Unwind: A Christian's Guide for Battling Stress, Worry, and Anxiety
Tim Atkinson
Life is crazy. It comes at you fast. Relentless deadlines, commitments, pressures.

We find ourselves running, racing, and in the process emotionally wearing down.

But living with peace is possible! You can experience calmness even in the midst of the stress and strife that life throws at you.

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book excerpt

From Chapter One When we run our lives on automatic, we often miss the subtle moments when stress and worry become intertwined, forming mental and physical holds on our bodies and minds. Living without pause, we set the stage for anxiety to emerge unwittingly until our overall well-being declines. This book is for you if you want to battle stress, worry, and anxiety with mindfulness and meditation, but you are concerned that these practices conflict with your Christian values. In this small volume, allow me to gently guide you through a six-week mindfulness program, sensitive to Christian thought and grounded in Scripture so you can practice without fear or guilt. Here, you learn to unwind from the holds of anxiety, worry, and stress in your life. The program is a focused and gradual process where you learn that the conditions you battle are temporary, and you can learn to release them with time. We will move slowly and thoughtfully, and learn to unwind from the mental and physical holds on our lives until we achieve each stage of release and healing. Over forty-million Americans suffer from anxiety and 37% go untreated due to the lack of access to medical care or the stigma associated with a mental health diagnosis. The evidence supporting the effectiveness of mindfulness for worry, stress, and anxiety is overwhelming, covering forty years of research and thousands of studies that consistently demonstrate meditation and mindfulness work to complement medical treatments for anxiety, or as a stand-alone practice that you can do at home. This book is unique because I have deep, personal experience with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), and I can attest that the daily practice of mindfulness finally healed me through a combination of meditation, prayer, and faith. I practiced for several years using traditional, mainstream, and Buddhism-based methods, and I regularly found myself uncomfortable with the words and approaches the teachers used to explain the current wisdom of meditation and mindfulness. Along the way, I modified the training for my Christian mindset, and the results were fantastic. I based this approach on two fundamental principles: (1) “The One who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world” (1 John 4:4), and (2) God created all things for his purposes (Col. 1:16), including meditation. In the following chapters, I share the six-week Christianity based program for mindfulness. This book is not about medical advice; you can think of it as a dialog among friends having a living room Bible study with a teacher who has defeated anxiety using a Christianity-based approach to mindfulness and meditation, and I want you to defeat anxiety, too. Mindfulness the Christian Way Mindfulness includes the practice of meditation, but the practice of mindfulness itself is the conscious, active awareness of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and behaviors in such a way that you understand with your heart how your actions affect yourself and others. Jesus asks his followers to abide in this way when he says, “Do unto others” (Luke 6:31). You can be mindful informally, while sitting in a meeting, walking down the street, shopping in a store, leading your team at work, or when with your family. From my perspective, the fruits of the Spirit drive the core of Christianity-based mindfulness behavior, and these are love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). Meditation the Christian Way Meditation is a deliberate act of focus which, like physical exercise, requires you to show up every day to show improvement. It is the formal, personal act of mindfulness where you set aside a particular time to train your brain to focus on singular objects of awareness. You start with your God-given breath, move to the body, and expand to the other present-moment experiences that God has given us. It is just like exercise for the body, but instead of exercising your muscles to make them stronger, you exercise your mind and soul to reflect the attitudes of Jesus. I believe these behaviors are captured in the command to “be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). “Be still” means stillness of body, but it also implies stillness of spirit, mind, and soul. Indeed, the Bible gives us insights regarding what we should practice when being still. Anxiety, Stress, and Worry for This Program When I worried, I continuously dwelled on negative thoughts. I even worried about things that were never going to happen, which added unneeded extra stress. Anxiety started to emerge. When I worried like this, I would worry automatically, without paying attention to what was going on in my body and mind. When I worried, it seemed like anxiety was just in my mind, but anxiety had also settled into my muscles and body. I carried an unconscious tension in my jaw, shoulders, stomach, and legs. Worry affects the mind, but if it goes unchecked, it can lead to stress. If stress goes unchecked, the body stays in fight or flight mode. I do not believe God intended us to stay in this state of mind because it causes our focus to shift to self and we can lose sight of him. In this program, I refer to stress, worry, and anxiety together because they all work in unison to generate holds on our thoughts and generate tension in the body. In each chapter, we will take a moment to find tension in the body and mind and gently release it. We can start right now. Just unclench your jaw. Let it hang loose. You do not have to open your mouth to let your jaw hang. Separate the top teeth from the bottom teeth. Raise your shoulders toward your ears, feel the stretch, then slowly drop your shoulders back into place. As you learn to stop and become mindful of the tension in your body and mind like this, you can break the cycle of stress.