Anxiety and Depression and How to Help Yourself
If you’ve ever been told to “just stop worrying” or to “choose joy,” you already know how unhelpful that advice is. Anxiety and depression are not character flaws. Nor are they signs that your faith is weak. They are not things you can simply decide your way out of – if that were the case millions of people would do exactly that! And if you’ve been carrying either — or both — I want to start by saying this: I see how exhausting that is. You are not alone.
I also want to share something that I have seen help create some shift in my years of working as a licensed counselor — something that doesn’t require you to pretend everything is fine, doesn’t ask you to suppress what you’re feeling, and isn’t about masking your symptoms with a smile and a scripture verse. If you’ve been around at all, you know we aren’t “take two verses and call us in the morning.”
There is a cycle happening in your mind that may be quietly making your anxiety and depression worse. And once you understand it, you can begin to interrupt it.
First, Let’s Talk About What You’re Actually Carrying
Anxiety and depression are exhausting in a way that is genuinely hard to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced them. It’s not just feeling sad or feeling worried. It’s the weight of it. The relentlessness. The way it colors everything — your mornings, your relationships, your ability to enjoy things that used to bring you life.
Anxiety can feel like your brain is running a threat-detection program on a continuous loop, even when there’s no actual threat in front of you. Depression can feel like being trapped behind glass or under water — you can see your life happening, but you can’t quite reach it or feel it the way you used to. You feel like you’re drowning.
And for many Christians, there’s an added layer of confusion or shame: Shouldn’t my faith be enough? If I really trusted God, would I still feel this way? That shame spiral can make everything harder. I want to be so clear: anxiety and depression are not a faith problem. They are a whole-person experience — mind, body, and spirit — and they deserve to be addressed as such.
The Thought-Emotion Cycle (And Why It Matters)
Here’s something that most people don’t realize: your thoughts and your emotions are in a constant conversation with each other. And that conversation can either calm the storm — or feed it.
It works like this: a thought appears. Maybe it’s “Something is wrong with me,” or “This is never going to get better,” or even something as simple as noticing that a friend didn’t text back and thinking “They must be upset with me.” (As an aside, so many people assume the worst when someone reacts or doesn’t react in a way we expect, but that deserves its own blog.) That thought and the meaning we give it triggers an emotion (or a whole bunch of emotions) like fear, sadness, or shame. And those emotions? They trigger more thoughts. Which trigger more emotions. Which trigger more thoughts.
Before you know it, you’ve gone from a single unanswered text to a full spiral about your worth, your relationships, and your future — in under two minutes. Sound familiar? I know it does to me. I once sent my own therapist a meme that said, “I’m not spiraling, I’m just following a suspiciously curved path.”
This is the thought-emotion cycle. And when anxiety and depression are already present, this cycle can spin faster and go deeper than it does for someone who isn’t struggling. The thoughts feel more true. The emotions feel more permanent. And the cycle becomes harder to interrupt.
Here’s the important part: your thoughts and feelings are not always facts. I know that might be hard to hear when a thought feels absolutely, undeniably true. Additionally, feelings are not facts. They are experiences — real, valid, worth paying attention to — but they are not always an accurate picture of reality. I refer to them as data and we can be curious about it.
What Happens When We’re on Autopilot
Most of us are running this thought-emotion cycle almost entirely on autopilot, like we talked about in our last blog. We’re not choosing our thoughts deliberately. We’re not pausing to ask whether they’re accurate. We’re just reacting — thought to emotion to thought to emotion — and the anxiety and depression get to keep driving.
Research has actually shown that this kind of automatic, unexamined thinking — what we call living on autopilot — is one of the factors that allows anxiety and depression to deepen and intensify over time. When we don’t notice our thoughts, we can’t question them. When we can’t question them, we believe everything they tell us. And anxiety and depression tell us some very convincing, very unkind things.
The good news is that noticing — simply becoming aware of the cycle — is already the beginning of interrupting it.
What the Bible Has to Say About This
The instruction to “take every thought captive” from 2 Corinthians is not a command to suppress your thoughts or pretend they aren’t there. It’s an invitation to notice them — to become aware of what’s happening in your mind — and to bring those thoughts into alignment with truth.
Philippians 4:8 tells us to think about what is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, and commendable. That’s not a call to toxic positivity. It’s a call to intentional attention — to practice directing our minds rather than letting our minds direct us. There are studies that show that what we focus on profoundly impacts our mood.
And Philippians 4:6-7 — the “do not be anxious” passage — is paired with a promise: that when we bring our concerns to God, the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds. Guard your minds. That language is active. It implies that our minds need guarding — and that God partners with us in that work. In a world where the news is literally a dumpster fire all the time, it can be so easy to have our thoughts and emotions focused on darkness. We have to be intentional about turning our faces away from that.
Skills That Actually Help (Not Just Cope)
Here’s what I want you to hear most: there are practical, learnable skills that can genuinely reduce anxiety and depression — not just help you white-knuckle through them.
I’ve sat with clients who came in convinced that they would always feel the way they felt. That this was just who they were. That the best they could hope for was managing symptoms. And I have watched those same people — through consistent practice of specific, evidence-based skills — experience real, lasting change. Not perfection. Not the absence of hard days. But genuine freedom that they didn’t think was possible. And yes, we also had to process traumatic experiences, but between sessions using good skills promotes healing.
One of my clients told me that practicing these skills changed everything for her. Another came in stunned to report that her blood pressure had improved — her doctor was amazed. The mind and body are deeply connected, and when we learn to work with our thoughts rather than being dragged around by them, the effects ripple out into every area of life.
Research backs this up. Practicing mindful awareness — learning to notice your thoughts and emotions without being controlled by them — for as little as 10 minutes a day over 8 weeks has been shown to literally change the structure of the brain and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. This isn’t a trendy wellness hack. It’s neuroscience. And it’s grace.
Where Do You Start?
The first skill — the one that everything else is built on — is simply learning to notice. Not to fix, not to analyze, not to judge. Just to observe what’s happening in your mind and body in the present moment.
When a thought arises, instead of immediately believing it or reacting to it (or judging it), you can learn to pause and simply notice: There’s that thought again. Or: I’m noticing that I feel anxious right now. That small act of observation creates just enough space between the thought and your reaction that the cycle begins to lose some of its power.
It sounds almost too simple. I understand that. But I have seen it work — in my practice, in my own life, and in the lives of people who were convinced nothing would help. The skill is simple. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. But it is learnable, and that matters. Here’s a pro tip – practice noticing your thoughts and emotions when you aren’t in a spiral. That will give you really good practice and build that muscle.
You Don’t Have to Stay Stuck
If anxiety and depression have been a long-term part of your story, I want to be honest with you: this work takes time and practice. These skills are not a quick fix, and I’m not going to promise you otherwise. But they are real. They work. And you deserve to have access to them.
The abundant life that Jesus talks about — life to the full — is not a life free of struggle. But it is a life where you are not a slave to your thoughts and emotions. It’s a life where the anxiety and depression don’t get to make all the decisions. Where depression and anxiety don’t get the final word on who you are and what’s possible for you.
That kind of freedom is available to you. Not because you’ll ever be perfect at this — none of us are — but because these are skills that grow with practice. And every single time you notice a thought, pause, and choose not to let it drive the spiral, you are doing something powerful.
You are taking your thoughts captive. And that is exactly where change begins.
Ready to learn the skills in more detail? Click the link below to learn more about the Taking Every Thought Captive course series and start building skills that create real, lasting change. Use the code RESET24 to get a big discount!
And if you need some one-on-one counseling support, reach out to our expert team at The Journey and The Process. It’s okay not to be okay, and you don’t have to stay there.
