Today, I want to share two simple strategies that you can use any time you feel anxiety trying to creep up in your life. We’re going to start with the P3 strategy. Prayer, Praise, Peace.
Prayer + Praise = Peace. You see, peace is preceded by prayer and praise.
Have you ever read the book of Psalms? It is basically a book of prayer and praise. Even through the hard times. Even when it didn’t feel good. There are many, many chapters in Psalms where David, King David is going through some really bad things… yet he is praying and praising God anyway.
It doesn’t always feel good to pray. Sometimes we simply don’t want to pray, or we convince ourselves that we don’t know how to pray. That’s when we need to push through and pray anyway. Prayer, in its simplest form is just you having a conversation with God, your father, your Abba daddy.
You really can’t mess up prayer. It’s just you opening up your heart to God, with praise, and with your concerns, all the things that are on your heart and then…. Leaving it with him. THAT’S the hard part. Sometimes we bring things to God, and then… we take them back. We pick them back up. Something triggers us and we pick the anxiety, the worry, the stress back up, out of his hands. That stuff is heavy when we pick it back up. There’s a reason that we’re supposed to leave it all with him.
1 Peter 5:7 has always been one of my favorite Bible verses. It says “Cast all your worry and anxiety on him, because he cares for you.” You see, he’s able to handle the hard stuff. He’s able to shoulder infinitely more than what we can carry.
It makes me think of my kids… They love to hunt for geodes, these big, heavy rocks that we have here in the midwest. And when you break them open, they sparkle inside. Sometimes we walk along the river bank and one of my kiddos will find a geode that’s really pretty inside and they want to just hang on to it, to carry it.
And so, we’ll keep walking along the river bank, and the big rock starts to get heavy in their hands, but they don’t want to hand it over to me, so we keep walking and walking until finally, they just can’t handle the heaviness anymore. Finally, they let go of the heavy rock and they put it in my hands. And when they do, they can breathe again, they can rest again. The heaviness is gone. And their hands are open and they are ready to receive something NEW at that point.
Isn’t that beautiful? A picture of a child placing their heavy thing in the hands of their mother or father. That’s what prayer is.
The Prayer Box
If you want to use prayer as a really effective weapon against anxiety, get yourself a “prayer box.” A prayer box isn’t anything special or fancy. It can be any old box you have laying around your house, like a shoebox, or an old pencil box.
When something is weighing heavy on your heart, write it down on some paper, talk to God about it in prayer and then slip the paper in your prayer box. The prayer box belongs to God, by the way. When you put something in it, you’ve officially handed it over to him.
After that, after you’ve prayed about and fully trusted it into God’s hands, you just release it from your own mind, your own worry. Should you find yourself starting to worry over it again, go to your prayer box, take out the piece of paper and carry it around with you… all day if you have to, because essentially you’re saying “God, I don’t trust that you can handle this. I’ll take it back and I’ll carry it around.”
You don’t want to do that right. A prayer box serves as a physical, tangible reminder of the worries and anxieties that you’ve chosen to hand over to God.
Praise
When it comes to the “praise” part of the P3 method, I love to use the phrase, “worship your way out of it.” The reason being is that this has worked for me over and over and over again. I have praised and worshiped my way out of anxiety more times than I can count.
What does praise look like? For me, it’s spending intentional time worshiping God. Sometimes I play quiet worship music, and sometimes I just sit in silence and I turn my heart and mind and thoughts to him. That’s what I do.
Now, I understand that you have real problems, and that you may not feel like praising God when you have junk going on in your life. I get it. You may not like the WHAT of what’s going on in your life. But you can still praise God for WHO he is.
He is near. He is good, even when things don’t feel good. He is your father. He’s faithful. And he’s big. He is big enough, and he loves you enough that he stands ready to listen to your prayers and praise. He stands ready to carry the weight of your anxiety, so that you can have peace. So, tuck this little phrase in your heart today… Prayer + Praise = Peace.
Re-Frame/Pre-Frame Strategy
The second way to reduce anxiety is a 2-in-1 so to speak. I call it the Re-Frame/Pre-Frame Strategy. You’ll only use one part at a time, depending on your situation, either the Re-Frame -OR- the Pre-Frame. Either way, it’s all about your perspective.
I have a story to share with you to illustrate “Re-Framing.” I call it “the story of Christmas chaos.”
This past December, there were a lot of things on my plate. At least from where I stood, that’s what it looked like. We were wrapping up the 1st semester of our 2nd year of homeschool, we’d just hosted Thanksgiving so there was all the Christmas decorating to be done, gifts to buy, family gatherings to plan, church events to attend, a birthday party to host for my youngest child, meals to prep, stockings to fill, and sporting events and Christmas programs for my kids that were going on. You name it, it was on my plate. Also, I’d been asked to volunteer at an event, several of my friends had asked me about catching up over coffee and to top it allllll off, my grandmother and my father-in-law had both been in and out of the hospital for weeks.
I felt like I was at my breaking point. It just seemed like too many things to be on any one person’s plate and I found myself dumping all of this out in a conversation with a friend.
I was talking a million miles a minute, just dumping out all of my overwhelm when suddenly I stopped talking. A revelation had just hit me, like a brick, between my eyes. I was focused on chaos. Do you remember talking about focus and how what we focus on grows? Right? I was focused on chaos, and the truth was… my family members being in the hospital was the ONLY thing in my world at that moment, that was not a good thing.
There was only one thing on my gigantic pile of concerns that was “bad,” that was worth worrying about. All the rest were good things. I was allowing myself to be completely overwhelmed and spiral into anxiety, over GOOD things!?
I had to unwrap the truth and tell myself the true story. All I had to do was re-frame my anxiety and overwhelm to completely eliminate the anxiety and overwhelm!
Re-Framing with God’s Word
Did you know that God actually teaches us a step-by-step method for re-framing? It goes like this: Step 1, take your thoughts captive. Step 2, renew your mind with truth. And step 3, meditate on that truth and repeat it until you believe it with every fiber of your being.
Now, this probably sounds at least halfway familiar to you because it’s all based on scripture that you’ve most likely heard before. But it’s when you put these three things together in this process, in this order, that it’s really effective and really powerful.
So before we dive into these steps, I just I want you to think about when it comes to your anxiety and the anxious thoughts in your mind, I want you to think of it like this:
Imagine if you have something really precious. In fact, I want you to imagine that you inherited your Great Grandmother’s rose garden. So you have this precious thing, but you begin to notice something. You notice a problem. There are intrusive weeds and animals and pests that have come to destroy this precious thing that you have, this rose garden that you inherited. Like groundhogs and foxes and pests and insects. You’re not going to let them destroy this precious thing that you have, right?
No, you’re going to do whatever it takes to take those destructive things captive and you’re going to replace them with things that will help your rose garden flourish. Things like earthworms, butterflies, pollinators, things that will help the precious garden grow.
Your anxiety and your anxious thoughts are like the pests coming to destroy your garden. They have no place there. So you’re going to take them captive, replace them with good things, and then continue to care for your garden.
Can this be a hard thing to do? Yes. But guess what? You’re capable of doing hard things. 2 Timothy 1:7 says that God gave you a spirit of power, love, and self-control. And Philippians 4:13 says you can do all things through Christ who gives you strength.
That applies when it comes to re-framing your thoughts and your focus and your life with the truth.
Take your thoughts captive, renew your mind with truth, repeat the truth, meditate on it until you believe it to be true.
Take Your Thoughts Captive
Let’s break this down just a little bit further. STEP 1. Take your thoughts captive. 2 Corinthians 10:5 says, take every thought captive to obey Christ. So how exactly are you supposed to do that?
First, it’s going to require that you take the time to actually sit down with your thoughts. That means you being willing and able to sit down and there are no other distractions, nothing else going on around you, nothing else on your plate. But you’re going to take the time to sit down and just be able to think about and wrestle with your thoughts.
Like it almost reminds me of a rodeo ring where the cowboys are trying to rope the calves or rope the bulls. It takes some work to take your thoughts captive. Let me just acknowledge that and speak truth about that. But it’s worth doing. so you sit down with your thoughts. You become aware of them. You wrestle with them. You identify them. You identify the thoughts that are causing your anxiety and your anxious thoughts. You identify what those are and you take hold of them in your mind.
Renew Your Mind with Truth
STEP 2. Renew your mind with truth. Romans 12:2 says to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. So you turn to God’s word to see what he says about the thoughts you’re thinking, and the things you are focusing on. And then you take what he says about those things and you plant seeds of truth in your mind. If you feel like you don’t even know where to start with this, take a look at the index in the back of your Bible, or even do a quick Google search. Just Google, what does the Bible say about… whatever you’re anxious about?
Friendship, marriage, health, healing, whatever it is. Look to see what God says about it. And then the truths that you find in the Bible, write them down. It’s super important that you write these findings down so that you can move on to STEP #3, which is focus on, meditate on, and repeat the truths until you believe them.
Philippians 4:8 says to think about things that are true, noble, right, pure, and lovely. It says if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.
You take God’s truth and you repeat it and you think on it and you post it up around your house and you put these truths on the home screen of your phone and you speak them and you read them out loud until you believe them.
Take your thoughts captive, Renew your mind with truth, Repeat and meditate on the truth until it sinks deep into your heart. This is how you re-frame.
Pre-Framing
Pre-framing is much more simple to do. To pre-frame, you pull from the truths that are already tucked into your heart and you speak those over situations before they even happen.
You speak the truth and you speak scripture to pre-frame the peace that you know God provides, no matter what circumstance may come next.
Pre-framing reminds you that you don’t have to lean into worry or fear. It reminds you that no matter the outcome of your next doctor’s visit, your Heavenly Father won’t leave your side. Pre-framing provides you the strength and the courage to walk into that family gathering that’s been weighing heavy on your heart because there’s tension between you and a sibling. Pre-framing speaks to an abundance mindset before your mind drifts off to a dark place of panic thinking about next month’s bills before they are even an issue. Pre-framing brings peace and dare I say it, it can even provide joy, whereas anxiety and panic rob you of those things.
Re-frame and Pre-frame… maybe not always easy to do, but very simple and effective ways to reduce anxiety.
I want to give you one last *bonus* anxiety reducer. It’s an episode right here on this podcast, a little hidden gem. Episode # 54 is a guided meditation where I walk you through a visual of meeting with the Lord, handing him your worry and just sitting and resting in His presence. So you can go give that a listen!
I can’t close out this episode without inviting you to take a look at the AA mini-course. If you found what I shared today helpful, then you would benefit greatly from this resource. The AA is about an hour worth of audios and videos that will walk you through the exact process of how to break free from your anxiety once and for all. You can find it at KatieHedrick.com/AnxietyAntidote
You can head over there now and I’ll meet you inside the program, or back on this podcast very soon. It’s an honor to speak truth and joy into your life, friend! Keep moving forward!
