No matter what your approach is for the healing of anxiety struggles, it is critical that you have patience with yourself in the process. Without patience, you will easily beat yourself up and make the battle a hundred times worse. It is critical that patience, as the Bible says, have its “perfect work” (James 1:4) in the whole process.
When patience is in the picture, you give yourself the ability to see with greater clarity what you are up against and what you need to overcome. Without patience, you’ll get lost in daily discouragement and defeartism. You’ll become angry with yourself and feel like quitting all the time.
Patience: Giving Yourself Time to Overcome Anxiety
Although it would be amazing for your anxiety issues to vanish in a moment. The majority of people who overcome usually took some time to get there. I find that Christians don’t make enough room for the process in their healing journey.
That means we need to give ourselves patience by giving ourselves time. I am not talking about mindless time, where we live passive, waiting for something to change. What I am talking about is giving yourself the gift of patience, where you engage the process of transformation without the pressure that you should have been free ten years ago.
You need to be released of the pressure that comes on because you don’t see the freedom yet. You need the patience that releases you from the pressure of getting “fixed,” and instead, lean into the process that’s ahead of you.
You need time. And I find we need to give ourselves patient time for a few reasons.
1. Time to Learn
Give yourself patient time to learn what you need to learn to overcome. Because what you gain in the learning becomes yours to posses and you can deposit the gold to others.
We struggle with this, but the signals that anxiety give reveal areas where we need to learn and grow in what it means to feel safe, to know we are loved and develop a new confidence where fear once resided.
I found that when I turned my frustration into learning, it humbled myself to be taught and learn what I did not know, but needed to know.
2. Time to Implement a Strategy
Hoping that anxiety will just some day go away is not a great outlook to have. In the learning process, it’s important to develop a strategy; a battle plan for overcoming.
As you develop patience, you are also giving yourself time to develop a strategy that impacts your daily lifestyle.
What is it going to take to overcome?
What does my day look like to come into agreement with freedom?
What would my life look like if anxiety was not in the equation? How can I begin practicing that now?
Strategy is critical to the process. This is why I am so passionate at giving practical application and tools to overcome, in both my book I Will Not Fear and the online training program.
3. Time to Practice
When you live in patience, you give yourself time to practice. You will have some great days and some really tough days as well. But if you position your heart well, you can learn from both scenarios.
Instead of beating myself up for where I thought I wasn’t overcoming, I used those tough areas as places where I needed to practice more.
When you have anxiety, you need practice to overcome.
Anxiety for me often came about during social settings. I would be lost in heart palpitations and nervousness. I couldn’t wait for the social setting to be over with.
Instead of beating myself up over this, I leaned into the discomfort and gave myself permission to practice getting comfortable in social settings. It is completely unrealistic to expect yourself to be free and then act. You often need to act, then over time, watch yourself come into alignment with the new way of living.
When a doctor opens up his or her line of work, they call it a practice. If they can practice as professionals, then you are certainly allowed to practice your overcoming journey on a daily basis.
See your setbacks and tough days as times of learning. It’s ok. You are practicing.
4. Time to Develop a New Response to Anxiety
When you have been under the conditioning of anxiety for some time, you can easily find yourself falling under a programmed response to it very easily. The two biggest responses that anxiety triggers is avoidance and displacement. We remove ourselves or we avoid situations altogether.
I have never seen anyone overcome anxiety without facing it. So you will need to give yourself time to develop a new response to anxiety.
You may need to become more mindful of the patterns you fall into when anxiety kicks up. Developing new patterns and new reactions can position yourself for victory like nothing else.
For example, when I found myself feeling anxious, I would ask myself a question: do I need to stop and connect to the loving peace of God? Or do I need to stand as a warrior and kick this anxiousness out? It was often one or the other. Either way, I developed a new response to the anxiety, rather than letting it dictate my life and decisions.
5. Time to Rebuild Your Confidence
Those who are afraid and anxious lose a sense of trust and confidence. When your confidence is stolen, you become hesitant, double minded and passive. The more the enemy steals your confidence, the less likely you are to take bold steps of faith.
But rebuilding your confidence takes time. For many people reading this, you’ve become more prone to anxiety because your confidence was stripped. Your heart was broken at some point and love needs to breathe confidence back into your life.
But as God’s perfecting love and patience has its work in your hearts, you can day by day, rebuild your confidence of His work within you.
6. Time for Your Physiology to be Renewed
Sometimes the body can take some time to get renewed into peace and out of constant anxiety. It’s important to understand that your body can be easily conditioned into certain patterns. Over time, it can get used to firing off a anxiety response without conscious awareness.
It can take time and strategy to begin allowing your body to regain its peace and strengthen its stress response. Patience practice will help restore the body to a stabilized state.
Many get discouraged and are frustrated because they are still having anxiety symptoms. I often find that they need a new strategy, they are being too hard on themselves, or they haven’t given their physiology time to get renewed and overcome. Practices of stillness and habits I talk about in I Will Not Fear help to address the physiological conditioning that anxiety brings.
The body can be easily conditioned into anxiety, but it can also be trained to walk in power, love and a sound mind. It just takes some patience application.
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