I was experiencing and decide to do something about it. I was ready to stop pretending and start fighting.
Are you ready to stop pretending?
Excerpted with permission from Attacking Anxiety by Shawn Johnson, copyright Shawn Johnson.
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Your Turn
Does Shawn’s story ring true for you? Are you still pretending? What might happen if you stopped working so hard to keep anyone from knowing about your struggle? The world would not end… but it might be the beginning of the end of your isolation and suffering. ~ Devotionals Daily
