The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry is the Doorway to Your Best Self by Curtis Chang

Author:Curtis Chang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsChristianPublishing
Published: 2023-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Trying to avoid the unavoidable generates anxious energy.

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The Opportunity for Change

The Anxiety Formula shows us that lowering avoidance is a powerful way to lower anxiety.

Like E = mc2, Anxiety = Loss × Avoidance identifies the opportunity for change. Avoidance is the key variable. Like the speed of light, loss is fixed, inevitable, and huge (in fact, total) over the course of our lifetimes. But just as subatomic changes in mass can greatly affect energy levels, modest changes in lowering avoidance can greatly affect anxiety levels. In the process, anxious energy can get freed up into more productive energy. Unlocking this opportunity requires changing how we handle avoidance.

We can change our avoidance habits. A large body of psychological research shows that lowering avoidance can meaningfully lower anxiety.9 But lowering avoidance requires training. Avoidance habits are deeply ingrained in us, often starting early in our childhood (like my latchkey kid ploy). Through repetition, they become unconscious and habitual. Thus, lowering avoidance habits requires practice.

Avoidance habits also call us to undertake a deeper investigation. In some cases, our avoidance is charged with a dark spiritual energy. We sometimes have to drill to this nuclear core, which the Bible calls “idolatry.” Indeed, some versions of Psalm 139 conclude the process of inviting God to “investigate our anxious thoughts,” with verse 24 translated as, “Look to see if there is any idolatrous way in me” (CEB, emphasis added). An idol is anything that supplants the rightful role of God—especially his love for us—in our lives. Idolatry is the set of habits that embodies our trust in this alternative to God’s love. In some cases, idolatry pulsates at the center of anxiety because idolatry is all about avoidance—avoiding our need to trust God.

Let me emphasize that idolatry is not always at the core of every case of anxiety, only that it could be. This is why the writer of Psalm 139 invites God to search his anxious thoughts to see if there is “any idolatrous way” in him. And the discovery of idolatry at the nuclear core of one’s anxiety is actually an incredible opportunity: if one can smash that idol, it is like the spiritual equivalent of smashing the atom. Incredible amounts of trapped energy can be freed up for the kind of productivity God intends for us.

How do we apply this Anxiety Formula to our lives in a practical manner? How do we lower our avoidance such that anxiety is lowered and anxious energy is transformed into productive and renewable energy, into what Psalm 139 describes as “the way everlasting”? How do we identify hidden idolatry that might lie at the core of a particular anxiety? The next chapter provides a case study in using the Anxiety Formula.

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