A Christian’s Guide for Battling Stress, Worry, and Anxiety

Battling Stress, Worry, and Anxiety, is not easy, but it is worse when you do so using a bad approach.

This write-up, excepted from a review of the book, Unwind: A Christian’s Guide for Battling Stress, Worry, and Anxiety makes it all easy.

When we run our lives on automatic, we often miss the subtle moments when stress and worry become intertwined, forming mental and physical holds on our bodies and minds. Living without pause, we set the stage for anxiety to emerge unwittingly until our overall well-being declines. This book is for you if you want to battle stress, worry, and anxiety with mindfulness and meditation, but you are concerned that these practices conflict with your Christian values.

In this small volume, allow me to gently guide you through a six-week mindfulness program, sensitive to Christian thought and grounded in Scripture so you can practice without fear or guilt. Here, you learn to unwind from the holds of anxiety, worry, and stress in your life.

The programme is a focused and gradual process where you learn that the conditions you battle are temporary, and you can learn to release them with time. We will move slowly and thoughtfully, and learn to unwind from the mental and physical holds on our lives until we achieve each stage of release and healing.

Over forty-million Americans suffer from anxiety and 37% go untreated due to the lack of access to medical care or the stigma associated with a mental health diagnosis.

The evidence supporting the effectiveness of mindfulness for worry, stress, and anxiety is overwhelming, covering forty years of research and thousands of studies that consistently demonstrate meditation and mindfulness work to complement medical treatments for anxiety, or as a stand-alone practice that you can do at home.

This book is unique because I have deep, personal experience with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), and I can attest that the daily practice of mindfulness finally healed me through a combination of meditation, prayer, and faith. I practiced for several years using traditional, mainstream, and Buddhism-based methods, and I regularly found myself uncomfortable with the words and approaches the teachers used to explain the current wisdom of meditation and mindfulness. Along the way, I modified the training for my Christian mindset, and the results were fantastic.

I based this approach on two fundamental principles:

(1) “The One who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world” (1 John 4:4), and (2) God created all things for his purposes (Col. 1:16), including meditation.

In the following chapters, I share the six-week Christianity based program for mindfulness. This book is not about medical advice; you can think of it as a dialog among friends having a living room Bible study with a teacher who has defeated anxiety using a Christianity-based approach to mindfulness and meditation, and I want you to defeat anxiety, too.

Mindfulness the Christian Way

READ ALSO: ‘Many People Had Written Me Off, But God Helped Me’

Mindfulness includes the practice of meditation, but the practice of mindfulness itself is the conscious, active awareness of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and behaviors in such a way that you understand with your heart how your actions affect yourself and others. Jesus asks his followers to abide in this way when he says, “Do unto others” (Luke 6:31). You can be mindful informally, while sitting in a meeting, walking down the street, shopping in a store, leading your team at work, or when with your family.

-To be continued