Have you ever looked down while driving and seen the “check engine” light on in your car? What an impossibly broad warning censor, right? At least one of the hundreds of moving pieces of metal in my engine is not functioning properly. Thanks for the tip. Anxiety is a bit vague, like the “check engine” light. It’s an impossibly broad warning system, but it indicates something is off. 

Let’s pretend for a moment—and believe me, this is pretending—that we could put you through a 90-day Impossibly Difficult Detox Program; what would that program look like? Following the directions to our Impossibly Difficult Detox Program may trigger some diagnostics that could help you isolate areas of your life that are out of range. The goal is to achieve a life in the optimal zone the designer created for you. That would presumably result in your shalom or total well-being. Let’s start with the four contributing categories to which anxiety could be linked.

4 Major Categories:

1. Body / Brain

2. Emotional / Social

3. Spiritual / Meditative

4. Environmental

Category #1 Body / Brain

The condition of your physical body and brain absolutely impacts your emotional well-being.

If you eat a giant greasy pizza, you may feel lethargic, bored, and even a bit foggy afterward. If your technology and social media usage exceeds certain limits, you will experience dopamine crashes, anxiety, and depression. Teenage girls famously experience increased anxiety due to overexposure to social media. Below is a shotgun list of things you’ll never do but probably should give a 90-day try. 

Impossibly Difficult Detox Program Steps

1. Breathing techniques to reduce stress and slow the heart rate.
2. Improve your baseline dopamine for motivation and drive.
3. Eliminate excessive caffeine from your life.
4. Stop drinking sugar and drink lots of water.
5. Stop eating gluten and sugary foods.
6. Reduce your dopamine intake. (Our church does not endorse all opinions expressed in this video.)
7. Take 30-minute walks outside for five days of the week.
8. Learn tactile hobbies that anchor your five senses to the real world, such as painting, knitting, sports, etc.

Category #2 Emotional / Social

The condition of how you fit into the group is a vital part of your health. Sometimes, if we are afraid of rejection or abandonment, anxiety can feel like a sort of relational parasite. Why do we continually worry about what certain people think of us, for example? In this list of impossible detox steps, we learn to listen to our soul and what to do with what we know.

Impossibly Difficult Detox Program Steps

1. Hang out with people you enjoy at least two nights a week.
2. Write an appreciation/encouragement card to someone once a week, telling them the things that make them special and how you’ve appreciated their friendship.
3. Journal for 15 minutes at the end of each day.
   1. Write about people, what you appreciate and how they make you feel.
   2. Listen to your emotions. What are they telling you?
   3. What do you need from others? Do you need approval? Do you need a hug? Do you need sympathy? Do you need a companion? Do you need someone to have fun with? Do you need to feel loveable?
   4. Who provides you comfort when you are feeling stressed or criticized?
4. Communicate
   
   1. Learn to articulate what emotions you are feeling.
   2. Learn to express needs that others can meet for you. For example, “I feel rejected, and I just need a hug.” “I feel misunderstood, and I need someone to listen to me.” “I feel neglected, and I need someone to spend time with me.” “I feel like having fun, and I just want a playmate.”

Category #3 Spiritual / Meditation

Life was designed to be lived with our Life Source. Anxiety can indicate that we are trying to manage things on our own when we were never designed to do that. God wants us to learn to bring our needs to him. Run to him with questions and struggles. Ask for his counsel and help. He wants to be our companion amid life’s battles and our provider in times of need.

Impossibly Difficult Detox Program Steps

1. Once a week, do at least one act or project of altruism and goodness that gets you out of your world and focuses you on helping someone else.
2. At the end of your day, thank the Lord for five things about this specific day.
3. Spend ten minutes of meditation on God. First, declare who he is: “God, you are good.” Second, thank him for being that to you right now: “God, thank you for being with me and for being good to me.”

Category #4 Environmental

Some environments are hostile, toxic, stressful, dangerous, or abusive, and anxiety is your body’s way of saying, “I don’t feel safe.” You may need to make changes to people’s expectations of you. Maybe you need to ditch an extra commitment, slim down a calendar, or maybe you need to stop visiting your abusive relative in their hostile environment.

Impossibly Difficult Detox Program Steps

1. Cut a commitment out of your calendar.
2. Cut a project out of your workload.
3. Cut a “location” out of your relational life.
4. Verbally create personal boundaries with clear consequences.

Conclusion

Anxiety is an alarm bell we should not ignore. The problem is that it can indicate so many different triggers and probably, for some of us, multiple triggers at the same time. Maybe what this article has done is given you a few good ideas. The key is that it will require a change of behavior to see a change of symptoms. So, doing nothing isn’t going to stop the anxiety. Jesus is the Prince of Peace, and he desires for you to experience his shalom! Peace, however, results from him resetting our lives in proper order. I pray for the courage and wisdom to follow his lead.

Tags: prayer, anxiety, water, relationships, body, spiritual, fasting, stress, meditation, brain, environmental, sugar, dopamine, deep breathing