Recently, I wrote a heartfelt message to a troubled friend and sent it via Messenger. Within a few minutes, an angry-face emoji popped up beside my message.
Instantly, I felt a sensation in the pit of my stomach that I recognized as anxiety. I immediately thought, “What did I say to offend my friend?”
I’ve felt this sensation in my stomach many times in my life. I remember feeling it first as a child when I was around my father.
Growing up, I admired my father. He was smart. An engineer by occupation, he could repair and build almost anything. I wanted to learn how to do the things he did, but whenever I tried to help him, I ended up making him angry. He needed more patience. I needed more focus. My father’s anger was not violent. However, not being able to please him created anxiety in me.
I felt anxiety in two ways. One was a queasy stomach that lasted hours and sometimes days.
At one point, my parents took me to the family doctor, and he diagnosed me with a “nervous stomach.” Today, a more accurate diagnosis is anxiety.
Later, I developed migraine headaches. My headaches likely came from other stressful issues, and they were undoubtedly a result of genetics.
In Dr. Judson Brewer’s book “Unwinding Anxiety,” he suggests that anxiety zaps your energy, makes it hard for you to think, and impedes good performance. (p.82) That sums up the way I worked around my father. Whenever he sent me to retrieve a tool, sometimes I needed to find it faster, and sometimes I could not find it at all. If my father had to come and locate the tool himself, often he found it exactly where he told me it was. I couldn’t explain how I’d missed it. Now I know. Anxiety! I could not think or remember his instructions for fear of failing.
Instead of focusing on his instructions, I focused on how I would eventually fail to carry them out and disappoint him. His anger fueled the fight/flight/freeze part of my brain. I usually opted for “flight.” Not that I didn’t want to be with my father or help him with tasks. I just wanted the anxiety to go away.
Eventually, I looked elsewhere to find affirmation, approval, and confidence. Sports was one place, and church was another.
Looking to the church for approval and affirmation proved to be a mixed blessing. There, I found my calling, my gifts, and my ministry. It is also the place where I discovered people I could never satisfy.
Once this calling became my profession, for every person who gave me approval, there were always several angry and disapproving voices ready to tell me what I did wrong and what I had better do to keep my job, especially once I became a pastor.
Replacing one authority figure for another meant that for thirty years of my vocational life, I struggled with anxiety whenever members of the church, especially those with authority, disapproved of my work.
The same places in my body where I felt my anxiety as a boy and teenager continued to plague me as an adult.
The first Sunday evening of my first pastorate, I had a migraine that hurt so badly I didn’t know if I could preach. If the congregation had suffered through the sermon as much as I did, they might have rescinded their vote to call me as pastor.
A few days before, the church’s treasurer had come into the church office and “blessed me out” for how I negotiated my salary package with the pulpit committee. It was the first time I’d ever met him. He was rude, angry, unprofessional, and played the bully role well.
Many meetings with him during my three and a half years there were contentious. This man was the first of many to remind me that being a pastor would demand more of me than I ever imagined. He was a thorn in the side of every pastor, or so I was told.
Within a year, I was seeing a headache specialist in Atlanta. For over thirty years, I’ve taken three medications daily to prevent migraines. Within two years of my first pastorate, I had operations to remove my gallbladder and my appendix. Did stress contribute to those surgeries? I cannot help but wonder. When Trinity Baptist Church in Moultrie came calling, I felt like I’d left enough of myself behind, and perhaps it was time to move on.
I stayed 13 and 12 years at my next two pastorates. Each church gave us good years, but each church had members I could never please. While I loved my job as a pastor, I have many scars from those years in church life that remind me that leaving the pastorate to become a chaplain, pastoral counselor, and life coach was a healthy transition for me.
These stories should be enough to help you understand that when my friend posted an angry emoji on my message, it immediately hooked me into some old habit loops from my past.
I felt sick to my stomach. I fretted. I did many of the things I counsel others not to do. I started ruminating about what my message must have said to offend my friend. Many thoughts ran through my mind about how my friend might respond to me later when we communicated. My mind could not rest.
Then, I reached out to him to seek clarification. He wasn’t angry with me at all. He was just angry at the situation I was writing about.
I breathed a sigh of relief and reflected on how I allowed my thoughts to create undue worry and anxiety in me, a prevalent trait in people with anxiety issues. Had he been angry with me, we would have worked it out. I know many of you can relate because I counsel people with anxiety issues, one of the leading mental health issues people deal with.
We create worries through thoughts as we try to predict what will happen in the future. Our minds come up with many things that usually never play out. We allow our minds to create scenarios based on irrational thinking.
Much of our anxiety begins with a single thought that we allow to go unchallenged.
Check your thoughts by asking: “Is that thought helpful? Is that thought true? Do I have any evidence to back it up?”
Many of our thoughts do not benefit our mental health. We create mountains out of molehills. All I had was an angry emoji, but there was no proof that my friend was angry with me. I created that in my mind.
We need to be curious enough to challenge our thoughts and lean into our anxiety. What do I mean by leaning into our anxiety?
Most of us avoid anxious situations because it is rewarding to do so. The reward is that our anxiety feels lesser. We refrain from talking to someone, going to a meeting or party, skipping a presentation, going to an interview, or leaving the house because we are anxious. Not going reduces the anxiety.
However, by allowing ourselves to experience this temporary dip in anxiety, we cripple ourselves. The anxiety ALWAYS returns, AND we have created an additional problem through our avoidance. The more we avoid these life events, the harder it becomes to return to them. We miss out on the blessings these events offer.
Anxiety is a normal emotion. It’s only bad when we don’t manage it well, and it adversely affects our decision-making and creates problems for us emotionally and physically.
The debilitating headaches and the anxiety I once felt in the pit of my stomach are rare these days. However, a simple, angry emoji hooked me into an old habit loop. My body still remembered the anxiety I used to feel. It took several minutes to figure out what my body was saying to me.
I’ve learned to ask important questions to get out of those habit loops. The sooner I remember to do that, the better day I have.
If you have anxiety that creates debilitating issues for you and get caught in anxiety loops, try asking yourself those three questions. Listen to what your body is saying to you about your anxiety.
Should you need to talk to someone about anxiety that has become debilitating and unmanageable, contact a counselor who understands these issues. We are here to help you.
(Dr. John Michael Helms is a Board Certified Chaplain, Pastoral Counselor, and Life Coach). He can be reached at 678-326-4352 or through his website at Johnmichaelhelms.com. Subscribe to Dr. Helms’ blog posts in the bottom righthand corner of this post.
Photo Credit: https://stock.adobe.com/images/emoji-yellow-angry-emotional-face-icon/175292989