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Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you (1 Peter 5:6-7, NIV).
Psychologists at Penn State decided to find out how many of our worries or anxieties come true. They sent texts four times a day to various volunteers asking them to record their worries or anxieties during their last few hours. The participants were then asked, after 30 days, to review their lists and count the number of worries that had come true.
In this study, people reported three to four worries a day, combined over a 30-day period — that’s 90 to 120 worries — with 75 percent of participants finding that 91 percent of their worries didn’t come true, and about 25 percent finding that exactly zero of their worries materialized.
Let’s summarize: of the 90 to 120 worries for each person, between 0 and 9 percent came true. One researcher wrote…
These findings underscore “worry deceit.” Deceit is a good word to describe the nature of worry, implicitly demanding that we pay attention to it because the threat is real. But in reality, it’s nearly always a false alarm.
Our imaginative worries affect us in the same way as bona fide concerns. Worrying ignites Miggy Moments (read Interruption #1589) in our brains, causing the amygdala part of our brain to shout, “Fight or flight now for life or death!” The brain then starts releasing cortisol and adrenaline into our bodies, helping us focus on immediate danger and supercharging our strength.
As one imaginative person describes, “Think of a dragster revving its engine for a race and then popping the clutch.”
If we are running from a bear, we need a Miggy Moment and probably a gun (or the ability to run faster than the person next to us), but revving our bodies three to four times a day — uh, oh! — causes inflammation, fear, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases. Also, consider that the emotional turmoil of constant Miggy Moments, grooves our brains to a depth that eventually almost every experience we have during a day redlines our primal safety hormones.
All for no reason! What should we do? The Apostle Peter was right when he wrote in 1 Peter 5: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.”
- Let’s be humble. All of us have anxiety; the word means “walking astray,” and we’ve all done that. Humility discerns and realigns our actions and attitudes back to God’s narrow path for our lives.
- Cast your anxieties. The word translated “cast” gives the image of “throwing.” Learn to say, “God, I throw this anxiety to you.”
- Allow God to lift us up. When God elevates our walk, there’s nothing to fear, as it’s God doing the work, not us.
Over the last three years, I’ve been re-wiring my brain through awareness, casting, and praising God for how He cares for me. I still feel stressed, but it’s not my “go-to” place anymore. When something goes wrong, my brain switches circuits from Miggy to the magnificence of God.
Peace restored.