Why Am I Anxious?
Real talk on the relationship between anxiety and Christian faith
“How do I know whether my anxiety is related to sin or caused by forces outside of my control?”
I get some version of this question regularly. Most of the time, it comes from a Christian who has received a mental health diagnosis but is afraid there might be something more going on spiritually. Sometimes it comes from a person who has been fighting anxiety through faith and prayer to no avail, and seeking a diagnosis begins to seem like the appropriate next move.
We struggle with complex questions like this one because we’d much prefer neat and tidy answers. Simple explanations give us the assurance of control. If I can accurately name my struggle, I can find a solution for it. When it comes to the inner lives of human beings, however, we need to accept that simple explanations are rarely available, for “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick” (Jer 17:9). A major dictum of historical thinking is that history is always more complex than it seems. Thus, the historian intentionally avoids monocausal explanations. History is complex mainly because humans are complex. We need to follow the same rule when it comes to the inner lives of human beings—there’s rarely one single cause.
Our culture doesn’t tolerate uncertainty very well. Every corporate decision is analyzed with predictive statistical formulas. When I write an article for my Substack, for instance, I get emailed statistical analysis with suggestions on how to better master the algorithm to gain more readers. We’ve reduced the unpredictable world of transcendent surprise to the clinical world of boring quantitative precision. When it comes to understanding our anxieties, we’d much rather hook our brains up to a machine and get a precise reading—15% hormones, 25% sleep deprivation, 20% lack of faith, 40% genetics. Thankfully, that kind of machine doesn’t exist yet.
In recent years, the pendulum has swung almost exclusively toward therapeutic explanations for our inner struggles. A person experiences anxiety, which is unpleasant. Since feeling good is almost universally accepted as the goal of life, that person is encouraged to do whatever it takes to get rid of those anxious feelings. Therapy promises help with very precise sounding medical vocabulary—diagnosis, treatment, medicine. For many, therapy does indeed help, and we should be thankful to God that it exists.
But what do we miss when we sprint as quickly as possible toward therapeutic solutions? Believe it or not, the Bible has a lot to say about anxiety. Excluding the Psalms, in which anxiety is consistently expressed in prayer to God, Jesus and the apostles mention it often. In all instances, it is explicitly connected to faith. When Jesus’s disciples understandably grow anxious from the boat during a windstorm, Jesus asks, “Where is your faith” (Luke 8:25)? A few chapters later in Luke, Jesus instructs his hearers to “not be anxious about your life” (12:22) and acknowledges that lack of faith is often the cause (12:28).
Similarly, Paul offers prayer and supplication to the Philippian church as the way to find peace which surpasses understanding when they are anxious (Phil 4:6-7). Peter, too, instructs the church to cast their anxieties on the God who cares for them. Jesus says we’re often anxious because we don’t have faith, and the apostles offer prayer—the vocal expression of faith—as the solution to anxieties.
Of course, faith is only as strong as its object. There’s nothing inherently valuable in faith by itself. Faith is powerful only when its object is powerful. Jesus wants his followers to have faith because he wants to give us access to himself. When we have faith in him, we connect our lives to the greatest source of power and love in the world. When we experience anxiety, we must not cut faith out of the equation. When we fail to consider faith, we fail to consider the Christ who commands life’s storms.
When we rush toward therapeutic solutions for unpleasant feelings, we fail to consider that sometimes anxiety is an appropriate signal—a gift from God indicating that something is not right in our lives. If we apply therapeutic techniques and prescribed chemicals to just feeling better, we may never address the problem our anxiety is pointing us to.
We should feel anxious, for example, if our lives are disordered and chaotic. God made us in his image, and he is a God of order (1 Cor 14:30-33). Similarly, if we spend hours each day staring into the abyss of our iPhone screens, comparing ourselves to what we see, we will probably experience anxiety. We were created to behold real faces of other human beings, the beauty of God’s created order, and even the face of God himself in the person of Jesus Christ. If our lives are disordered away from God’s design for us, we will probably experience anxiety.
Similarly, sin causes anxiety. If you are a Christian living in unrepentant sin, you should be anxious. You were saved to walk in righteousness. If you are an unbeliever, you are living your life under the righteous condemnation of God. Anxiety is an appropriate experience for such a person. If you are trying to make your life work without reference to God, living under the illusion that you can control life’s varied storms in your own power, your circumstances will eventually shatter your false confidence and cause you to panic.
None of these observations contradict that sometimes we can be doing everything relatively right and still experience anxiety. We live our lives in a fallen world of corruption. Our bodies sometimes rebel against us. We inherit things from previous generations. Sometimes we’re anxious because we’re sick. My advice is simply this—don’t run to therapeutic solutions without seeking answers from Jesus. If you’re seeking Jesus and still anxious, don’t feel guilty about therapeutic solutions.