Anxiety. It seems so right, so normal, so justified.
As a child, stressed-out adults was all I knew. I saw anxiety as cool, and visible stress as a badge of responsibility and importance. Anxiety is baked into my DNA.
This morning, as I struggled to cope with planning and budgeting in the face of many uncertainties and unknowns, I suddenly realized that I was still holding on to that false belief. I was believing a lie.
Truth is, I am a King's Kid, and peace and joy are my birthright. Anxiety is an imposter. As such, I chose to prosecute, to haul anxiety into the Courtroom of Heaven, and allow my Defender to take care of it. It's the first step in rewiring those faulty defaults in my brain, and a huge step toward living in my inheritance.
Anxiety is NOT right, should not be normal, and does not need to be justified. (Do not hear this as condemnation of those who are anxious. Instead, think of it the way you would high blood pressure. It isn't normal or good, but we don't shame the person who has it. We help them bring it down to where it should be.)
Our brains are literally wired for joy. When you try to run fear through those circuits, the system isn't designed to handle it, and begins to throw sparks, in the form of anxiety, murky thinking, panic attacks, anger, etc. Neuroscientist Caroline Leaf explains the biology of this in her book Switch on Your Brain. (While I do not endorse Dr Leaf unreservedly, her work on the relationship between thought patterns and neurobiology is excellent.)
