Faith and Anxiety - When and How They Coexist

Mrs. Falk* walked into my office and sat down on the couch. When she started speaking, she told a tale of someone who struggled with anxiety for years. I marveled at how she managed to accomplish as much as she did while carrying such a heavy load. People like her always amaze and inspire me. Juggling life's responsibilities can be a struggle for anyone. Seeing someone carrying the heavy weight of anxiety yet still manage to raise a family is simply breathtaking. Anxiety can be debilitating, and trying to hold the fort while fighting our own personal struggles is no small feat.

But Mrs. Falk didn't see much greatness in how far she had come and all that she accomplished. Instead, she kept on repeating something I hear often. "I shouldn't feel this way! Where is my faith? I know G-d is in charge, so why do I worry?" And then her unfortunate conclusion: "I'm such a failure!"

But was she correct? Is faith a contradiction to anxiety? How about depression? Does faith mean that someone won't feel unworthy and sad because they know G-d is in charge? Is faith an antidote and cure for anxiety and depression?

There seems to be a lot of mistaken ideas and a lack of clarity on the subject. Misunderstanding these crucial ideas can cause tremendous pain and harm, both for ourselves and for our children. I hope I can give some clarity and help change that.

One of our primary goals as parents is to instill proper emunah and bitachon into our children. We must understand the subject ourselves if we hope to do a proper job.

Should the answer to our children's worries be that G-d is in charge, and they, therefore, should expect never to have anxious thoughts cross their minds?

Let's first understand a bit about our thought process and how anxiety works.

There are countless thoughts flitting through our minds on a constant basis. Some of these thoughts are positive, and some are negative. Some are important and some less so. 

Inherently, these thoughts are neither good nor bad. They are merely passing through, entering and leaving our minds in rapid succession. We don't have direct control over what enters and leaves and can't directly decide which ideas should come and go.

Our mind has an essential job, and that job is to filter these myriads of thoughts and decide which ones are important to focus on and which can be discarded. If there were no system to this filtering process, we could be stuck thinking about the least important things, which would leave us unable to control our lives and even place us in danger.

You can probably relate to this common scenario: You're absentmindedly driving while speaking on the phone. All of a sudden, the car in front of you stops short, and you immediately slam on your brakes. Fortunately, your car comes to a halt before you hit the car in front of you, and everyone is okay. Interestingly though, you have no recollection of what the person on the other end of the call had been saying for the few seconds it took for this to transpire. Somehow, your mind "knew" to focus entirely on the urgent situation in front of you and not let anything else distract it. If you hadn't had this focus, your life would have been in severe danger.

How did your mind know to focus on stopping your car instead of the phone conversation you were so engrossed in?

The way your brain knows what to focus on is based on whether any individual thought has meaning to you.

And how does the brain know whether any individual thought has meaning to you? Well, it knows this because you care about that thought.

When you drive down the street, most things don't matter much. The color of the car to your right and the appearance of a home you’re passing may not register because your mind doesn't find these things important. You do register the red traffic light and the stop sign at the end of the block because these things are important to your driving.

Now let's get back to our original discussion of faith and how it relates to anxiety.

When we face difficulty, we will automatically have some worrisome thoughts cross our minds. At times we may not even be conscious of these thoughts, but they come through our minds, similar to the millions of other thoughts that cross our minds.

Our job is NOT to push these thoughts away, thinking that faith should make them disappear. Telling ourselves that thoughts are wrong doesn't help remove such thoughts and will instead make them more prominent because we are now focusing on the negativity of having had those thoughts in the first place!

When anxiety takes over, it's as if that anxiety hijacks our mind. Instead of the thought coming and going, it continues to repeat itself over and over. Trying to push the thought away doesn't help and can often make it worse. This is where the idea that faith removes anxiety is mistaken.

Bitachon (faith) is something we can move towards. We can feel anxious and then mindfully move towards the thought that G-d is in control. This can be tremendously soothing and can play a significant part in treating anxiety. What it can't do is stop these automatic thoughts in the moment.

And this is why Mrs. Falk was mistaken. She was beating herself up for feeling anxious because she saw it as a lack of faith. What she didn't realize was that faith can be calming, but it cannot remove thoughts.

And this is what we want to give over to our children. We want to explain and help them feel how G-d is in charge and how He only does what's best for us. We want this to be part of them.

 What we don't want to do is push away thoughts and feelings. Instead, our goal is to calm ourselves when we are worried and not to berate ourselves when our first gut reactions are anxious thoughts.

Note: Recurring negative thought patterns can be helped and, over time, can often be eliminated. The idea of this article is to point out that this doesn't happen instantly, but over time, as our minds begin to learn and work with new thought patterns.

#anxiety #pragmaticparenting #freeyourmindcourse