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80. Where Are Our Guests Now

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 80. Where Are Our Guests Now

Where are our guests now? To mark the Hope for Anxiety and OCD 80th episode, I’m giving you some updates on some of our past guests.

Some of them recorded their own updates and some sent us the update via email to read.


           

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 80. I thought it would be kind of fun to do an update episode where we hear where our guests are. Now, the podcast has been live for almost two years. Some of our guests are doing some new things that you might be interested in. And this also gives me an opportunity to remind you of some of the episodes that you may have missed and wanna go back and listen to.

Some of our guests recorded their own updates to put in the podcast and some sent us the update via email to read. I’ll start off by giving you several author updates. I mean, you always wanna keep up with the authors because of course they have written more book.

Holly Gerth

Holly Gerth brought us episode 19, Thriving as an Introvert in an Extrovert World.

This is truly one of my favorite episodes that we did because I wish I had understood intro introversion 20 years ago, as a young adult. I think it would’ve made just such a huge difference for me in understanding myself and how to navigate the world. Holly has written a devotional book for people, struggling with anxiety called what your mind needs for anxious moments that came out in September. And she’ll also be hosting, Breaking Free from Stress Worry and Anxiety Summit.

Peyton Garland

Peyton Garland told us the story of her O OCD diagnosis and treatment in episode 26. Here’s her update.

Peyton: Hey everybody. It’s Peyton Garland. I had the honor and the pleasure of being on the hope for anxiety and OCD podcast about a year, a year and a half ago. And I just wanted to hop back on here and let you guys know that there has been so much growth in my life. And you know, it probably sounds a little cheesy because hope is in the title of this podcast, but I’ve found lots of hope in the past year.

Since I last chatted with you guys, I have found hope and a little white better known as Zoloft. I am so thrilled that I have finally found a medication that seems to be a true miracle and is working so well for my brain. And also my soul. My husband and I just bought an old 1894 farmhouse in Tennessee on about 13 or 14 acres and, you know, OCD for me as someone who struggles with sensory overload.

I am so to finally seem to get some serenity and some peace and have just the quiet of nature to nurture my mind. And aside of that last time I talked with you guys, I just released not so by myself, my first book, and it was a memoir that dug deep into my, my big battle with OCD, you know, kind of pre-diagnosis.

The day I got the diagnosis and post-diagnosis and how to trudge through difficult seasons. Well, and I’m so honored to let you guys know that I have a second book releasing actually in about a couple of weeks, it’s gonna be called Tired, Hungry, and kind of Faithful, Again, diving into this concept that life is messy. Life is muddy, but it is so beautiful, even in seasons of hunger where you’re thirsting for more, where you feel that your faith and your hope are kind shoved in a glass that’s half. But there’s so much room to fill that cup. And, and it’s a cup that’s mid by God to overflow and yeah, a year later still strugg ling with OCD, but finding so much hope.

And I would love for you to check out my next book. It’s got lots of funny stories. My dogs are in this book as well. Lots of tidbits on my battle with OCD, but I think most of all, it’s just. The story of me discovering that there is true beauty from Ash and that that beauty from Ash is something that’s attainable for you as well.

So again, I’m so excited to be back on here and to tell everyone, Hey, life is full of light and hope amid the mess over in Peyton Garland’s world. And I’m so excited to catch you guys later.

Dr. Irene Kraegel

Carrie: Dr. Irene Kraegal who joined us for episode 16 on his mindfulness for Christians had a new book come out on August 2nd, published by Zondervan.

The book is a Christian mindfulness devotional for teens, also applicable for adults. Each of the 150 devotionals includes a scripture passage, a spiritual reflection and a corresponding mindfulness practice. Written guides for classic mindfulness based stress reduction exercises are included such as a body scan, sitting practice and movement meditations along with instructions for informal mindfulness practices that can be incorporated throughout each day.

The devotional also includes introductory and frequently asked question information about effective integration of mindfulness with the Christian.

Pastor Steve Hinton

Carrie: Pastor and author Steve Hinton joined us on episode 37 to discuss doubt and faith. This has been a popular episode in regards to downloads. So if you missed it, you might wanna catch up on that one.

Steve Hinton: Hello, Carrie let me just first say congratulations on reaching number 80 in your ministry and podcast journey. Wow. Your 100th episode is just around the corner. And Gary, I know that your work is encouraging so many people on my end. Well, I’m actually on an extended social media fast this summer, but I am gonna pick up my blog work again the second in September.

You know, social media fast might be a good idea for many of your listeners because there’s so much stress that we unknowingly allow into our lives. And that can’t be prevented by governing what we bring into our hearts and minds from the world around us. But I am planning to get back to the blog in September and I will do this.

I will send a free copy of the confessions book to the first person in your audience who leaves a comment or question in the blog post. When I kick back into it in September the kingdom.com blog post, in addition to my preaching role with a local church on the north side of Houston, I am working with a ministry designed to help foster soul care for pastors, which really is a vital need in our day and age.

I want you to know that pastors need encouragement as well, but again, you have done a wonderful job and, and I’ve been inspired by your podcast and my preparations to launch a future podcast, myself, keep going and as the British say, good show. Thank you, Carrie for all your work.

Carrie: Now we have a few counselor updates for you.

Dyana Robbins

Dyana Robbins: Hi, Carrie and Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast guests. I am Diana Robbins and I was a guest on the podcast talking about my experience, parenting special needs, and children who struggle with anxiety. Since that podcast aired. I have moved back to the United States from Singapore and I’m working as a licensed professional counselor and group and private practice in Texas,

My specialty areas are trauma and grief recovery. I am also developing a program entitled building resilience and parents of exceptional children. For my doctoral dissertation. This program will provide information, support and counseling interventions to help parents thrive at every stage of parenting special needs children.

This month, I have also been a presenter at the trauma and mental health conference where Christian leaders from many fields provide guidance in helping those affected by trauma. You can learn more about my work and contact me through my website dianarobbins.com. That’s D Y A N A R O B B I N s.com.

Thank you, Carrie, for the opportunity to connect with your important work and with all of your listeners. God bless you all.

Lindsey Castlemen

Carrie: You may remember Lindsey Castleman from episode 22 welcoming parts. We don’t like where she introduced us to ifs therapy and told us a sweet story of hope about adopting her son.

Lindsey would like everyone to know that she is doing well. She’s currently the director at the Counseling Center at Fellowship. She supervises marriage and family therapist and has a group practice. She says she’s very proud of the team that she gets to work with and is thankful for all of the opportunities that God has brought her way.

Aron Strong

Lindsey introduced me to Aron Strong of Pathways Counseling in Murphysboro, Tennessee, who brought us episode 29 on God, Feelings and Theology. This was a great episode where we discussed how God has feelings and created us in his image to have feelings as well. Pathways Counseling in Murphysboro has grown adding three additional full-time therapists for a total of nine therapists and graduate interns.

They’re also beginning the process of launching a new location in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. Lindsay and Aron both have an organization called In Relationship and they would like you to know that they have, in addition to their marriage intensives, In Relationship has also created a day and a-half marriage workshop for churches and organizations called Being With. They also have online courses for therapists and Christian counselor member groups. In Relationship has its own podcast.

And they’re excited to announce that they’ve been working with Bridgestone on writing a series of four trainings on empathy and relational engagement to help create work environments in their Firestone stores that employees won’t want to leave. So that’s very exciting for them. Now I’m going to share some updates from organizations and individuals who support people with anxiety in some way.

Dr. Katie Aitken

Carrie: In episode 45, Dr. Katie Aiken joined us for improving nutrition to help anxiety.

Dr, Katie: Hi, Carrie, and the Hope for Anxiety and OCD community. Congratulations on 80 episodes. I’m sure these conversations have helped so many Christians with anxiety and OCD find more connections. Since we’ve spoken, I’ve released the audiobook version of my book, Create, Calm, The Professionals Guide to Overcoming Anxiety from the inside Out. it’s on Audible.

I know how much you love listening to practical guidance on managing anxiety at home. And this resource has all my best tips. The section on connection, where I share how my faith cultivated my self worth might be something that you would enjoy. It’s been great to connect with you, Carrie. Best wishes for your next 80 episodes

Cat Sharp

Carrie: On episode 46, cat sharp brought us Combating Emotional Eating with scripture.

Cat: What an honor, it is to be a part of this special episode. Carrie, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to update you and your listeners on how the Lord is working in my life. Over the last few years, my business has been primarily focused on helping Christian women overcome the traps of emotional eating and binging.

But recently the Lord has been calling me to teach more about what discipleship means and what it looks like in different areas of our lives. So I’ve been partnering with other Christian teachers to create the everyday disciple virtual summit together. We’re tackling topics of parenthood, forgiveness, finances, work, and, and so many more.

And we’re taking a look at what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ in our everyday normal lives. The summit and working with these teachers has been such a blessing for me personally. And of course, as our heavenly father does, he has been challenging me in some new ways. So I’m really excited to share the summit with you and your listeners.

If you would like to learn more, please go to cat sharp.com/summit. The summit is free of course. And if you happen to miss this one, don’t worry. We’re gonna be doing another one. I just don’t have the dates for that yet. Again, thank you, Carrie, for allowing me to be a part of your amazing podcast in the way that you serve others.

Alexa Hulsey and Trey Brackman of Encircle Acupuncture

Carrie: We covered the topic of acupuncture on Episode 23 with Encircle acupuncture. I really wish that they were closer to me. It was near my old office and I miss going to acupuncture. It is so relaxing. Trey and Alexa have an update for us.

Alexa: Hi, this is Alexa Hulsey from Encircle acupuncture.

Trey: And this is Trey Brackman from Encircle acupuncture

Alexa: So Trey, what have you been up to?

Trey: Well, I have surpassed my 10-year mark here at Encircle Acupuncture, continuing to help my wife raise three great kids and continuing to do community acupuncture that I love. How about you? What have you been up to Alexa?

Alexa: Well, I am continuing to see patients here at Encircle. We’ve celebrated our 12 years of treating patients and I have also been blogging. My blog notes from your acupuncturist, which you can find on substack and write about all things related to acupuncture.

Trey: That sounds awesome. It is. And you have recently been on another podcast. I was on Sebastian’s finest hour and we talked all about acupuncture and community acupuncture.

It was really a lot of fun. I would do that again.

Alexa: Awesome. So check out Trey on Sebastian’s finest hour and notes from your acupuncturist on substack. Thanks.

Kelly Ehlert

Carrie: Kelly Ehlert is a pelvic floor physical therapist who joined us on episode 20 to discuss overcoming sexual anxiety and dysfunction for women. She’s also in middle Tennessee.

Kelly would like you to know that she’s collaborating with an acupuncturist and functional medicine provider to help women solve underlying issues for some of their physical symptoms and are offering a collaborative program with the three of them treating the individual. They’re currently calling this the purple duck pack, finding the right provider and creating overall health for mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing on her website.

Kelly has some free resources for returning to work postpartum and free screens for considering when to see a pelvic floor, a physical therapist, to determine if her niche is a good fit for them as someone who just had a baby. I really appreciate all that pelvic floor physical therapy has to offer. In helping women recover their bodies after birth.

Jeff Allen

Carrie: We had a few guests share their personal stories with us, fellow podcaster, Jeff Allen who’s also the host of Simple Mental Health shared with us his story about discovering he had anxiety on episode 32.

Jeff: Hi, Carrie, thank you so much for reaching out and giving me an opportunity to speak again on your podcast and congratulations on 80 episodes. That is quite an accomplishment, especially when you are coordinating all the interviews and giving people such valuable content.

Thanks for all that you do. I just wanted to update you and tell you a little bit about what’s going on with. I recently found out that it’s not just an anxiety disorder, but I have been diagnosed with something called cyclothymia, which is basically a really mild form of bipolar. Been treating it with medication and goodness. I can’t tell you what a difference that has made in my life.

I’m blessed to have found a psychiatrist that has worked with me so well. And given me the opportunities to treat what’s going on with me also, I have been promoted at my job recently. I’m the online site lead for the gathering, which is a church in St. Louis, Missouri recently wrapped up the third season of my podcast, Simple Mental Health. If anybody wants to check it. Simple mental health on all the podcast platforms. Check it out. Thank you so much for all that you do, Carrie. I can’t wait to continue to listen and ride along with you as you continue.

Jennifer Harshman

Carrie: This podcast journey. Have a great one last but not least.

We have an update from Jennifer Harshman who talked to us about her abuse story. Why did God Allow me to go Through That on episode 47.

Jennifer: In the time since I shared with you part of my journey, I achieved a lifelong dream of having a swimming pool.

I started a TikTok account in late June and all along. I’ve been busy serving others who wanna make a difference. You can hear all about all of the ways. If you go to harshmanservices.com, sign up for any of the free goodies you want while you’re there. There are two things that I’m doing right now that are the most exciting one is your book bakery, making it easy to write a book, which is a book I wrote, it’s coming out September 1st. And it goes with a program that I’ve been running for a few years, where I walk you through the process of writing a helpful nonfiction book. All you need is the right recipe, and you can do this. The other is editor’s school, where I teach you how to become a freelance editor and build a solid income.

I’ve been helping people since 1992, and I love helping people make dreams come true. You deserve it.

Carrie: Jennifer, congratulations on the pool. That is a great life goal. And who knows? Maybe I might get around to writing my book someday. It’s truly been a blessing and a privilege to interview all of these guests and provide this valuable information for you.

Podcast Updates

Carrie: Since I have updated you on our former guest, I also wanted to update you on what is going on with my counseling practice, By the Well Counseling. I have made the decision to keep my business online for the time being while my daughter is young. However, I have. Insured office space for intensives to focus on doing those on Fridays, I was trained in the flash technique for treating trauma this year.


I also have an upcoming training on something called Blast and in November. I’ll receive additional training for working with OCD via EMDR. I’m excited about just continuing to learn and continuing to grow as a professional each and every year, I continue to be amazed and blown away at how many people are finding the Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast.

I have been on several other podcasts to promote this one, which is a great way for people to find out about the show. Of course we also have our social media marketing that we work on just putting up posts on Instagram and Facebook for people who are following us there. According to Google, our website is showing up more and more in Google searches.
So that’s really exciting to me not because I want to have a podcast following. I don’t really care about that. I am excited because it means that more and more people are accessing just messages of hope and knowing that there’s a variety of treatment options available for them. And then if one doesn’t work that they don’t have to be pigeonholed into that treatment.

They can seek other treatments outside of that. That’s one thing I’m super passionate about especially for people who are struggling with OCD and have been told, there’s only one treatment for them. I have many hopes and dreams for the podcast that I thought I would go ahead and share with you. It feels actually like a little bit vulnerable to do this because I don’t know if any of these things are going to actually come true or not.

My big girl dream is to start a nonprofit organization that helps people get the mental health treatment that they need by matching them with an appropriate provider, making sure that financial barriers are removed if they’re not able to afford counseling or afford their copay. I know that there are a lot of great resources, great counselors out there.

And unfortunately seems like finances often get in the way of people getting the very specified. Specific help that they need, because there are so many different types of therapies and ways that therapists practice. It’s hard for people to find what it is that they actually need. So that’s my big girl dream that we’re miles and miles away from, and I don’t know if it will ever come true, but I just said it out loud to you.

Another passion of mine related to the podcast is I would love to get some self-help materials out into the hands of specifically Christians who are looking for help with anxiety and OCD. This could be a great precursor to people coming to counseling, or as a supplement for people who are already in counseling. I’m not exactly sure for me, if this looks like an online course, a workbook, audio, relaxation, or maybe a combination of all of things. I’m not really sure, but it’s something that I hope to be, have time and be able to take some time to work on between now and the end of the year. Doing every other week episodes has really been super helpful and much less stressful in this season of life.

So thank you for all of those of you who have kind of like held on with us this year, in that transition of going from weekly episodes to every other week episodes. Since there are so many new people finding this show, I think it’s actually a good thing in both ways because many people don’t listen every week or, you know, don’t have opportunity to do so. I absolutely love hearing from our listeners and I would love any support communication. If you want to be involved in a beta launch of a course or a workbook, definitely reach out to me via our website. Hope for anxiety and ocd.com. And I’ll kind of put all of those emails together.

I’m always writing about things like this first to our email audience. Anyway, if you’re not on our newsletter, be a good time to get on there and just keep up to date. If you’re interested in any of the self-help stuff, mostly I just let you know what’s going on with the podcast and things that I’m offering. I am going to keep on to the best of my ability, continuing to help Christians who are struggling with anxiety and OCD.

I’d like to ask If you would pray and consider supporting our podcast, you can do that via Patreon through monthly subscription, or one-time gifts can be sent through the website, Buy me a Coffee.

Those links will be in our show notes. There are a variety of expenses that go into producing a podcast, such as, you know, website hosting, editing. And I just really appreciate if you would consider supporting this because as I really view this as my ministry to reach people all over the world who are Christian and struggling, not everybody has access to counseling services where they’re at, unfortunately. People just need this positive support, hope and encouragement sometimes to keep going.

Thank you all for listening to the podcast today. I appreciate each and every one of you who take the time to tune in.

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By the Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time may be comforted by God’s great love for you.

78. Bible Study from “Should” to “Want” with Keith Ferrin

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 78. Bible Study from “Should” to “Want” with Keith Ferrin

I’m privileged to be interviewing  Keith Ferrin. Keith is a speaker and author, with a passion for helping people read, study, and enjoy the Bible.

  • How Keith developed his passion to help others read and enjoy the bible
  • How to internalize the scripture rather than memorize 
  • Reading the Bible from a relational perspective 
  • How can people fall in love and enjoy reading their Bible? 
  • Keith Ferrin’s Book and Online Courses

Related Resources:

Keith Ferrin

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 78. I am your host, Carrie Bock. And if you’re new to our show, we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. While we’ve had several episodes about prayer on the show. I realized that we really have not talked about reading the Bible and I ran into a guest.

That would be good for that. So today on the show, we have Keith Ferrin who is a public speaker, and author of how to enjoy reading your Bible among other books that he’s written. So welcome to the show.

Keith: Thanks for having me, Carrie. Good to be here.

Carrie: You’re really passionate about not just people reading the Bible because it’s, they should, or because it’s a have to, but you really want people to study the Bible because they want to, and because they enjoy it and it builds their relationship with God.

How did you get on that journey of helping other people?

Keith: It wasn’t quick where I can point to the actual day when it started though, cuz I was one of those kids. I was raised in the church and I found that I was kind of one of those typical people that I run into now, which is for most people who are Christians, they’re reading the Bible is the one aspect of their life with Jesus that is more of a should than.

That we want to gather in community and we want to hear good preaching and we want to sing and worship, and we want to make a difference in the world and the Bible comes up and we go, yeah, I should read that more. And that was me for the first 20 years. I was a Christian and the shift took place over the course of about a year or two.

And it began on April 18th of 93. And it was something that I was a full-time youth and worship pastor at a small church plant in Tacoma, Washington, a few days prior to that, I was having lunch with a buddy of mine who was a youth pastor at another church in town. And my friend mark said, Keith, I don’t know what to make of this.

There’s this guy coming to our church Sunday night, who has memorized the entire gospel of Luke. And he gets up on stage with no sets or props or costumes or anything. And he. Quotes it, and while he quotes it, he kind of acts it out. And I just remember thinking, okay, that is a lot. And are people really gonna listen to that for two hours?

It’s just my idea of memorized quoted scripture transported me back to when I was eight-year-old, a second grader scared in front of a big church, quoting John three 16 as fast as I. So memorized quoted scripture and good drama. Didn’t quite line up for me in my brain. I went honestly, no great kind of spiritual motivation.

I thought it’d be fascinating, but I thought I would kinda sneak out after a little while and because I didn’t think it would be good in engaging. And I tell people what happened for me that night is the living word of God went from being a phrase to a reality that I find as I travel around the world for most people, the living word of God is a phrase that they wish was a reality.

And it has nothing to do with whether we believe it’s true but believing something’s true and believing something’s alive and engaging and fun. Those are two very different things. No, not only did I stay through the whole thing, but I went up to this guy afterwards, his name is Bruce, and I just said, “Hey, they mentioned you were gonna be in the Seattle area for a week doing these presentations at different churches and colleges. What could I take you to lunch tomorrow?” And our lunch turned into picking him up at noon and dropping him back off at 9:00 PM. And we spent the whole day together and he just challenged me to soak in bigger chunks of scripture to sit down.

And he said this, if, what if instead of studying this little piece and this little piece and then memorizing this verse and this verse, he said, what if you just took a book of the Bible and you just soaked in it until you knew it, you just hung out there until you know it. And I had heard my whole life about studying the Bible and memorizing verses.

I’d never heard anybody talk about soaking in it and hanging out with it. So I just decided for the summer of 93, I would. Read Philippians every day, Philippians takes about 15, 16 minutes. If you’re just kind of reading at a normal rate of speed and I had read it, but it had always taken four days because it’s four chapters.

And I was told somewhere along the line, you’re supposed to read a chapter a day, but I realized after about day two or three, that I was finally reading this letter. The way that you would actually read a letter, if you sent me a letter and it was four pages and the first line on page one, I give. Thanks every time I remember I wouldn’t read page one and then go, okay, I’m gonna save page two for tomorrow.

and take

Carrie: four days to read the letter.

Keith: Yeah. And so you’d read it and then you’d read it again. Over the course of that summer, I realized that I was making more connections. I was understanding it better. I was enjoying it more. I was remembering it, it was sticking in my mind and it was just such an engaging process that, that honestly, I got to the end of the summer and that I pretty much knew the whole thing, word for word without ever really trying because I had just read it 45 or 50 times. Think of the number of movie lines, you know, or song lyrics, you know, that you watched the movie or heard the song a bunch of times and you didn’t even try to memorize it. You just know it now.

And so that’s actually when I stopped even using the word memorize and started using the word internalized, cuz it was really knowing it, understanding it and memorization was kind of a small piece. Yeah.

Carrie: Can we camp out on that for a moment? Because I like that internalize versus memorize. Like when you think about memorizing something, you’re essentially regurgitating the material, right?

Like, oh, I memorized this line and then I’m saying it back to somebody talk about like the internalizing. What’s the difference there?

Keith: The essence of it can be summed up in kind of this sentence. Internalizing is about knowing the word and memorizing is about knowing the words. Ah, and so that idea, if you’ve internalized something, then you can probably quote it.

I mean, whether you can kind of perform it like Bruce did. And like, quite honestly, now I do, that’s a different level of work. I mean, to get it something stage ready, but to be able to have it where you can say it, it can come to your God can bring it to your mind. Whenever he wants to that when I’ve internalized something, if I’ve memorized something, then I don’t know that just by the fact of me being able to quote.

I don’t know that that’s transforming me to be more like Jesus or that’s really saturating my mind. But if I have internalized it, then I feel like when I had done that with Philippians and then the next year in 94, I made one new year’s resolution to internalize the gospel of John. I just wanted to read Bible. I wanted the life of Jesus to just saturate my life and mind.

And so I just read the gospel, John over and over again until I had it internalized. And when I did that, oh, and that’s why I say this process kind of took a year or two for. That as I had Philippians kind of both hidden in my heart and my mind, which is really what I think of as internalization and the gospel, John as well.

I understood over the course of the next year or two, what meditating on scripture is all about because you see things throughout scripture, whether it’s Psalm 1:19 or whether it’s Joshua. the do not let this book of the law depart from your mouth meditate. Day and night the word meditation and meditate on and think about and ponder and remember are woven all throughout scripture.

And I realized for the first time in 93 and 94 and into 95, what that was like because I could actually think about scripture. At times other than when I had my Bible open. Right? Yeah. I mean, once I had hidden it in both my heart and my head, I understood it and I knew it kind of word for word knew it, then God could bring it to my mind whenever he wanted, I could be walking down the street, whether it’s I needed a word of correction or comfort or encouragement or inspiration or whatever it is that you know, or whether I was talking to somebody else and they needed that.

I just felt like it was much more. Relational and conversational. And that’s what happened when internalized. And so I just found that all growing up, I tell people it’s just interesting that we, the first verse we typically have kids memorized in Sunday. School is John three 16, man. It’s a good one.

That’s a good place to start. But typically the second one is in Psalm one 19, where it says, I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you. And we do that one, but typically when we talk. Actually knowing the word, we’re not talking about hiding it in our heart. We’re talking about hiding it in our head.

And so the second verse we teach kids is really about hiding it in our heart, but we don’t frequently equip them or ourselves to really build that understanding. And that love for God’s word. Into our memorization process. And I think when we combine those two, that’s where internalization happens. Yeah.

Carrie: I’m just kind of processing things from my own childhood. I think, cuz I grew up in the church and there was this element of almost like studying the Bible, like a school textbook mm-hmm but you were just supposed to know that you were supposed to read the Bible and nobody really sat down and said, this is how you read the Bible.

Or if you did, you may have gotten like a devotional book or two, and then it’s like, okay, well, I guess I’m supposed to go out and buy another devotional, or now you can there’s apps, you know? Okay. Well, I guess I’ll go get another devotional on the app. And one of the struggles I always had with those was you had two or three verses and then someone’s life story was really the rest of it.

And there are plenty of devotionals out there like that. And some of them there’s a time and a season for some of those. But it doesn’t really help you get into the word of God, right? Like you’re saying if you’re not actually reading the words of God and getting that in your head. I had a conversation with my husband a while back where I said, I have such a hard time memorizing scripture.

Like I really wanna know what it says, and I wanna be able to quote it. And he just really encouraged me not to get so hung up on saying it word for word, cuz I’m like, there’s these really long sentences in the Bible. And even if you try to break it down by phrase and it’s not how we typically talk or communicate.

And he said, “yeah, but it’s more important that you understand the essence of the scripture of what it is speaking to you rather than just being able to quote it back.” And I was like, “oh yeah, you’re right on that one. Reading the Bible like it was intended to be reading the letters. It was a letter really soaking in and reading some of the same things over and over.

How else can people really fall in love and enjoy reading their Bible?

Keith: That’s what I spend hours writing things and all that, but I’ll give you a couple of kind of nuggets. One is really what I call our position. You can remember these two by thinking of your position and your process. Your position is really your mindset, your approach to scripture.

I think that so often, and you just alluded to this, that so often when we’re 11, 12, 13, 14, we’re supposed to start reading the Bible on our own and having this quiet time or whatever it is, we are almost taught the Bible like a textbook and we’re approaching. Informationally. And I say, if your position is relational, instead of informational, yeah.

It will change everything. So many of us, we breed the Bible to learn what God wants us to know, so we can do what he wants us to do and live a life that honors and glorifies him. And that all sounds well and good, except it’s not the purpose of the Bible. The purpose of the Bible is the only book that’s ever been written with the purpose of drawing you into a relationship with its author.

The purpose of the Bible is relational. And I think let’s say that you and your husband moved here to the Seattle area and became friends with Carrie and me. And we said that we were gonna get together for dinner once a. Over the course of those weeks to come, we would learn things about each other. I’m not saying there’s not information in the Bible.

We would learn information about each other. And how did you and your husband meet and how long have you been married? Do you have kids and where are the different places you’ve lived and what do you do for work? And what do you like to listen to? I mean, we’d learn tons of information about each other, but imagine.

You and your husband coming to our house the first week and my wife and I pull out our notepads and across the top, it says, here are 54 questions. We need to ask Carrie and her husband. So if they’re gonna be our friends. And so how did you meet? Do you have any kids? How long have you been married? When did he brought you to Seattle?

What do you do for fun? What sports do you like? What music do you like? What tech do you like? What blah, blah, blah. You and your husband might be polite, but on the way home, you’re talking about how can we make sure we never have to come.

Carrie: Super awkward dinner.

Keith: I think that so often we go to the Bible and we’re taught, read what it says and figure out what it means and how it’s gonna apply.

And everything is kind of in that mindset. And I’m not saying those are bad questions, but if those are the only questions, I don’t think it leads to enjoying the Bible. Whereas the irony is that the more relational our approach, the more. Information will actually learn. I mean, think of the people that you’ve learned the most from the people that can correct your mindset, your attitude, when it’s off, that can comfort you the best.

I mean, those are also the people that you watch movies with and have a pizza with. And the people that you’re in deepest relationship with are the people who you learn the most from and who comfort you the best. We know that as people. And I think that if God is our heavenly father, why do we think that every day he wants to teach us something and that some days he just doesn’t wanna play with us and just enjoy the relationship.

And so there’s that relational mindset that I think is a huge piece of that. And that’s, that’s what I call. And kind of what’s our position as we come to the Bible. And the second is really the process and some of what I’ve already mentioned about kind of reading a big chunk that certainly falls into the process piece.

But what I realized is I was reading Philippians that, you know, every day for that summer, and then I. Read the gospel of John the next year. And I didn’t read that. Obviously, those two books are different. Philippians takes 15 minutes and John takes a little bit less than two hours. So when I was reading John during 94, that wasn’t something where I was reading the whole gospel every day.

I bet in the year there were probably two or three days outta the whole year where I sat down for two hours and just read the whole thing. Most days I’d read for 30 minutes or something like. But over the course of that 93, 94 timeframes, I kind of accidentally put some things together, which is realizing that when we line up our process of Bible study with how God has wired our brains to naturally and enjoyably learn anything, it changes everything that think of anything that, you know, anybody that’s listening to this podcast, think of something that you know really well and that you.

I don’t care whether it’s sports or music or cooking or technology, whatever it is, I’m guessing that you learned it from the general to the specific. You didn’t learn a detail and then add a little detail and then add a little detail. I love to cook Italian food, but if I’m gonna teach somebody how to cook Italian food, the first lesson is not gonna be all of the uses for basil.

If you’re gonna cook Italian food, you should probably know something about basil, but it’s not the first lesson. Right. And approaching the Bible from the general to the specific is 180 degrees opposite from how most of what I was taught the first 25 years, I was a Christian about how to study the. Yeah, analogy that frequently helps this idea make sense for people is I call it the movie analogy that if you and I, when your husband and you come over and we’re hanging out and we decide, let’s say that the four of us are gonna watch a movie.

I mean, imagine if after seeing one, I paused the movie and said, let’s discuss. And then we watched scene two and I paused it again and said, let’s discuss, wouldn’t be long before you and your husband would be like, just put the remote down. Let’s watch the movie after we’ve watched the movie. If you want to talk about a scene or a character or a plot twist or something like that, we can have a specific conversation, but we kind of wanna watch the movie first.

And I think from a process standpoint, one of the reasons that so many people are confused by the Bible, they’re bored by the Bible. They don’t remember what they read in the morning. By two o’clock in the afternoon is because we’re studying the Bible. Like we’re studying the scenes of a movie. We’ve never watched.

We know what Philippians four 13, I can do everything through him who gives me strength. We know what that means, but if I say what’s Philippians about we go, I don’t know. And I’ve fought the good fight. I’ve finished the race. I’ve kept the faith. We’ve heard sermons on that and we’ve seen it written about, and we’ve seen blog posts on it and all this kind of stuff.

And we don’t even know what book that’s in. Let alone. It’s second Timothy, by the way. So we don’t know what second Timothy’s about. We don’t know what was going on with Paul at the time. Whereas I tell people if you took second Timothy, which is that’s even shorter than Philippians, it’s four chapters, but they’re shorter chapters.

So it’ll take you probably 12 minutes. If you took second Timothy and you read second Timothy in its entirety every day for a month, and then you studied it verse by verse. After that you’d never read. I fought the good fight. I finished the race. I’ve kept the faith the same. Because when you got to that, which is toward halfway through chapter four, you’d have such an understanding of the whole picture.

Kinda like again, going back to the movies that if you’ve ever heard somebody, a speaker, whether it’s your, a pastor or just another speaker, that’s used a movie clip in their speaking and you see the movie clip. If you haven’t seen the movie, that movie clip, you can still kind of be inspired by it, or you might learn something or whatever.

But it’s nowhere near as rich an experience as if you’ve seen the movie that the clip comes from, because then when you see that clip, the whole movie floods back. Right? Right. So from a process standpoint, when we read more of it, when we read bigger chunks and when we then read that again and again, and soak in one, when we devote a month or two months or something like that, to reading the Bible and getting kind of the big picture overview.

And then we naturally move to the next place that we move, which is then looking at smaller pieces, looking at a chapter and then looking at a paragraph or one theme or something like that. And you’ll understand it because then you’re looking at that little detail in the context of the whole, which is how anything that we know deeply never met a musician that learns a song, one measure at a.

Carrie: I think you’re really talking about finding out about the character of God, which can only be found out over time. You can’t just like, I can’t know my husband all at once. I knew his character by watching his actions day by day by day and watching how he interacted with other people and watching how he interacted with me.

The words that he said, did they line up with what he actually did and those types of things. And I feel like that’s what we have to do with the Bible. We can’t know the character of God by one verse or one chapter or even one book. We have to really learn over time as we walk with him. And as we’re approaching the scripture that way, and then you have the surprises along the way.

I was talking one time and somehow we got on the conversation about milking cows mm-hmm and Steve, my husband. Oh, I’ve milked a cow. And I was like, you’ve milked a cow. I was like, I’ve never heard this story. You gotta tell me about that. he was like, well, yeah, I was, I had like ag because we grew up about an hour away from each other, but his area is not that way now, but it was a little bit more rural back then.

And I was in a little bit more of a suburb. So even though my mom milked cows growing up in Tennessee, I had never milked a cow. So I found this story very fascinating. Right. Anyway, I digress, but I think it helps us with situations. As we’re trying to walk on this earth when we can go back and point to not just, like you said, specific words, but, okay. What is the character of God through the Bible? That’s awesome.

Keith: Frequently people say, how do you go about studying the Bible? What do you do? And I don’t have time to kind of teach them my whole process of something. I’d boil things down to. Really asking four questions. And the first that you can take for any passage that you have, and the first question is that character of God, well, you know, what is this passage say about who God is?

And then looking at that, what does this passage say about what God has done? The third is what does this passage say about who I am or what I have or whatever, because of who God is and what he’s done. And then the fourth is really I’ve switched. It used to be kind of that one that I was raised on, which is what are you going to apply?

What’s your application? And I say, I’ve switched it a little bit to say, what is my response? Because I think sometimes that response is to apply something. Sometimes that response is to change your thinking or to correct something or whatever, or get rid of something or. Whatever, but sometimes our response is just to worship.

Sometimes our response is just to sit in silence. Sometimes our response is just to be amazed at how cool the story was. We just read. I think that when our question is, how can I apply this? Then that puts us in an informational mindset. Whereas if we say, what is my response? God may have something to teach you and have something for you to apply.

And if that’s the case, then apply it. But God may also just want to that particular day. Reveal something about just how much he loves you. And your response is to say, thank you. And then to go through the rest of your day. I think that idea of we need to learn something every day is just not bad. It’s just misdirected.

And

Carrie: I think that switching it from the concept of, I need to learn something versus I need to maybe experience the word of God today. I don’t know if that’s a good word to use there. It really takes down some of that intimidation that I think people have about approaching the Bible almost like they think they have to have a degree or something to learn from it.

But a lot of the Bible was written by some people that were educated and some people that were not formally educated. So just kind of going back even to the authors, the fact that you would have to approach it from an academic. Oh, I went to school for it is a little ridiculous for sure.

Keith: Absolutely.

Couldn’t agree.

Carrie: okay. Tell us a little bit about what’s coming up for you as far as books, or I know that you do speaking engagements. How can people find you as well?

Keith: Well the easiest way is keithferrin.com is my blog. Some of the things that we’ve talked about today, I mean, relational Bible study. Got a course on that. If you just search relational Bible study or just go to relational Bible study.com, that will take you. If that kind of how to study the Bible, if that’s something you struggle with or that internalized just last September recorded a brand new online course, teaching people my process of internalization and kind of how to hide it in your head and your heart.

And so keithferrincom/internalize is how to find that. The main thing, as far as books goes, it’s been fun. I have something called the Bible life community, which I started two weeks after the pandemic started for I’d had it in my mind for a couple years, but once all my speaking engagements were canceled and I had a bunch of time on my hands, I finally created this kind of online Bible study community.

I write a new Bible study. Every month. And sometimes it’s one month study. Sometimes it’s two months. Sometimes it’s a book study. Sometimes it’s a topic, things like that. But I guide people through that. We discuss it together in community. We have some live conversations over zoom and all that. That’s been really fun and I’ve taken the last several of these studies and turned them into books that, so it’s been crazy cuz I released six books in 20 years and then four books in the last six.

Just taking these Bible studies. And since they’re right there and I’ve been writing them anyway, I just turned them into these books that I call the scripture journey series. And so two of them have been topical, advent and lent when we walked the first one was advent coming up to Christmas and then lent going up to Easter.

And we did a book study on the book of Ephesians. Book study on the book of first Peter, if you go to Amazon and you search on my name, one of the things you’ll see there and all the covers kind of look similar, but there’s a series of books called the scripture journey series that are kind of these combinations of the utilizing the process that we’ve talked about, but also having a devotional aspect to it.

So a lot of small groups and churches and things like that will take some of those because most of them are 40-day scripture journeys is what I call ’em and those have been really fun to see people walk through those.

Carrie: You did a blog post that I saw on your website about messing up during one of your talks. It was great.

Keith: That was the craziest because as you know, as I kind of, we didn’t talk a ton about, but as I alluded to, I saw Bruce do the gospel of Luke and then started three years later in March of 96, I started performing in quotes, the gospel of John, but then also present different books of the Bible, short books about the way that he did with Luke.

So I did that. I’ve been doing that for 26 years of kind of doing the biblical storytelling. It was last fall. I think that was all the week. It was, I think it was the weekend after Thanksgiving or something like that. And I’d been presenting John for a quarter century. I’ve done a ton and there was a church that’s local here in Seattle.

I’ve spoken at this church probably 20 times friends with the pastor and they’re preaching through John. So they had me take two Sundays in a. Present John one through five as the sermon. Just no preaching. Just get up, present John one through five and just kind of the watching the movie, if you will.

And then the next Sunday, six through 10. And I mean, you talk about having brain freezes as you saw from the clip, the clip that is on my website that you saw. That was from the second service, which went better. The first service was even worse than the clips that you saw, but I thought let’s just throw it out there.

And some of the conversations that led to, and just the transparency were all a mess. Yeah. We all have days that are good and days that are bad. And we have days that we take things that we’ve known and that we’ve done well and everything. And some days, those things that we’re good at that we’ve done well, that we’ve been solid on before.

Some days, even that’s messy. And just realizing that as one of my friends calls it, we’re all a glorious mess. So it’s just be gloriously messy together.

Carrie: Yeah. And just the idea that God can use you, no matter what your mess has been or is in the present. I just, I love that concept. So this piece of the podcast and everything certainly is not perfect, but we strive to get it better.

A little at a. All right. Well, thank you so much for talking with us about this today. Its pleasure. It’s been very interesting for me and eye-opening. Just thinking about my own process and what I would like to do maybe differently in what I can try. It was helpful.

Keith: Thanks for having me.

Carrie: I have to say that since interviewing Keith, I made this decision to read through first Peter over and over again as our pastor is preaching through first Peter right now. So he does one chapter a week and I haven’t necessarily done it every single day, but I’ve read through several times and it’s been interesting to see.

The different themes and the different things that stick out to me on different days, kind of seeing that as a whole entity, instead of just broken down into different chapters or different verses. One thing that we didn’t mention in this episode that I just wanted to throw here in the end is that the Bible has some quite crazy stories in the old Testa.

To put it mildly. If you read those things, you’re like, what in the world just happened right now? It definitely makes for some interesting reading. Granted, there are some kind of boring parts of the old Testament when you get into the genealogies, but some of the stories in there. If you’ve never read, ’em are pretty amazing.

If you like this episode and you want to find out more about what’s going on with the podcast, you can subscribe to our newsletter. It goes out weekly on wednesdays@hopeforanxietyandocd.com.

Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By the Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum, Until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

77. Postpartum Anxiety and Depression with Julie Lamb

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, OCD, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 77. Postpartum Anxiety and Depression with Julie Lamb

Julie Lamb, LCSW who is a life coach at julielambcoaching.com shares with us about postpartum depression and anxiety, and how to cope with it. 

  • Julie’s personal experience with postpartum anxiety and depression
  • How many weeks are considered postpartum
  • Difference between postpartum depression and major depression
  • What makes postpartum depression worse
  • How to cope with postpartum depression and anxiety

Related Resources:

Julie Lamb Coaching

How to Reduce Anxiety About Giving Birth with Carrie Bock

Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 77. I’ve been trying to do an episode for a little while on postpartum depression and anxiety because this is. Such a common issue in our society. And actually, as several of, you know, I have a young daughter, but actually, I’ve been trying to do this show way before I became pregnant. And it just didn’t work out with guests and so forth. But we have a guest today that has both personal and professional experience. So I’m super excited to interview Julie Lamb, LCSW who’s a life coach at julielambcoaching.com. 

Carrie: Julie, welcome to the show today. 

Julie: Thank you. I’m so glad to be here.

Carrie: Talk with us a little bit about postpartum depression. How would you define it on a basic level for people?

Julie: One of the first things I wanna talk about when it comes to postpartum, depression is we have to understand that birth is traumatic. It is a traumatic thing that happens to your body, and yes, we can say it’s normal, natural, whatever.

It doesn’t matter. It’s still traumatic to your body. It increases all those hormones. It increases all of that adrenaline within our body. The parasympathetic nerves kind of go out whack. And what happens is that every woman that has a child will experience it. Some symptoms of loss, sadness, and some anxiety, everyone will experience. However, postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety come into play. When those symptoms continue generally about two weeks after birth. And so the biggest thing to think about is. Everybody’s gonna have these normal feelings, but if they continue past two weeks is when postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety come into play.

Carrie: Okay. So it’s gotta last for at least two weeks.

Julie: Yes

Carrie: How would you say that it’s similar or different to someone who’s maybe going through a major depressive episode or a dysthymia

Julie: depression has so many different layers. And one of the things that are really fascinating about depression is that it’s not a one-size-fits-all.

It’s not a, oh, you’re sad. Therefore you have dyslexia or you are manic, therefore you’re bipolar. It doesn’t work that way. But there are certain categories that we say that would then say, this is the kind of depression that you have a major depression is essentially where for a period of a long time, you have had these feelings of sadness of overwhelm, perhaps not being able to sleep or having no desire to do anything.

Those continue dysthymia. You have to have that for at least a year. I mean, can you imagine, I have to feel this way for a year before I can finally say something’s wrong. And major depression tends to be a shorter period. So a lot of times people will be diagnosed with a major depression first because it’s something that you can diagnose quicker generally before six months when somebody’s had those experiences and SEIA says, well, you’ve had these a lot longer.

And this is what this looks like. Postpartum depression is just different from that because it’s quicker onset. Essentially you have nine months and some people will also experience depression during their pregnancy. And unfortunately, people will tend to people, meaning doctors will tend to be like, it’s just your hormones, just your body changing.

Women kind of get put to the side, basically. Like that’s not really a problem you’re just changing. And then what happens then is you may have had those feelings and then after the baby is born, they are magnified and they’re made so much bigger. And if you’ve ever had any depression in the past, then you’re more likely to have this postpartum depression and we’re talking any, you could have seriously a week of just feeling really down.

And then you’re more likely to have this postpartum depression that will hit and it will feel even. More triggering more sadness, more overwhelmed, more irritability, more feeling like you just can’t get up and do the next thing. And it all is because of that one event. And that’s having a baby.

Carrie: Yeah. It’s interesting. I’m glad that you brought up being depressed in pregnancy because I got depressed in pregnancy and I felt very isolated because there was all this conversation surrounding postpartum depression that it almost, I felt like a weirdo. I was like “I’m supposed to be happy being pregnant.” And was really struggling because I had a lot of friends and family members that either, you know, had infertility difficulties and I thought, well, here I am supposed to be. Really happy and thankful that I was able to get pregnant and give birth, but it absolutely wrecked my body. Unfortunately, it’s interesting that you said a little while ago, that birth as being traumatic.

And I necessarily wouldn’t have said that for myself and my situation, although I will say that just even the process of the pregnancy and the hormones and different things really mess some things up for me. And I’m still dealing. Some ongoing back issues and stuff that I’m trying to get straightened out because of the pregnancy stuff.

But I think in my situation was a little bit different because it was connected with chronic pain. That was really kind of fueling that depression. I’m curious too, about the onset of postpartum depression. Is this something that happens right after people give birth or can it have a later onset? Like when they go back to work, for example,

Julie: It can happen later and it can happen both.

It can happen almost right at birth, and then it can happen later. Part of my story with postpartum depression is I actually have had very difficult pregnancies when I had my first baby. I actually, my body started to shut down. And so I had to have her cuz it went into help syndrome. If anybody knows what that is.

So my body was shutting down, saying, you have to have this baby. I have an epidural. So it was all natural. She was about three and a half weeks early. So she was little, the whole. I had this baby feeling pretty good. I will say afterwards, you know, maybe a little bit of the blues, but then I had a significant loss.

I had a brother that died about two weeks after the birth of my baby. Wow. And so what happened is that that compounded all of those feelings. Here’s this supposed to be this happiest time? Which I think is a misnomer anyways, but supposed to be this happy time. And yet I’m dealing with this grief and I’m supposed to just move forward with it.

I’m supposed to just, you know, grieve move forward refined. And what I noticed is it was about four or five months later that I went into a real deep depression. You could say, yes, it was postpartum. You could say, yes, it was because of this grief. You could say it was cuz I went back to. You could give all those different circumstances.

The point is that I hit that depressive wall where essentially it was like, I wasn’t bonding with my child. I wasn’t viewing life could be any better and all, because essentially all those circumstances compounded together. And my body said, you have to deal with this one way and we’re gonna make you deal with it mentally.

It’s kind of how I viewed it. Looking back how I viewed it now.

Carrie: Wow. So it was just like, that’s how it felt. It just kind of a shut or like hitting a wall and like, you couldn’t go forward or do the things that you need to do. I mean, there’s a lot that goes into caring for a baby. It’s very time-consuming and it’s very exhausting.

Julie: Yeah, absolutely. And the thing with caring for a baby is that we all think, again, this is supposed to be the greatest time babies are so sweet and precious. You have a lack of sleep. You’re not eating well. You’re 100% focused on this little person and forget the whole idea of taking care of yourself.

Forget the idea of even having a relationship with your partner. Like any of that, it suddenly becomes, I am so focused on just a survival instinct of that day to day. And a survival of this infant, of this person that 100% relies on me. And that’s a lot of pressure. And if you are already not taking care of yourself with sleep with food, or even just rest like mentally resting, it just compounds more and more and more.

And then you throw in the idea that you have some depression in the past, you throw in any circumstance, job loss, financial insecurity, you throw in any of that. And suddenly our brains go, I just can’t do this. it’s just way too much. That’s when postpartum depression almost seems to flare a lot more.

Carrie: Yeah, this is pretty common. I think I read something like one in seven women. Just kind of from what you’ve seen statistic-wise. Okay. Mm-hmm cause this is a pretty common issue, but I think a lot of times people feel. Very isolated by it. If they haven’t heard other people talk about it or, or known someone that’s gone through it.

Do you feel that way? Like just the, what you were talking about, the shoulds and the supposed to that you feel like are on society.

Julie: Yeah. And there’s also this idea that this is what you’re supposed to do, so you should just be okay with it. . And so I think it also leads to a lot of women that are afraid to talk about it.

You mentioned something. And I saw this a lot when I worked with adoptions for years was the fact that there were women that felt guilty for having babies because their friends couldn’t. And I, again, I worked with adoptions and I felt guilty that I could get pregnant. And it becomes this fear of like, well, I should love this.

I should be happy. And if you suddenly feel like you can’t. That’s a huge amount of pressure that you put on yourself and that you put on everybody else around you. And I noticed something really interesting with me was this idea that I had to do it all. And so here I was with this new baby and I was like, I have to make sure the house is clean.

I have to make sure that I’m, you know, that I’ve got food on the table. I’ve gotta make sure my husband’s taken care of and that, oh, I have to go back to work and I’ve gotta make sure I’m working all these hours. And I’m doing all these things. And suddenly it was like, my husband was not good enough with the baby.

It was only me that could do it. And all of us as women. We have this idea that there’s a standard we’re supposed to meet, and this standard comes from maybe something we’ve been taught to, maybe something we’ve experienced, maybe it’s even something that we just inherently believe. And that standard is sometimes what creates this feeling of. Unworthiness this feeling of I’m not good enough. And when we feed on those feelings that it can lead to a lot more depression. And especially that can lead to a lot of anxiety because you’re not living up to that standard.

Carrie: Yeah. I know that that was hard for me more so when I went back to work of handing over more responsibilities to my husband, we had like a dramatic household shift in our world where I was at home for maternity leave for three months, you know, I was doing the majority of the baby taken care of, and he was very much involved and he would come home and spend time with her and spend whatever time we could together, so forth. But then it was like this light switch flipped.

He quit his job. And became a stay-at-home dad. So all of a sudden he was like the primary baby caretaker. And I was like, full-time household provider. And that role switch was just like very jarring for us. And it took a lot of communication and a lot of adjustment, but for me learning that I had to let go of some things and trust him to be able to handle the baby stuff that I had learned to do. Like he can’t actually do some of these things, but I think what you’re saying, like that sense of like, oh, I have to be the one to take care of this, or I have to be the one to handle it. Was it pretty easy for you to recognize that you had postpartum depression? Or were you kind of in a little bit of denial?

Like, no, that’s not me.

Julie: I was in denial because as a therapist, I knew all the signs. I even remember before I had my babysitting down with my husband and saying, here are all the signs of postpartum depression. So you are aware of it. You get to know what it is. And my husband (bless his heart) was like, okay, I get it.

I got it. I’ll know, and this will be fine. but a lot of people think postpartum depression is just that, like, I wanna kill my baby. That’s honestly like, we’re gonna go that extreme. And so here I was like, no, no, no. Like if you notice I’m crying a lot or you notice that I just feel more lethargic. I don’t have a lot of energy.

Those are things to watch out for. It was interesting because he was very aware of that. But I think because we had a death that got mixed in and very confused. Oh, He said he was really good at that. But what happened is that after I started to feel that way, my training kicks in was like, you can’t have postpartum depression.

You’re not allowed to have postpartum depression. So here’s what you need to do. And I remember trying to tell myself, do this, this and this, this, and of course, none of that worked. So I was still feeling really off. And I was like, well, I’ll go talk to a therapist. I went and talked to them, it was not a good therapist.

And I went, talked to a therapist who basically was like, you’ve just had a lot of things going on. Just make sure you get some. Make sure you let your husband do things, you know, whatever. And it wasn’t helpful because on the way home, I could acknowledge that I had postpartum depression and he missed it.

I feel like many times we, as women, we think we know something is wrong, but we almost discount it. Like I discounted because, well, you know, I’m qualified. I should know better. Mm-hmm but I also discounted it because it didn’t seem as severe as what I had thought it should look like. And it wasn’t until somebody actually did discount it, that I was actually able to say, okay, wait, maybe there is something going on here.

And I think many women go to their doctor afterwards. And the first thing they asked them was like, do you wanna hurt the baby? I’m like, no, no, I never wanna do that. Okay, then you’re fine. I

Carrie: just wanna tell you what my doctor asked me six weeks after I had the baby. Literally, this was a question and this was the.

You’re not depressed. Are you? And I was just like, I’m smacking my forehead, you know, as a mental health professional, I’m like, that is not how you ask somebody. And funny enough, the paediatrician’s office, I feel like has been much more sensitive and has given me a questionnaire. Like every time that I’ve gone in there, But, you know, if somebody says, well, you’re not depressed, are you, I mean, then you feel like, well, what if I was like, would I wanna open up about that right now?

Would I wanna tell you if I was, of course, I’m not gonna open up yeah. That was an interesting response. Let’s talk about anger connected to postpartum depression because maybe that’s a sign that sometimes people don’t necessarily like see as being connected and anger can be really connected to depression.

Julie: Absolutely. And anger, a lot of times are like, well, that’s just something that happened to you that made you mad. And they don’t actually recognize that there’s sometimes a rage. And that’s what that anger tends to feel like in postpartum. Depression is just this idea. I’m yelling. I’m screaming. You may not wanna hurt anybody, but you just feel like I said, this intense rage going on, and that is an irritability.

And the funny thing is, is that people will say, well, you just need to go get some sleep or you just need to go relax or something. Yes. Sleep is vital and important. And I wanna know any new mom that gets sleep. It’s more than that. It’s the fact that I want you to imagine all these pressures, all these feelings, all these thoughts being put into a kettle and they are just put pressure upon pressure upon pressure.

And then you have a doctor saying you’re not depressed, or you’re not anxious, or you’re not whatever. And you’re inside you’re bubbling. And you’re just thinking what I am like. You don’t understand. And it just feels like it’s exploding. And what’s interesting is that if you have experienced ever some postpartum anger, you will most likely experience it.

Every pregnancy after. And people don’t think that they’re like, no, no, you can overcome it. But realistically speaking, when your body naturally holds that it almost associates that with every next pregnancy, I had a client that came to me specifically while she was pregnant and said I’ve had postpartum anger, and I need to know how to deal with it now, because I don’t like who I.

So we worked with some very specific tactics that helped with anger. That would also help her as a new mom. And it was interesting. She went to her husband, she says, here’s what I’m gonna do. And she messaged me after she had the baby. She’s like, I have to just tell you my anger. Yes. It’s there, but because I can acknowledge it and it’s safe to say it just doesn’t feel like it’s overwhelming.

It doesn’t feel like that rage that’s gonna come out and just explode at any moment. She’s able to say I’m angry and it’s okay. That I’m angry. and these are the things that I do with it. And I think that’s, yes, anger is definitely a part of all of. Yeah, that’s really good. How did you get the help that you needed?

I knew that something wasn’t right. So I, I first went to my OB doctor and she is fantastic. She delivered all my kids. I’m a high risk pregnancy, so she very much, her and I are, are really good friends. She was like, Julie, here, you should take some Lexapro. You should take, you know, just take something. It will help.

And I will admit that I didn’t want to, because I was like, no, I can do this on my own, but she was there. That’s like, then talk to me, tell me what’s going on. And you need to make sure you have somebody to talk to that you have some resources in place. So it was really great that she was one. She prescribe the medication, if I needed it and wanted it. And there’s nothing wrong with taking that. But she also was like, if you don’t want to, here’s the things that you need to do. So I did go that’s when I went and found that therapist, I would recommend that you don’t go see a male therapist. That’s my number one mistake.

I think I know we should say no out. They’re all getting no, no, no. You need somebody that understands women’s hormones. And that specifically understands postpartum and understands what that is like when you have somebody that knows those feelings, those emotions, and can help you through that. That’s one of the best things I did do some cognitive behavioral therapy.

So with him, he didn’t help me at all. So I went to like with another therapist, friend of mine, And I said, okay, this is where my thought is and help me with my thought process. And so I did have that available, but at the same time, if it wasn’t available, I would have gone and sought out somebody else, another therapist, another somebody else to talk to.

So by all means, that’s kind of what I did. The other thing is, is I actually allowed myself to just take a break. And so I acknowledged that. I’m not okay. I’m not good. This is not what I need to do. And I told my husband, I said, I need to just get away for a little bit because I am not in okay. Place. I wasn’t breastfeeding.

So I was formula feeding at that time. And so I was able to kind of walk away and just like take some time to myself. I knew she was in good hands. When I say take some time, it was literally like a weekend. It wasn’t like I was gone for months on end. I’ve thought about it. No, it was just, it was like a weekend.

And I went and I just like, was able to just kind of relax into that. And I came back. I was really overly in love, I think, with my baby at that point, because it was like, I felt healthy. I felt good at that moment. And I think those are the things that really helped me, especially when I had my next. You and those next two were very difficult and there was a miscarriage in between.

I mean, there’s lots of stories there that just compound all of that. That essentially after I have had my third, I was able to look back and say, here’s the things you did that work. Do this again. Here’s the things that didn’t work. Don’t do that. And I implemented that a lot quicker with number three than I did with number one, obviously

Carrie: From what you’ve seen in your experience is postpartum more common for first-time moms or not necessarily?

Julie: Not necessarily. I’d love to say, oh yes, if you have it once, then you’ll never have it again. But, or if you’ve never had it, you’ll never have it. That’s not true. I believe that there is a chemical that does get impacted very much so with every pregnancy, I explained it kind of my first pregnancy, I left feeling like something was just incomplete within me.

My second pregnancy. I literally felt like all my hormones went back into place. It was like the weirdest sensation. And it was actually the healthiest, I would think after that pregnancy. But I got pregnant really soon after that one. And then it was like, I was depressed pre-having this baby because it was so close.

It felt so soon. I wasn’t sure I could handle this. And then that impact. I feel like my depression. Well, no, actually it was anxiety that hit me after the third one. Depression was the first one, but then I had anxiety the third one. And so I think that that’s important to recognize too, is that you don’t always have to have depression.

I had depression and then I had anxiety at the last pregnancy and they can also look very different. I think the second one, I did have a lot more of what we’re gonna call the baby blues because it was, you know, a new baby. It was hard. She didn’t latch. She was so difficult in that way. It was like some of that.

Whereas with the third one, she was in NICU and that escalated my anxiety escalated some of my concerns in that aspect. So I think you really have to look at the circumstances around each pregnancy to understand sometimes which one somebody may perhaps have.

Carrie: That makes sense. Tell us briefly about postpartum anxiety.

Like, how does that typically show up for moms?

Julie: Anxiety is a worry and it’s a fear almost this is fear-based. And so postpartum anxiety is where for moms, it’s like, you’re deeply worried something’s gonna happen to the baby. And so many moms may not sleep at night because they’re constantly making sure the baby is.

Like nothing’s gonna happen or they are afraid to leave the baby with anybody because something could happen to them or the baby they’re even afraid of. Sometimes they’ll leave their house because what if something happened to them and the baby. And so it becomes a fear-driven base where you are so afraid that something terrible is going to happen, that you then try to protect it and hope that nothing does happen.

Anxiety really shows up that way, shows up more. If that fear and that worry about the incessant, worry about the future.

Carrie: I think that that’s a good distinction to make. And this, we have some listeners who also have O C D. So it’s important for people to realize too, that OCD latches on to things that are important to you.

And so you may have different themes come up, either when you’re pregnant or after you have your baby. And if you start to have, you know, obsessions about harming them, Those types of things, that may be part of your OCD that you might need to get help for. How did you handle that anxiety? I mean, obviously, you felt like, okay, you know, you wanted your baby to make it through the NICU and be okay at home.

I know, like for me, I didn’t realize how still babies can be when they’re sleeping. I know I definitely did a lot of like breathing checks and was a little worried about SIDS, not to an extreme level, but I definitely was like, is she still breathing? Like, oh my goodness. She’s been like, so still she has not moved.

Julie: Yeah. I think what helped me with the anxiety is that actually, this is the same doctor when my baby was in NICU. She came and found me and pulled me aside one day and she. It doesn’t feel like this is a good thing, right? She says, but you know, your baby’s gonna be fine. And she said, you did everything right during this pregnancy.

I was like, of course, she would say that because, you know, she’s the one that delivered this baby, but she’d been with me through two other pregnancies. This pregnancy was more challenging and she’s like, we did everything, right? This is not your fault, which I needed to hear from that professional. Yeah.

And then she told me, you know, that this baby will be right. Be okay in the ni. Your number one focus she said is to sleep. She said “I want you to heal because you’ve had, again, this traumatic experience of giving birth, I need you to heal and Trust NICU will take care of your baby.”  And she said, “You will actually feel so much better”

And I really wish that we had more professionals like this doctor that actually were the ones that cared about us as patients. Not only to be able to say, yeah, this sucks. This is hard. This is not what you signed up for, but it will be okay. And here is what you need to do in the process. I did. I cried every single day when I had to leave the hospital, but my husband was so good cuz she also pulled my husband aside and said, you make sure she sleeps.

And so I would get home and that was my job was to just go sleep. He took care of the other two and he’s like, you just go take a nap. You just go to sleep and then we will get there as early as you need in the morning. And during the day I would have all the anxiety that’d be like are my other two.

Okay. And I lived an hour from the hospital as well. So it was like all those things compound. I just remember, as soon as I could bring her home, I was grateful that I’d had the rest because I knew mm-hmm it was like a blessing in disguise where I was able to get this rest where I could heal from giving birth.

And then I was able to bring this baby home and then I was able to know that she was okay and she could breathe. And it was fine. It was interesting though because she had one episode where I think like, I felt like she struggled. And that’s when my anxiety was like, came back in full force. And when I recognized it, I didn’t say, “Oh, Julie, just sweep it on, it’s fine.”

I allowed myself to say, of course, I’m anxious. Of course, this is difficult. And I allowed myself to say, it’s okay. And I cried. And I just, I allowed that. I think sometimes we are so used to just. Pushing through and being strong that you have to be okay to allow yourself to just cry, to allow yourself to feel that.

And there are, some other things that I did, if any of your listeners are familiar with tapping? I did a version of tapping for myself at that time. Okay. I also did some guided imagery just for my myself to kind of find my places that helped me. And those were things that helped a lot. And then it’s interesting.

So my baby isn’t such a baby anymore, cuz she’s seven. And I noticed that this summer my anxiety seemed to spike. It was like, I was worried about my kids, worried about something happening to them, worried like all of those. And it was interesting how I could recognize, of course I’m anxious because I’m worried and I love these children and it’s okay that I’m anxious about them and it’s okay that I then do something with it.

So I. Never ever tell yourself that my anxiety, my depression, my OCD is a problem is wrong. Like it hurts because it doesn’t it’s normal. It’s absolutely just a part. And it is okay to be anxious. It’s okay. To be depressed. It’s okay to have O C, D it’s okay. To tell yourself I have me. I’m alright. And then to be able to say, this is what I’m gonna do with it.

This is what this means. This is how I handle it. And what that may look like for you definitely is very different per person, but that’s, for me, that was the best thing you to be able to say. Of course, I’m anxious and it’s okay. That I’m this way as well.

Carrie: Yeah, it is. Okay. that you feel a certain way and so normal and so understandable.

A lot of times, like when we really look at the situation that we’re going through, it’s like, yeah, this makes sense. you know, that you’d feel that way. One question I like to ask people towards the end of the podcast is what would you say to your younger self who is going through postpartum depression, and postpartum anxiety?

Julie: I’d wanted to know that one, this was completely normal, even though we have those, you know, one in seven we’ll have postpartum about 50 to 75% will experience some sort of baby blues. So that’s definitely more than half. All of us will experience those feelings. Not only is that normal, but it’s also a sign that everything has gone.

Right. And I wish that I had told my younger self that even though the pregnancy felt like none of it went right. The delivery, none of it went right. Like nothing happened the way that it was supposed to happen. Everything went right. And that it was okay for me to take a step back. It was okay for me to not have to do it all.

It was okay for me to acknowledge that this could be somebody else’s response. Or something else somebody else could help me with. I didn’t have to do it all. And I think that would’ve been the advice I wish that I had gotten then. Yeah. Good.

Carrie: Thank you so much for sharing your personal story and your professional experience with postpartum depression, and anxiety.

I think this is hopefully gonna be a really helpful show for people.

Julie: Thank you. I love talking about this. So I’m hoping that this will help others as.

 I really feel like this is one of those. You are not alone type episodes. And I love it. If you are struggling with postpartum depression or anxiety, please reach out and get the help that you need. Whether that’s medication therapy, support group, friends, spiritual counsel, whatever that is, just make sure that you reach out and get the help that you need. If you like this episode or found benefit from it, let us know. You can always contact us on hope for anxiety and ocd.com. There’s a contact form at the bottom of the front page of our website.

Thank you so much for listening. Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee.  opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By the Well Counseling.

Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

58. Using Humor for Anxiety with Sporty King

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 58. Using Humor for Anxiety with Sporty King

Today’s special is a certified humor professional, certified stress mastery educator,  master listener and author, Sporty King. Sporty talks about using humor as a coping tool for anxiety and other mental health issues.

  • Laughter is a part of humor but not a requirement. 
  • Sporty’s view on these two different extremes: people may take themselves too seriously or they may make everything a joke.
  • How Sporty became a master listener at the same time a public speaker
  • The healing power of laughter and the study of healthy humor
  • Helpful advice for those who mask their feelings with humor
  • How Sporty use humor to help people master their stress and anxiety
  • Does God have a sense of humor?

Related Links and Resources
 
Sporty King 

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Transcript pf Episode 58

Carrie: Welcome to Hope For Anxiety and OCD. I’m your host Carrie Bock. And today on the show, we are talking with Sporty King, who is a Master Listener, Stress Master Educator, and Certified Humor Professional to talk with us about humor. I did not know prior to meeting Sporty that you could be a certified humor professional, but I find this very interesting and intriguing. And I think we’re going to get into a great conversation today. Even though you’re a public speaker, why would you say that you’re a master listener? That seems like a contradiction a little bit there. 

Sporty: Great and say that’s part of the beauty of life and humor is the contradictions. Listening is actually the number one communication skill.

So what happens is, we tend to hear people say that they’re motivational speakers, you know, they’re speakers, but the truth is you have to listen when you speak, you should be sharing. And so you share the information that went in and you’ll see then, later on I taught her some things that will really show you why I call myself the master of listening.

And, the reason I also came up with that moniker is instead of saying, I’m a master, a master of ceremonies, I’m a master of listening. I will listen throughout in a conference for instance, awards,  a banquet or whatever. And I listen to the things that people say, and then I do what I collect the words and then at the end, I will actually create a poem on the spot that grabs the spirit of what went on in that tribute or the conference as well. And so that’s why , another reason I call, the master of listening.

Carrie: Wow. That’s impressive. Poems on the spot. Awesome. You told me that laughter is a part of humor, but not a requirement. So tell us more about that. 

Sporty: Yeah, you see, humor is actually the quality that makes something amusing or laughable, whereas laughter is actually the biological reaction. So laughter is that outward expression of humor. So, you know, it’s just like we hear people say I got a good sense of humor. You can have a sense of humor and not actually not laugh, at all. Gosh, let me tell you this last batch that I just had earlier in my speaking business, a disease called R R F D

Carrie: Ok? 

Sporty: And it stands for reflex dystrophy or  Reflex, Dystrophy, Sympathy, RDS. And so I’m speaking to this group as I’m talking and I’m laughing and I’m talking. And about 10 minutes into the presentation, one of the persons in front of us said, “ Sporty”  because no one laughed while I’m talking.

And she said, “ I just want you to know that we are really enjoying you. But this disease is a cross between cancer and arthritis and actually laughing is painful sometimes.”  So it gives you another look at, when people talk about being speakers, we got to reach your audience and go with their moods. You can’t always do that because you don’t know, you know, someone who you think is looking stoic or uninterested may be the most involved, engaged person in your audience. But you don’t know whether to have a disease or what type of trauma they’re going through in their life that they are thinking about, so they, you know, say may not be responding the way you want them to.

So that’s just, you know, one of the early lessons I got in my speaking career, and I love it. 

Carrie: Somebody took a nap one time while I was speaking at a conference and I just figured that they really needed that nap at that time . I tried not to take any offense to it, but I was like, “ Man, this is rough here.” I wasn’t even after lunch or anything.

Sporty: See? Because that laugh at large you see from speaking after lunch, I’ll open the session by saying, “ Welcome to sleep therapy.” 

Carrie: Yeah 

Sporty: But, but yeah, maybe your voice was so calming that that allowed them to get that rest that they need. 

Carrie: There you go.

Sporty: Again, switching, switching things up.

Carrie: Yeah. One of the reasons that I wanted to talk about humor on a show that has to do with anxiety, is because I know somebody who’s tuning in right now going, “ Why in the world are they even talking about this on the anxiety show here?”

But I noticed that if people aren’t careful that they struggle with anxiety, they can really fall into two different traps. And one is, they may take themselves too seriously and they have a hard time just finding that sense of humor and maybe making light of some things that happen in our lives. I think that’s a skill that we all have to kind of develop to, I don’t know how to stay sane and get through some difficulties. But then on the other trap, they may make everything a joke and just kind of joke their way through life and avoid really diving into some of those difficult feelings they might actually need to feel. I’m curious about, you know, your thoughts on those two different extremes.

Sporty: So let’s jump right on that word you use twice, feelings. Say because the key is no emotion is wrong. And sometimes we have to recognize how you feel.  You should feel nervous . You should feel anxious.  You should feel excited. You should feel great. You should feel sad. No emotion is wrong. But the key is how do we choose to then deal with the emotion?

Like you say, “ I’m not taking myself too seriously?”  or “ Am I hiding how I feel with jokes?” I see anxiety and excitement as fraternal twins. We both recreate a reaction in the body of what’s about to come and how I’m going to perform. “ Am I being judged because we’re judging ourselves?”  All of that is there. We can just as quickly make it trivial, but the same way you say, “ Oh my God, I don’t think I’m going to do well. I’m feeling scared. I’m nervous.”  We can just as easily say, “ Man, I’m excited. I’m about to do a great job and make a difference in people’s lives.”  The brain doesn’t say, “ Oh, Siri here. That’s correct. That you’re nervous. You’re scared. Now the brain goes with what you are telling. Sometimes, like I said, it’s not necessarily going to be easy, but it’s a commitment. And so, if I’m taking myself too seriously, the key becomes the world throws around and that is truth, truth, and trust. You know, you’ve got to  be honest with yourself because sometimes , the people who take themselves too seriously, I think it is because they, they won’t let anybody else in who will say to them,  “ Hey, look, you’re doing this.” And then therefore now to  have a chance to correct it. 

Carrie: And sometimes humor, you know, requires a certain level of vulnerability because you don’t know, like, is the other person going to find this funny? Are they going to get it? Or they, you know, sometimes you’re dancing on that line of, they’re  going to be offended by the joke I just made or something of that nature too.

Sporty: Yeah, I’m a member of a, you mentioned my CHP, is it Certified Humor Professional. I’m a member of an organization called A  A T H and it’s just the “ Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor.”  We believe in the healing power of laughter, but also in the study of healthy humor . So say, you know, when you’re wondering, “ How is someone going to  react to this?” Well, flip that coin and , “ How am I going to deliver this?” 

Carrie: That’s good. So for people who use humor to like, hide their feelings, do you have any ideas or recommendations about how they might start to shift to that a little bit?

Sporty: It’s funny because I think when we, even, when we think about that humor style for most people, young and old, I think even a lot of young people know Rodney Dangerfield. And that was his style, just totally self-deprecating humor. You know, it’s funny when you have to figure out,

 “ Does he really feel that bad about himself or is he aware that sometimes the humor actually can trivialize and cut that anxiety down, make the anxiety? ”  No, you don’t have the best of me,  master of listening.

I’d like to use the English language and massage it. Right? So ,Hope as the name of your show. I hope it’s one of my, I call them my act formations because their acronyms,  that are affirmations  and my act formation for hope is, “ Having OverPowered Evil” . So therefore if you get into that state where you are, that to me, that’s how you can laugh in anxiety’s face.

“ Oh no, you can’t beat me.” See, we can beat. If our problems just popped up one at a time, we have no problem. We can beat them one at a time. 

Carrie: Sure, sure. That makes sense.

Sporty:  Yeah, the challenge is when they come in DRO and then we think that we can’t. And so now we backed out. I actually, I know I want to round the field on that, but I take that back to where I’m saying a person, who’s making a joke.

That could be a way of standing up to their anxiety and saying, “ You know what? Hey, I’m not going to take it that seriously. I am going to get through this and see things come out in a positive vein for myself.”

Carrie: I know sometimes when you look back on a situation, not when you’re in the middle of it and you’re anxious and you’re in the middle of it and you’re worried and you’re anxious.

It feels so real. And like, it feels like that bad thing really is going to happen. But sometimes after you’ve had some time and distance from it and the bad thing didn’t happen, you can look back and it can be funny. It’s like, “ Oh wow! I can’t believe I was so worried . I was so convinced that that thing was going to happen and actually it just never happened. “

Sporty: Self-fulfilling prophecies. When we decide bad it’s going to happen. We just need to wait for it to catch up. Even if you think, look at comedians, the best jokes are the truths. They don’t make a lot of those things up. 

Carrie: Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. You are also working with people who are, uh, you know, coming back from deployments or are getting ready to go on a deployment with the military. And that’s some of where you use the stress mastery education. I’m curious, how do you help people use humor to help master their stress?

Sporty:  My form of using it is similar to what I, what I did with the HOPE thing. I call it controlling your vocabulary, rather than allowing your vocabulary to control you. See ,if we can put all of the stuff together that I talked about, the AATH, stress mastery that the act formation controls your vocabulary. And if you decide that I’m going to have a positive vocabulary, it actually helps you again, because your brain is going to go with whatever you say and you tell your brain,  “ Hey, we’re in a great situation right here. We’re not anxious and nervous. We’re excited.” And in fact, one of the biggest examples, people are afraid of public speaking. They get up there and they say, “ Oh my God! What if I screw up?”And you know, “ What, if I knocked my notes over?”,  you know? So they come up with all of these reasons and no one’s going to pay attention and you could just as easily. And again, I used the word easily, but I never ever realized. You can say, “ Man, when I get up here and I start talking, I am going to knock the shoes off of these people.”

Okay. So you can, I saw this on TV. So now all I have to do is be the hero that I saw giving this speech on TV because you’ve been asked to speak. So sometimes we erase the gift in favor of the challenge. And so you’ve been asked to speak that that was a gift to you instead of you accepting what has been given to you, you decide, but I’m not the right one.

Hey,  sounds like,  “ Bows this to me, you know?” ,  I mean. 

Carrie: Not me. I don’t think I can do this task. Yeah. I mean, that leads into my next question, which is, “ Do you believe God has a sense of humor?” 

Sporty: Absolutely do. And I think that if you believe in God, think you kind of have to, because if you believe in what’s, the premise of, of us is that we’re made in God’s image.

So if we are made in God’s image, we have the characteristics of God. Therefore, our sense of humor is a characteristic of God’s . We are the living sense of humor of God. 

Carrie: Yeah. That’s awesome. Absolutely.

Sporty:  I’ll check with Him on that by the way. 

Carrie: You’ll, you’ll ask Him. We had a funny experience in our household this week, actually. We sat down to pray at the dinner table and my husband’s no sooner as he gets,  “ Dear God”, out. Then we started to hear this music and it’s like, uh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. And we’re like, “ What in the world is that?” The ice cream truck was passing by like right at the time where he goes to pray. And it was like trying to pray the pop goes the weasel ,  just doesn’t doesn’t quite seem right. But it was just so funny, the timing of that happening, and we very rarely get ice cream trucks that pass by here. So at first we didn’t quite even know what it was. Like, “ What is that noise? And we just started laughing at the table. It was good. I know that there have probably been times in your life. Has there been a time where you.

Look at something and maybe you said, “ No, I’m not going to do that.”  Or, you know, “ I don’t really think that’s what I should be doing.”  And then next thing you know, God like,  somehow leads you in that direction in some kind of roundabout way. And you ended up doing that thing that you didn’t think you were going to be doing?

Sporty: Uh, there’s a novel, right? One of, even first, which is talking about prayer, I would like to connect that to humor. One of the things like, for instance, I was a master of listening at an event , that was a fundraiser and they asked me to do the invocation. That was on the board and this way back, and I was known for my zaniness.

So I get up to the mic and I say, “ God, It’s me again, Sporty and my board members held their breakfast like, “ What is he doing?” And I said, “ And I’m glad to say I’m in a room full of other people who, you know, by first name. And see? So there is humor that does not require this crack up laughter. God, again, God has a sense of humor. So you, you don’t always have,  I don’t believe you always have to have this big reverent prayer to God, as much as you have to talk to God. And let him know that, you know how you feel because He knows.

Carrie: Sure. Absolutely.

Sporty: Pop goes the weasel. Okay. We’ll pass the potatoes and share the gravy. Make sure you pray first. 

Carrie: That was pretty good. 

Sporty: There it is. As these things happen in our lives, you’ve got to see the funny. You don’t always have to be funny to see the funny,

Carrie: Yeah. 

Sporty: So, even as you’re talking about the one thing, I mean, God, like I said, there’s a million things that I said I wouldn’t do. In fact, one of them, I’m doing one of them right now.

And that is, I live in Charlotte. I’m a native New York. I worked in corporate America, 18 years. I worked at the Wall Street Journal. I started as a messenger and when I retired, I was an advertising sales manager. But the reason I say that is because while I was there, I said to myself, “ I’ll never leave the Wall Street Journal.”

Carrie: Yeah. I am gonna retire here. 

Sporty: Yeah. And, “I’ll never leave New York. “ Well, they transferred me from New York to Maryland. When they promoted me to a sales rep, then they transferred me  from Maryland to Chicago when they promoted me as a sales manager. And then when I retired and decided to be an entrepreneur, I moved myself to Charlotte.

But somebody, even when I first relocated from New York to Maryland, my boss was so surprised that I was even interested in the position when it was open, when I went in to him and  he was like, “  Really? You would leave New York?”

Carrie: That’s funny. 

Sporty: So that may not be a huge example, but in all of that, what is also where at that time, when I started to journal, I didn’t have a great sense of spirituality to myself. I was just living the way I once lived.  I wasn’t reckless on anything, you know, but I didn’t really connect. And I think this is sometimes a challenge for people. I didn’t really connect to my spirituality ‘til about 38 years old. And where I, like we talked about earlier in retrospect, when, when I was in Maryland, North Carolina was my sales territory and I stood on a corner in Charlotte and I said, “ I like it here. I think I’ll move here one day.”  25 years later, is actually when I moved here, but I had that conversation with myself in 1985 and then it was, so I must’ve been probably  20, 28. And then, because it was when I was 38, that I was able to look back and see that that was my first conscious conversation with God.

And even when I moved to Charlotte in 2010, people said, “ Goodness, you took 25 years? “  I said , “ No, I use 25.” And again, just change…

Carrie: Changing the words. Yeah. 

Sporty: Now you look at it. 

Carrie: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s awesome. I know I was just batting around some different ideas with one of the counselors in our office one day. And we were talking about, I said, “ You know, I want to do a little bit more than therapy.”  I’m enjoying what I’m doing, but I think I just needed a challenge. I needed something like kind of to keep me more fresh and new. I said, “ Maybe I’ll write a workbook, you know, for people with anxiety or maybe I’ll work on some self-help type stuff, as well. “ Why don’t you start a podcast? And I was like, “ A podcast, like what?” And I was like, “ No.”  I was like, “ I just, I don’t know what I would talk about if I started a podcast.”  And now we’re over 50 episodes in. So I guess I didn’t run out of things to talk about. But I look back on that and I think that’s God’s sense of humor. Like God knew that I was going to end up taking this path and falling along here. And I’ve enjoyed it so much.I enjoy meeting people and talking with them and having all kinds of great conversations. And I learned a lot and other people learned a lot too. So it enriches me and enriches other people.

Sporty: Do it so smoothly. I mean, I love how things reconnect. It takes us right back to what we talked about, where you have to accept again.Rather than look at it as you know. Oh no, I’m not going to write a podcast. Excuse me, Carrie.  I’d like you to write a podcast.

Carrie: And sometimes people see things in you. Like we need those other people outside of ourselves to speak the positive things into our life or the gifts that they see that God has given us.

We’ve talked about this on the show before, but it’s like, it’s important to like, for us to be in community with people who are able to kind of call some of that out sometimes and say, “ Hey, you know, I see this in you. Have you ever thought about that? “  I mean,  that in itself is a blessing for sure. 

Sporty: Yeah. And you know, it takes me back to what we were saying about anxiety, people taking themselves too seriously. How I help people deal with stress. One of the main things, other than telling them, you know, control your vocabulary, do not compare yourself to someone else. 

Carrie: That’s huge.  Very huge. Nothing will rob you of your joy and peace and all of that more than comparing yourself to other people. I really believe that.  Everyone is on their own journey and their own path. And unfortunately, I think someone said this and I don’t remember who it was, but it’s like, “ We used to only compare ourselves to the people that we knew, the people that were around us and in our inner circle.” And now we can compare ourselves to anybody in the world. We just get online, get on social media. And it’s rough, it’s hard.

Sporty: In fact, even with my New York roots, one of the ways that I keep myself grounded, crazy things go on and I will say, “ You know what? This has been going on all along. We didn’t know it.”

Technology has, this is a part of, this is what technology did.  Put new stress and anxiety into our life because now we have more information that we didn’t have before. So that whole thing of a simple life that’s gone 

Carrie: You’re Amish.

Sporty: Yeah. There’s a joke that you cannot or can make . Is it a striking joke?  It’s not. It’s one of those, they are proud of what they do. And I say, Therefore. Yeah, that’s right. That’s the thing. And, I didn’t know what was going on in California, so I didn’t have to care about it. And so now, like you say, you’re on all this technology and you’re modeling yourself out of somebody who you don’t even know their real, true persona, because who they’re showing you on the screen may totally be the opposite of who they are.

Carrie: Right.

Sporty: One of my favorites when I do my presentations and I’m talking about stress, cause I always say, if you don’t like the way things are changed, the way you look at them. And I open that with a slide that shows a jail cell and empty jail cell and the caption is she met him on the internet. He said “ He lived in a closed community.”

Carrie : Oh my goodness. That’s a closed community. Maybe not what you thought. Tell us how people can find you and get in touch with you. 

Sporty: Sportyking.com. It has all of my connections to all of the social media.  I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, “ Fussbook” . That’s what I call a Facebook because everybody’s just complaining. 

Carrie: My dad has come to call it,  “ Face lift” ,  and he’s not on there, but that’s what he likes to call it is facelift. I don’t know why. 

Sporty : But also, I might say, at Sportyking.com, I do three audio broadcasts a week. So similar to you. It’s a podcast. Well, Monday I do a quick 2-minute Inspirational message.  Wednesdays,  I do one of my Wednesday messages is called GLUE Wednesday, and my glue is G L U E. God’s Love Undoes Everything where I’ll, I’ll talk about how we have to recognize that Wednesday is not hump day.

Wednesday is actually the middle of a traditional seven-day week that keeps things together. So we don’t need to honk. We don’t need to get over it. We need to find ways to keep it together. So again, just playing on words and bringing the calm. And then Friday, I call it a GIFT Friday and gift,  G I F T , to God Is For Today.

You know, because everybody says,  T G I F but I, I say, well, “ TGIT, Thank God is Today.”  And , “ Thank God Is Tonight.” Let’s make sure that we recognize that God is for today. Do you know what you took when you talked about it  earlier about how, when you’re going through something and you’re in the middle, poetry is how I started my speaking business.

And I wrote a poem called, “ How far is the middle?” Because see, we don’t really know when we’re in the middle, because we don’t know when that situation starts and or when it’s going to end, it’s going to end, right?

Carrie: Yeah. That’s huge.

Sporty:  So you’ll find those three broadcasts on it and people can subscribe to them.

It’s free. In fact, you don’t even have to subscribe. You just want to watch one and enjoy it. That’s fine. You have options. 

Carrie: So towards the end of every podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time where you’ve received hope from God or another person. 

Sporty: That one is actually very easy for me. It’s the hope of how He has allowed me to, to handle grief. When my mother died, I was the one in the room with her to see her take her last breath. I had to turn that and I was able to turn,  flip it very easily, actually. And that’s again, that’s the gift of God.  I said, “  You know, I’m the only one in the family that could have handled this.”

Yes, I was torn apart and yes, I went through my whole crying bit and everything like that, but I had said, you know what? And my sister and I had just switched changing of the guard. Who’s turned. Was it the watcher? Uh, about an hour ago, my sister would’ve lost her mind. But I had to see that as the gift that God gave me, even though your listeners can’t see it right now, you know, I’ve got on a shirt that says faith and faith is F A I T H Feeling As If There’s Hope,  recognizing that the only thing you cannot do is give up.

And that’s what God has constantly allowed me to feed into my life and then share with other people’s lives. In fact, let me do a quick thing with you. I want you to answer me. This is a cliche. This is what I would say. Also control your vocabulary. This is a cliche and I want you to finish it. Okay. All right.

“ When one door closes…”

Carrie: Another door opens.

Sporty: Good. But now the Sporty King remix, “ When one door closes, go for the windows”

Carrie: There you go. Don’t wait for the other door to open.

Sporty: That’s right. ‘ Cause it may not be your door. And what we do is we have to recognize that, they’re using more doors than they are windows in a room.

And once you see what you have to choose from, once you make better choices in life, see that, that’s why I say the cliches. We gotta be careful of those cliches and the comparison of ourselves to someone on the other side of the world, because they’re saying things that may not apply to what’s going on in our lives.

So really be careful about that, but definitely go for the windows. You get another chance. To make one more choice because each of us does. And my closing comment is that, “ We do the bravest thing that we can do every day and that is lay our heads down and go to sleep.”  

Carrie: Yeah, that’s good. I really appreciate this conversation and I know that our listeners do too as well, so thank you for being on the show.

Sporty: Thank you so much. 

Carrie: Just a reminder, no episode next week for Christmas week, but I hope that you have an amazing Christmas holiday celebrating with family, friends, church, community. We’re going to be back the last week of December to talk about new year’s resolutions and goals. And then I have several interviews coming out in the beginning of the year that I think you’re going to enjoy.

If you would ever like to give a gift to the podcast, you can find out how to do so. In our show notes.  We have a subscription through Patreon and we also have one-time gifts that can be given through, “ Buy Me A Coffee.”  All of that money really helps to go towards editing. Our social media is assisting to support us, continuing to be able to do the show.

Thank you so much to those who have supported us.

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.

Until next time. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

51. Surrendering Our Insomnia to God with Dr. Charles Page

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 51. Surrendering Our Insomnia to God with Dr. Charles Page

Today on the show, I’m privileged to be interviewing Dr. Charles Page, a surgeon, author and speaker.  Dr. Charles shares with us how he surrendered his sleep problems to God.

  • Why did Dr. Charles write a book about insomnia?
  • Christian worldview about sleep
  • Dr. Charles’s tips and strategies to beat insomnia and sleep better.
  • Scripture verses related to sleep
  • How do we surrender to God?
  • Dr. Charles’s book: Surrendered Sleep

Scripture verses discussed: Psalms 121:4-5, Psalm 4:8, Ephesians 4:27, Psalm 148

Links and Resources

Dr. Charles PageBook: Surrendered Sleep

Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hopeforanxiety)

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 51

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, Episode 51. I’m your host Carrie Bach, and we are covering all types of topics on the show related to anxiety. I have wanted to have someone come on and talk about sleep for quite some time. Because as we know, many people who struggle with anxiety deal with insomnia, and this topic is especially timely for me because I was up in the middle of the night, just last night, having a hard time going to sleep.

Carrie: So I am so glad that Dr. Chuck Page, a surgeon, and author of Surrendered Sleep is here to talk with us today. Thank you for coming. 

Dr. Chuck: Well, great to be here with you, Carrie and I got up about three o’clock this morning, too. So are I share your pain. 

Carrie: How did a surgeon come to write a book on insomnia?

Dr. Chuck: Well, that’s kind of a convoluted story. Let me make it short. My whole adult life I’ve suffered from sleep issues. Just the regular things that people face every day, the things that raise through our minds, our to-do list and all the woulda shoulda kudos of the day And then all the things that we are anticipating or worrying about it the next day.

So all of those things, but on another level, my whole adult life I’ve been an insomniac because I’m a surgeon. I’m on call all the time. I get called in the middle of the night, even when I’m not on call. Yeah, people call me at three o’clock in the morning to say, hey doc, what you’re doing? We just want to know that. Just want to see what you’re up to at three o’clock in the morning. So it’s been really challenging for me from that standpoint. Then on another level, I have sleep apnea, I didn’t even know it and I’m kind of one of those who do, as I say, not as I do doctors, I’ve kind of gone through this process of learning myself about sleep disorder.

So it kinda hits me in a lot of different ways. I think that’s kind of one of the take-home messages that I want your audience to really think about is that a lot of times its not just one thing. It’s multiple things that are hitting us as we lay our heads on our pillow. 

Carrie:  Yes. Physical and mental health things can be coming up at night.

Dr. Chuck: Yep. 

Carrie: Yeah. So what scriptures have you found that speak to sleep specifically? 

Dr. Chuck: Oh, my goodness. So there’s a lot. There’s a lot of scriptures that talk about it. So it’s interesting as I began to kind of deal with this, I began to realize how much the Bible has to say about sleep. It’s kind of funny. Most people don’t think about going to the scripture with their sleep issues, but you think about it, sleep was God’s idea. One of the interesting things, you being a psychologist, I know you face this, as a medical doctor, I face this. There are different worldviews out there.

Do you think about it? No one can explain sleep. I mean from a natural secular worldview thinking as it from an evolutionist, they don’t have an explanation for sleep or they have some very brilliantly stupid ideas that somehow, but from that worldview, they don’t have an explanation for why we go to sleep.

You think about it. Humans are unique because we sleep about eight hours in a 24-hour cycle, as opposed to elephants or giraffes, or dear me, nicely of about two hours. From an evolutionary standpoint, if you think about it from that worldview, you snooze, you lose. So it’s, it’s really hard to explain.

Now we know from a Christian worldview that sleep was God’s idea. So the scriptures have a lot to say about sleep. Yeah, can look at the Bible and say, okay, here are the 11th commandment. You shall sleep eight hours. I’ve read some books that people say, you know what God’s promised you and a good night’s sleep. There are not really any passages that say that. There’s no turn to the fourth book of sleep and we’re going to study this. I mean you have to kind of look at the Bible on a kind of a bigger picture to really understand what it says. The main thing is there’s a lot of attitudes that emerge for the circumstances that we’re facing.

So yeah, there’s a ton and I can just kind of go through all those, but just beginning with the first kind of a concept, sleep was God’s idea. We were created to sleep and I think one of the big ideas that the scriptures tell us and kind of fits in with the rest of our lives. One of the reasons I think that we were to sleep is because God really wants us to turn off. When you think about the creation story, starting in Genesis one. It’s a funny phrase, it says in the evening and the morning was the first day. And so it’s funny, we get it the other way around. We think, well, those day starts when the sun comes up.

When I get up in the morning, that’s when the day starts. No, from the Hebrew standpoint of the day, the day started when the sun went down and so they began their day with rest. That’s an interesting, different, very different perspective than the way we live in our modern culture. We can say, hey, we turn the lights off, and hey, goodnight God, I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning. But actually, the scriptures talk about how God never slumbers or sleeps 120 seconds song. God never slumbers or sleeps that He is just as active and working in our lives as we put our heads on our pillow. That’s one of the great things I think to bring in that, that the Christian can bring into to rest is that, hey, whatever circumstances we’re going through, God’s got this.

So just kind of keeping that big idea that God is just as active as He does. He doesn’t go to sleep when we do. So he’s still working in our lives and I think that’s one of the first things to kind of understand about who got it. 

Carrie: Okay. I always like to say God’s bigger than any problem that you’re going to face today, so we don’t feel like we can handle it, but it’s easy for God. He can handle anything. I know that we talked about this a little bit earlier, but worrying thoughts about our present life, sometimes just thoughts about the state of the world. It can keep us up at night and we’re taught in the Bible or pray about these things in order to receive peace from God. Have you found specific prayer practices or strategies helpful when you’re awake, either having trouble falling asleep or waking up in the middle of the night? 

Dr. Chuck: Yes. I think we need to make whatever routine. I mean, once again, we’re personal beings and we each have a unique relationship with God for the Christian. But I think beginning your day in scripture and prayer, and just a time of just journaling or whatever you do, do that before you go to bed and do that in the morning and kind of sandwich your laugh into sleep.

And so one of the interesting things, so often the things that race through our mind and rob us asleep, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience. But sometimes like, I’ll be thinking about a situation may be. Oh my goodness, I face things every day, all kinds of things and that theme begins to pop into my mind and I pray about it as I don’t even read scripture.

It seems like prayer and I give it to God and then five minutes later, it’s pop base boomerang back into my consciousness. It really plagues my slave. So one of the things I think that we often forget is the art of meditation. Meditation is so powerful. You guys talk about, cognitive behavioral therapy, think about the good things but it’s even from a scriptural standpoint. It’s a lot deeper than that. I mean, it’s not an Eastern meditation where we’re emptying our mind, actually, meditation is filling our mind. It’s kind of the law of replacing. So often when a competing thought or we’re worrying thought enters our mind, we can’t just take it out of our mind because it’ll boomerang back into our thinking.

We have to replace it and that’s where meditation comes in. For example, Philippians, everybody knows Philippians chapter four, it talks about, in everything, give prayer and in that verse, it talks about there’s anything good, anything noble, anything, think about these things. It’s talking about the art of meditation and I think that’s so key for us because as you show me your focus, I’ll show you your future, and as we begin to focus on the scriptures and begins to fill our minds with the good stuff. So that’s part and you can even go back to the songs.

For example, if you think about David, one of the songs is the fourth song. It was in the evening Psalm that David prayed when he was going through the toughest time of his life. This was when Absalom Salaam had usurped the throne and he was running for his laugh crossing, the Jordan river and people were and fingers at aim. It was just multiple stuff that was robbing  his sleep. As he goes through this process, and it says in Psalm 4:8, I will lay me down in peace and sleep for you, Lord. Let me dwell in safety and so this process of prayer and meditation, I think is huge.

So, hey, have you ever heard of the hippocampus part of the brain? So it was interesting. No, it’s not an exhibited Azu okay. The hippocampus is a part of the brain for the audience. What the hippocampus does is the hippocampus take short-term memory and embed it into long-term memory. And so at the end of the day, our hippocampus goes to work. So as we’re sleeping, the hippocampus is constantly taking all of those memories of the day and it begins to embed them in our long-term memory and that’s why it’s so important. But back to your question that we stop and we begin to process those events that have happened during the day. I mean, it’s just so simple because if we don’t, instead of getting better, we’re going to get better, those bad experiences, we all have this stuff.

I mean, think about all the COVID stuff that everybody’s dealing with now and just these experiences and so being able to filter them through the scriptures and be able to process them, I think is very healthy. It talks about in Ephesians four, I think 26, it talks about, not to give the devil a foothold, but to deal with your anger before you go to bed. So I’m paraphrasing that, but so often we have these emotions that just, man, you probably never have those Carrie being a counselor, but people mad at me all the time, you killed a grandma, you didn’t do this. You didn’t or something didn’t turn out the way that I expected them.

When I have a bad day, I really have a bad day. So being able to filter those things in and deal with those emotions is huge. We have to let the natural processes of the way we were designed work for us. And so we don’t have to do much. I mean, the devil doesn’t have to do much when we’re not meditating and praying the scripture. So I guess that was a long answer to your question, but that’s what I do. I try to meditate. I try to read, I try to pray, do all those things.  I think that’s what most people deal with. It’s called primary insomnia. Most people have trouble going to sleep. 

Carrie: Okay. So what do we do for those of us that wake up in the middle of the night? Because that’s my problem. I normally do not have problems going to sleep. I can just ask out, but then when it comes to, I wake up with thoughts in the middle of the night.

Dr. Chuck: Well, good for you. That’s great and I don’t either, because usually, I’m so exhausted by the time I get to bed. It’s funny. They say those who sleep like a baby probably don’t have one, and I haven’t been my wife and I have such different sleep habits. So, I tell people I’m the best, get the best guy to see on the worst day of your life. My wife is the best person to see any day of your life. But for me, when I’m woken up in the middle of the night, one thing that I’ve learned to do many times when I’m kind of tossing and turning in my bed is take a step back and listen to God sometimes.

Those are opportunities that God is trying to get our attention. I think most of us and the culture that we lay, I remember going so fast during the day that we don’t have time to really stop and listen, and God wants to speak to us. And sometimes He has to, He has to wake us up and not to get our attention. And so you don’t think about that. You go back to study in first Samuel, the story of Samuel. He has a little boy and they’re at the table with Eli and he’s going to sleep, and God’s saying Eli, he gets up and goes. Samuel gets up and goes to Eli and back and forth all the time, and God’s trying to get his attention to give him a message and he doesn’t catch it.

I wonder how many times I’ve done and it’s actually an opportunity, to meet with God and think about what Samuel would have missed out on. He would have never stopped and heard the wind. That was the beginning of a series of steps that set the same direction. And so often when I’m waking up in the middle of night, just kind of keeping them in mind, God, are you saying something to me? And sometimes He’s not. I always try to keep a journal at the bedside because sometimes it’s something a thought will come into my mind and it may be just a random thought or it may be something that’s really something that God has woken us up to tell us. And so just to write it down and in the morning, you can look at it.

Now, the verse Psalm 7 talks about how God ministers to us, how the spirit ministers to us at night. And so looking at that and thinking about the fact that hey, this may be just something that God just write it down. How many times they’ll say him let’s sleep on it. Now I want to sleep on this message, maybe something very simple, simple about either or a person can pop into our mind. Somebody that we haven’t thought about a year. So the first thing, if you get up at night, get up and pray. Just like Samuel said, speak Lord for your servant is hearing. That’s in first Samuel three. A good rule of thumb, hey, got it. This may not be you, but it may bespeak for your servant is listening.

You’d be surprised and something, and even if we don’t have an answer, I think those times of fellowship become very precious to us, in the sense where we’re not losing anything by having those times of fellowship with God at night, when no one’s there, you can go through the Psalm 1:48. I think it talks about how God keeps me up at a meditated night upon God. And so just kind of thinking about that, it’s a very different perspective of sleep than we get. So it may be a divine appointment. You’re correct. 

Carrie: It’s a good time to be quiet. The house is quiet. There’s not much going on. There aren’t really a whole lot of distractions, maybe that can, we can’t do too much. We don’t want to wake up other family members. So it is a good time to sit down, maybe in reading or praying. Sometimes I will get up and write and I’ll just type whatever’s on my mind and it’s kind of a brain dump in the middle of the night.

And I wonder if you know, I’m not, it’s some of those things that may be that I didn’t take the time or have the chance to process. Sometimes things happen, in the evening, like right before you go to bed, and sometimes that can really throw me off. Sometimes on Tuesday nights, we’ll have church director meetings via zoom and I’ll be thinking about what our pastor was talking with us about or upcoming church things that we have going on. I don’t always have a lot of time to process that before I go to sleep. I think I ended up waking up in the middle of the night. 

Dr. Chuck: I think everybody who listened to this is going, yep, I get it. But one of the things you brought up Carrie, that I think is very important is journaling. I didn’t really realize this, but this book that I wrote about sleep was I really thought I was writing it for other people, but really in a sense, I was writing it for myself as my own way of dealing with the spiritual component of sleep. And I’m realizing that too, with the rest of the books that I’m writing, I mean, really. Journaling is a way that helps us process the events in our lives that I think is so productive. And if you know, if anybody in your audience has never tried journaling, get up and write, and you’d be surprised, you’d be surprised what just a little bit of introspection and thinking will do.

Carrie: You would be surprised at what comes out. A lot of times, one time I realized, oh, well, I’m worrying about something that’s the way in the future that I don’t have any control over. I was like, well, that’s not even close to where I’m at today. That’s really an opportunity for me to let go. You have lots of worries about the future. So how can, because your book is called Surrender to Sleep. So for people that, I mean, we have a hard time sometimes letting go of control. Let’s be honest. We want to try to control things that we don’t have any control over. That obviously creates a lot of anxiety. How do we surrender that over to God and not pick it up five minutes later?

Dr. Chuck: Wow. That is one of those million-dollar questions that, I think we all struggle with Carrie. I think surrender is a process, pass or disease go or just surrender, but it’s us thinking about that, it really is a process. It’s a stepwise process. It is an attitude. I think that we have to embrace this concept of surrender, control even as a Sergeant because I’m a control freak because even, in the operating room or patient, just the smallest thing can make a huge difference. And so, and it’s really hard to realize that control is just an illusion from an earthly standpoint.

And so realizing that if we do yield to God, God’s grace begins to empower us to be able to work more according to His plans and just release the outcome into what God wants. So surrender is huge and it’s I think a lifelong process that we go through. But once again, I think we were created, I think it’s just a reminder every day. If we were, God created us to surrender, that’s what sleep is about. It’s just, it really is. We have to let go and let God do for us what we can’t do for ourselves. What a picture of grace. It’s not saying not to minimize our responses, but yet to understand that we let go, God’s going to do some great things and so that’s what I’ve learned. That’s what my book is about. It’s just really changing focus. You show me your focus, I’ll show you your future.

And so if we focus so often we think about sleep, we think about, oh man, it’s 11 o’clock or three o’clock in the morning. I can’t sleep and I’ve got all this stuff to do tomorrow. And man, the male in our mind just starts working and we begin to worry and we began to meditate. We meditate on our fears and stuff. But if we change focus and we focus on our relationship with God, it doesn’t mean that God’s going to promise a good night’s sleep, but He will give us, we have to trust His sovereignty that even if we’re wake up and we’re tired, we’re exhausted, God’s still got that. I mean, God’s still going to give us the energy that we need to do the things that He wants us to do the next day. It is just a kind of bigger picture understanding of God’s grace in His work. 

Carrie: I think you do bring up a good point there because we get stressed out after we’ve been awake for a little while in the middle of the night or after we can’t go to sleep, then we’re stressed about before now we’re stressed about not sleeping. Oh, I’m only going to get five hours, I’m only going to get four hours. I’m going to just try to go back to sleep this last hour before the alarm clock goes off and you get real trippy about it. So that definitely happens to a lot of people.

Dr. Chuck: But I’ll tell you something and that’s the thing about surrender. Sometimes it means that we sacrifice our sleep to help other people. And I have to do that a lot. I have to get myself up out of bed and go and go to the hospital or answer a phone call or whatever. And just having that attitude that, hey Lord, whatever tomorrow brings Your grace is going to be sufficient. They helped me through that and just keeping that perspective has really helped me a lot. 

Carrie: Good. Well, we’ll definitely put links in the show notes to your website and your books and where people can find out more information. If they want to get the book. So at the end of every podcast, I ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time where you’ve received hope from God or another person.

Dr. Chuck: And thinking about this, Carrie, I just want to just leave you with a personal story. So, I’ve been practicing surgery for 26 years. I’m 54 years old and I’ve seen a lot of changes in medicine. It’s kind of funny, I’m becoming one of those old dinosaurs. So anyway, as health care has really changed in the past 10 years, I can’t say that I’ve always responded in the most positive ways.

A lot of bitterness, a lot of things, just a lot of stuff because there’s the way things should be and the way things are. And I think we all live with those kinds of attention. In our laws and once again, that’s something that keeps us up at not sometimes, but what’s interesting over the past several years, just realize it is that I’m going through a different season of life, that I had to make some decisions about my lifestyle.

And the biggest breakthrough I’ve had in the past couple of years is changing my lifestyle. I had to stop taking calls at the hostel. And as a surgeon, a lot of the ways you value yourself is how much work you do in the hospital. But it was a real step of faith for me is that I had to say, okay, good. I’m just not a 30-year-old guy anymore that can stay up three days and deal with stress and pressure. So as I began to say no to a lot of things, to stop being a doormat to the hospitals, and I know that sounds crazy, but as in my job, as a rural surgeon, I mean, they call me for everything. And so in taking a step back and letting go of some things, my sleep has gotten so much better.

Because like I said, it is multidimensional, as I’m getting fewer calls from the hospital in that I’m sleeping better. And then I’m able to focus on my mental health and my diet and I’m losing weight and I’m feeling better. I come home and not in my wife says, who are you married? So thinking about this, we live in this crazy nanosecond culture that’s constantly barraging us. And so getting back to the way that we were designed and created and getting along with God and cooperating with God. It’s not anything big. It’s not like a laser beam of holy spirit power helps me in, but just me and making some decisions to say, hey, this is just unhealthy.

And at this season of life, I just need, what’s funny is that God has provided for my family. I mean, I’m busier now and I’m not going into the hospital doing outpatient surgeries. And man, I just, I handle stress better. I have. People better and problems better, it’s just, my whole life has just changed.

I feel like I have a new lease on life and I’m a better doctor now than I was two years ago because I was so overwhelmed. And so what I want to encourage your audience today is to think about those things in their lives that they really need to change because so often sleep is just a symptom of a deeper problem in a deeper issue that’s going on in our lives. We didn’t even touch about medicine, but the medical problem, medical aspect of this,  but go get, go get checked. I mean, you may have a med, you may have a sleep disorder, but just keep in mind that sometimes we focus on the little, the symptoms and not on the deep root causes.

And so for me, it’s been a big, just a change of my lifestyle, which has a real spiritual component has made a world of difference and I’m sleeping better now than I ever have. And I wrote the book in that crazy, do as I say, not as I do, but I wrote the book and I didn’t realize that it was just something so simple in my life that I needed to change. And it was an aspect of luck. We’ve been talking about it as an aspect of surrender said, okay, God, you’ve got this, I’ve gotta let go of this. I can’t do this. Like I did 20 years and so I think for me, that has been the biggest thing. And I want to encourage people to just take time and reflect and think about those things that maybe that God doesn’t want them to do.

And we just pile so much on our plate. We have no margin and I think so many of our problems are self-induced that’s what I’m learning is that I can let go. They all say in a clean conscious makes us off the pill, as you make those decisions. And this is one of our attitudes, have a wise heart and make those decisions in your daily life, you set yourself up for better sleep.

Carrie: I think that that’s excellent, really evaluating what we have on our plate. And do we need to have everything on here and ask God, okay, I feel like I’m doing too much, which of these things can I let go of, or take off my plate. And that is a step of faith for us because we’re so used to doing so much often. I think that that’s great advice for people to evaluate. So I know that you told me before we hopped on here, that you have some videos on YouTube and that people can learn more about these practices. And so we’ll put some links in there in the show notes as well. Thanks for coming on and sharing with us your wisdom in between procedures.

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon. Until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

49. Will Less Stuff Equal Less Anxiety? with Becca Ehrlich

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 49. Will Less Stuff Equal Less Anxiety? with Becca Ehrlich

Today on the show,  I am joined by a Christian minimalist, pastor and author, Becca Ehrlich.  
Becca and I had an interesting conversation about how minimizing and simplifying your life can help with anxiety.

  • How Becca developed an interest in minimalism
  • Different aspects of minimalism 
  • How to be more intentional with time and energy
  • The intersection between Christian faith and minimalism
  • Minimalist approach to buying things
  • Small steps to take to minimize and simplify your life
  • How to tackle the tasks of evaluating possessions and minimizing stuff as a couple.

Links and Resources:

Becca Ehrlich
Book: Christian Minimalism: Simple Steps for Abundant Living


Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hopeforanxiety)

Let’s Talk About Hoarding!

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 49

Hope with Anxiety and OCD Episode 49. If you’re new to the show, I’m your hot Carrie Bock and today we are talking about the connection between having too much stuff or clutter that invades our lives and how that can cause us anxiety. We can’t find things anymore because there’s too much stuff in the way or we have piles around maybe that is crushing our creativity, things that are keeping us, from doing everything that God has called us to do.

Carrie: So here today with me or a discussion of Christian minimalism is Becca Ehrlich, who is a pastor and Christian minimalist. Thank you for joining me today. 

Becca: Thanks for having me. This is going to be fun. 

Carrie: So you once had what some would quote, call the American dream like I have a spacious house and I have lots of stuff in it. What kind of suffering do you feel like coming from at some point of having too much. 

Becca: I sort of bought into pun intended. The idea is that the reason we exist is to have more, more stuff, more time commitments, more things. We use our energy and time for more recognition, all of that like more status. And so we bought a 3000 square foot house and then and it was just me and my husband, and when you have that much space, you fill it with stuff cause it just looks weird to have empty space sometimes or so we’ve been told.

Carrie: Makes sense. 

Becca: So did what normal folks would do in consumer culture and filled it with a bunch of stuff. And then we moved, we moved into a smaller place just because that’s what was available at the time where we were moving and we did not have enough room for all this stuff. So we rented a huge storage unit outside of town and we filled it, they call it high and tight.

So it was literally like wall-to-wall stuff, ceiling to floor stuff and we couldn’t even get into this stuff if we wanted to in that storage unit. Then in our new place, it was like stuff was coming out of corners and out of closets and it was just stuffed to the gills with all the stuff. It was just not helpful for my life I couldn’t find anything. It was things that would fall on top of me. We’ve all been there. Right? You open the closet, it is just all down and it was just not good for my well-being. I just didn’t like it and so when I discovered minimalism, which by the way is not just about stuff, right? Our issue was stuff, but a lot of other people could be other things. It made sense to us and we were like, I think we need to start living a little bit more minimally. 

Carrie: How did you discover this and develop this interest in minimalism? 

Becca: I watched Netflix and my life changed. 

Carrie: Wow. 

Becca: No one expects their life to change when they’re watching Netflix. But that is what happened. I have a chronic illness, so I was having bad health, and usually, when I have a bad health day, I kinda chill on the couch and watch Netflix or whatever. And I was browsing through, I watch a lot, a lot of documentaries and it recommended the minimalism documentary, the original one by the minimalists.

I’d never heard of minimalism before. I had no idea what I was like, well, it’s only an hour and 15 minutes. So if it’s terrible, it’s only an hour and 15 minutes of my life that I wasted and it was the opposite. Like I watched it and said, oh my gosh, I think this is something I need to do and my husband will get home from running errands and I was like, you gotta watch this and he was like, I don’t know. He eventually sat down with me and we watched it together and he said, you know what, I think this is something we need to do. 

Carrie: That’s good. You definitely have to get your spouse on board if you’re married and are going to do this.

Becca: Yeah, I will say though, that like both of us have very different ways. We live out minimalism, which I think is also okay. So you don’t necessarily have to be completely on the same page and agree with all the things you just have to know. Be okay with each other, living out a very simple life.

Carrie: So you said that it’s not just about the stuff. Can you tell us about some of the other aspects of minimalism? 

Becca: Yeah. So basically minimalism is a focus on the aspects of life that matter most and intentionally removing everything. So at its core, it’s living intentionally and getting rid of anything, that’s keeping you from focusing on what’s most important. So that can be anything, right? Like for a lot of people, it’s stuff, because of how consumer culture works, we’ve accumulated too much stuff, but for other people, it could be time commitments. Like maybe you said yes to all the things out of obligation or because you felt like you had to, or were expected to, or whatever.

It could be chasing wealth and status and fame. That’s also something that’s glamorized in consumer culture. So paring down your life to be more intentional and focus on the most important things like relationships and self-care, passion, and things like that. 

Carrie: It’s interesting that you say that about not chasing fame and fortune. I just had a conversation with another entrepreneur this morning that we just get together and have business chat. She told me, everybody’s trying to chase this six to seven-figure thing. She’s like, I just don’t need all that. I just, I mean, I need a few thousand dollars to pay my bills and live okay. 

She’s like, what do I need to make six figures for us? That’s not what’s important to me and so that’s kind of exactly what you’re saying. Like finding what’s really important and really valuable and this individual also has a daughter. So obviously it’s important for her to have time to spend with her and to have self-care and have enough rest. So do you feel like having the chronic illness or receiving that diagnosis affected this? 

Becca: Oh yeah. I think for folks who don’t have an infinite amount of energy and health that’s everybody really, but especially folks who are living with illness, living more simply and more minimally, it just makes the most sense because you’re just more intentional about what you’re using your time and energy for.

So it was a no-brainer for me as someone with chronic illness, because I just have to be more intentional about how I’m using my time and energy throughout the day. Because if I don’t, by the end of the day, I’m just going to be dead meat and maybe the next day I’m going to be dead meat. 

Carrie: It’s interesting because my husband, I got married last year in October and my husband calls me a minimalist, which I find kind of funny because I wouldn’t necessarily put that label on myself, but he really sees how I interact with stuff specifically for buying.

Like, I may see something and say, oh, that’s, cool or something, but I really don’t have space for that extra gadget in my kitchen. I mean, where would I put that? I just don’t know that I would really use that a whole lot, or I just don’t need that. You think about how many people have invested in multiple kitchen appliances that don’t pull them out of the cabinet or don’t use them.

I watched the documentary as you did as well and it really made me. Actually, the minimalists have a podcast I’ve listened to some of their podcasts episodes as well. And I appreciate some of their values that they repeat a lot to like using things, not people, the memories are not in the stuff like they talk about, not having to hold on to every family heirloom that you have because of your memory with your relative. 

So even though I don’t think that they say anything specifically about their faith, I do believe that some of those values can be translated over and aligned, with Christian values. And I imagine that you, you found that same thing and, and that was how you started, like writing on your blog.

Becca: Yeah at the time. So when I discovered minimalism, it was the end of 2017. So there, there really wasn’t like. I researched it afterward because I was like, oh, they talk the minimums, talk a lot about meaning and so the implication being, you’ll be able to find more meaning in your life when you’re living more simply and focusing on what’s most.

Which makes sense and I was like, oh, that’s really interesting because usually meaning is something that you find through religious tradition. And for me as a Christian, I found that a lot of what they were talking about aligns very well with Jesus’s teachings and what’s in scripture. And so I was like, I want to read more in-depth about this and at the time there really wasn’t anything out there. There were a couple of articles or blog posts or maybe a YouTube video here and there, but there was nothing in Greece and that’s so that’s why I ended up writing about it. Because I was like, okay, well, I can’t be the only one that’s interested in this intersection between the Christian faith and minimalism and I wasn’t, which is great, but it’s really interesting because like when you write, you really discover things about yourself while you’re writing, it’s like, that’s why people journal and things like that.

So the blog has really helped me discover things about why I accumulated stuff in the first place and why I say yes to things when I really shouldn’t and really helped me get at the core reasons why I do things that are not serving me well And that’s helped me live more minimally.

Carrie: Talk with us a little bit about that putting the pause button on getting new things, because everyone can go through their stuff or their closet and be like, yeah, I don’t need this. I’m getting rid of it, going to give it away, whatnot put it in the garage sale. But then next thing you know, six months later, they’re back in the same place with too much stuff.

So I’m curious, like what that process was like for you, like in terms of your evaluation of buying things or having to approach things differently. 

Becca: Yeah, one of the big things for me, and this is what I always tell people is that you have to find your why, your reason for, to live more simply because if you don’t do that and it’s just so like the decluttering movement. For example, it’s super trendy right now, basically, it’s just about getting rid of stuff which in itself is not bad. But like as you said, it’s not going to last, if you don’t get at the core reason why you want to simplify in the first place, because you’re just going to accumulate back the things that you got rid of eventually. So finding your personal why. 

Like, for me, it was spending more time with friends and family. It could be other things for other people. Maybe you want to go back to school or whatever. There’s a wide range of wise. You want to do this but find your why, and that will also help keep you motivated because it’s not super glamorous to minimize. It sounds cool and you get halfway through and you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m going to die.

Carrie: A lot of work and I appreciate the transparency there. That’s good.

Becca: Yeah. Like everybody gets a wall at some point because it just works and it’s going a lot of times, it’s going counter-culturally and it’s going against what, how you lived previously. So it’s not only physical work, but it’s also mental, emotional, spiritual work because you’re literally shifting your worldview and your lifestyle.

So knowing why you’re doing it in the first place is going to help you get motivated to continue that process and then live it out, continue living it out. Because that’s the thing like decluttering is a one and done process. Like you get rid of stuff and you’re like, you’re done, but like you’re not done right.

It’s a constant journey that’s why I always call it the Christian minimalism journey because you’re constantly figuring out what adds value to your life and what matters most and how you can focus on that. Because a bachelor bachelorette is going to live out the minimalist lifestyle differently than someone who’s married and has three kids like that and that’s normal. So you have to kind of shift depending on your context. 

Carrie: I think that’s great. Hard for people with children who may receive a lot of gifts from grandparents. He has an uncle and next thing, birthday parties, Christmas, next thing they know, there’s just piles of stuff everywhere and kids typically do not want to get on the minimalism board.

So it’s like, if you can ward some of that off ahead of time, it’s probably helpful in encouraging relatives to buy experiences instead of things. Different opportunities for that time to spend time together.

Becca: Definitely and the earlier you can start the better, but it’s never too late with kids. Joshua Becker actually has a great book called clutter-free with kids kind of outlines a lot of this or younger to older kids, which I think is great. So I think there are ways that younger children and teenagers do actually want a more simple lifestyle. But you just are so used to the consumer culture around them, that it may be a little bit of a shift for them, just like it is for us. Right but I think it’s definitely something that can be incorporated with kids. 

Carrie: For you, what does being a minimalist look like on a practical day-to-day level?  

Becca: Yeah, an intentional living which sounds kind of cliche, but I’m literally aware of how I’m making decisions around consumption and spending and money habits and ways. I use my time and energy and resources. Like I’m just very much aware of how I do that and how I make decisions around that. How I make those decisions has completely shifted since becoming a minimalist. It’s not that I don’t spend money and I don’t own things. I think some people hear you’re minimalist and it’s like, they picture this like room with one chair and that’s it, you know?

Carrie: Right. No pictures on the wall. 

Becca: Right? Like obviously I own stuff. I have pictures on the wall. I’m currently packing to move. So I own things, but I own less things because I’m much more intentional with what I bring into my life and that includes all things. That includes things that include people that include time commitments. Media usage, I’m just very intentional with how I use all of that. And so for me, it’s a good productive day if I’ve been intentional and I made some time for rest and renewal as well. 

Carrie: That’s good. Did you use to have a lot busier schedule and just kind of say yes to all the opportunities and pile them on?

Becca: Yeah, 100%. Like I was like, I was one of those I’ll rest when I’m dead type people and it was not good for me. I mean, I felt awful all the time. I was exhausted. I felt burnt out. I just wanted to disappear on a desert island and that’s not normal. We shouldn’t feel like that. 

Carrie: Right, so much goodness there in terms of rest and Jesus getting away to reflect, spend time with God and really, if you look at the life of Jesus, He was very intentional about how He spent His time, who He spent His time with. I always find it interesting that in one of the early chapters of Mark, where people were coming to be healed and they were trying to get to Jesus and Jesus, looked up and left and we look at that and we’re like, that doesn’t seem right.

But it was just, He couldn’t do everything in his humanity. Like He couldn’t meet with every single person, he would have been there for years and years just doing that. He could have set up a little, but, and just had people come to Him. But that wasn’t the mission. So you had to get out and be on the move and I look at that and I think, a lot of times we try to help everybody with everything and we think that that’s like a Christian thing. 

Oh, well, I’ve got to do all these good things for other people. But the reality is we need to be intentional to like our calling and what God has asked us to do globally as Christians, but also specifically. And if we miss that, because we’re looking at every single opportunity to help people, then we’re missing the boat there.

Becca: I think especially like churchgoing folks tend to be like over overextended. I don’t know why that’s a thing in Christian culture, but it totally is and that’s not even what Jesus said when God created the world. God gave us the Sabbath as a gift to re-ask and connect with God and our loved ones. And like, so we’re not even created to keep going 24/7 all the time. Like we’re not made to do that and so if we do that, we’re not, it’s not going to go well for us. 

I learned that the hard way and especially with my chronic illness, that is not even doable for me. So making sure that there’s built-in time for rest and renewal, even when it’s a busy time, obviously we go through spurts where it’s busier than others. And so making sure that you build in that time, so you’re not getting burnt out.

Carrie: Sure. So we talked a little bit about some small steps that people can take to get started and you talked about I think before getting rid of stuff, like finding your why, why do you want to live more simply or more minimalistic. Looking at that, maybe what domains need to change? Is it about the stuff? Is it about how I’m spending my time? Am I overextended financially? And then what are maybe some other small steps that you feel like people can take if they’re just really beginning this journey? 

Becca: Yeah. I always encourage people to start small. I think it can be very overwhelming. Like if the problem is stuff and you’re looking at a whole house filled with stuff, obviously, you’re never going to get started if you’re like, oh my gosh, I have a whole house full of stuff. I can get this big paralysis by looking at all the things you need to do. So for us, it was stuff for us. We started literally 10 to 15 minutes a day and it was easy and it was quick and you could see results really quickly and it helped motivate us to continue more because you can see tangible results.

And then when we had more time on our hands, like a Saturday, we like tackled that storage unit. I talked about it before it took many Saturdays, but finding ways to set aside time to do it and even if it’s just 5, 10 minutes a day, just start. Like, if it’s your social media usage, for example, I’ve had some people start there and being like, okay, I’m going to let myself scroll through social media for a half-hour tonight, and then I’m done.

And just being more intentional with that, because we’ve all been there over scrolling through, and it’s been like an hour and you’re like, where did that hour ago? Then you’ve lost an hour. You’re never getting that hour back and it’s probably not the best use of time. It might be if you found some cool stuff, but it’s still an hour out of your life. Just find ways to be intentional and start small. 

Carrie: Yes, that’s good. So we were talking about when I intro the episode that oftentimes having a lot of stuff can lead to anxiety. Have you seen in terms of other people that you’ve interacted with or yourself personally, like a reduction in anxiety from reducing the amount of stuff or living more intentionally?

Becca: Oh, definitely. Yeah. I have a lot of folks who either have anxiety disorders that are diagnosed or feel anxious regularly. And once they cleared their space, whether that be physical, mental, emotional, social, they find that they have breathing space basically and the anxiety has lessened a little bit. Obviously, if you’re diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, it takes a lot more than that, but it can at least help the process of finding ways to handle that anxiety. 

I know that for me, I feel a lot less anxious when I don’t have as much stuff or clutter in my brain or around me. They’ve done some studies around this to show that when there are less clutter people feel less anxious, less stressed. And so finding ways to make that space for yourself is really important. 

Carrie: I find that true in my office, now I have a home office. And if it’s got a lot of paperwork stacked up or things that I’ve put to the side and haven’t dealt with, I just noticed that I feel more cramped in there, less free. I find myself trying to work in other areas of the house instead of being in the office, which is where I need to be in. So I can definitely attest to that. That’s true for me. And obviously, I think what we’re talking about here as well. We’re not necessarily diving into hoarding or anything of that nature, which is something that’s more extreme.

We’re just talking about the normal day-to-day American westernized way of living, unfortunately, that we often so easily, because it’s all around us in our culture. We just kind of fall into it and we don’t even realize how it’s affecting us until we get to a certain point 

Becca: And actually the typical American house on average has 300,000 things.

Carrie: Wow. Isn’t that a lot of things?

Becca: It’s insane. 

Carrie: Wow. I did not know that. I know for me, I’ve gone through different seasons and periods of my life where I had foster children and I had this kid stuff around. And then you wouldn’t know what ages of children you’re going to get. So I had these different toys and clothes in the attic. Then I went through a divorce and then I got remarried. My husband moved in. It’s interesting. Now we’re in kind of a similar season where we’re trying to decide what’s most important and I’m trying to be sensitive to his stuff and not just say like, ah, we don’t really need that.

So I’m curious for you, maybe you could talk a little bit about relationally in terms of working with this with your husband. Like how have you two been able to come together to achieve the common goal? Did you have certain criteria for things as you were looking through them? 

Becca: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I always tell people, it’s funny, you bring that up because I always tell people do not minimize another person you’re living with stuff because it doesn’t end well, never ends well, let them deal with their own stuff.

So I always encourage people and this is something that we did is we dealt with our own stuff because obviously, we were dealing with stuff first and our own time commitments. Obviously, time commitments when we have them together. We have to have those conversations. If it’s stuff that we both use, obviously we talked through it and see if it adds value to our lives and if we want to keep it in our lives. 

But keeping communication open is really key and that’s for anyone you’re living with. Right? So like it could be any family member. It could be a roommate, especially if I’ve had friends who started the minimalist lifestyle and live with. And their roommates are not minimalist, right. Finding ways like, okay, well, my own space is going to be my own space, but then also like trying to find ways to live in this way in communal spaces where other folks may not be living the same lifestyle. So just finding ways to do that and what we’ve actually seen is that a lot of times when people start living more minimally, other people see the benefits and then they start doing it after the fact.

So even if the folks you’re living with aren’t on board right away, they may be doing it later. So just do what you’re doing and they may see for themselves that it’s worth it. 

Carrie: That’s good. We had a yard sale recently from just combining two households of two adults. And obviously, we couldn’t keep everything and we redecorated the house. I got let go of my office and just have my home office. So that was definitely a big downside and it was interesting to see my husband go through this process. Because I think he struggles a little bit more maybe than I do with getting rid of things. And he said, I really like such and such picture, but it just doesn’t fit with the decor of our house anymore.

Or I really enjoyed that and I think maybe somebody else will enjoy that as well. So there are, there’s something about being able to let things go and bless other people maybe that can use it more than you can. 

Becca: Yeah, that was a big thing for us. So we have a son who died and we moved a couple of times with all the baby stuff because we knew we were planning on adopting at some point probably. But we didn’t know when and so we were just holding on to all this. And we realized after a few years of that when it was sitting in a storage unit that I talked about like there are families that could use this stuff right now, and we’re just collecting dust over here. 

And so we don’t eat it at all and know full well that when we do adopt and we’ve started the adoption process now that we would most likely have to get it again. But we knew that was going to be a few years down the road and that we could save up to do that. So we made sure that helped us let go of it because we knew that there were families that would be using it right now and getting used out of it, as opposed to us holding onto it for years and years and years for when we’re going to use it again.

Carrie: Yes. That was something that I had to help evaluate for myself after, the foster kids left and everything. And I said, well, I have to have my space according to the life I’m living right now, not the future life I hope to have. And I don’t want my house to be full of stuff that’s just representative of the past life that I’ve lived. It has to have this balance of just being present and being in the moment. And what does this fit in with the life I’m living right now was a question that I asked myself a lot and it helped me determine which stuff needed to stay and which you could go. 

Becca: That’s fantastic that you did that naturally because most of the time we hold on to it either because it made sense in the past or because we think it might make sense in the future. And like in reality, most of those in future things don’t actually happen in the past. It doesn’t, it’s not serving us now. So being like, okay, is this serving me now? Is this adding value to my life right now? And if it’s not, if it’s asked for the future, it’s okay to get rid of it.

Carrie: Right. I might need this one-day mindset. 

Becca: Yeah. And like that just in case thing, like never ends up happening like 99% of the time. Right. 

Carrie: Right. So as we’re getting towards the end of the podcast, I like to ask every guest to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.

Becca: Yeah. So, I went on a three-week retreat to Costa Rica, which was not a Christian retreat. It was an alternative wellness retreat, which was a whole new experience for me. I had not really dealt with the grief around not really being able to have biological children. So my chronic illness, I have mast cell activation syndrome. It’s genetics. So it’s past, it’s 50 50 shot. that’ll get passed on if I were to have a biologic and try to have another biological child again, and it’s more severe every time it’s passed on. 

So I could in all consciousness, like give birth to a child that would be disabled. So I don’t feel comfortable doing that personally. So we had felt called my husband and I to adopt at some point. Anyway, it’s just, we’re just adopting up. But I didn’t feel, I wasn’t ready to let go of the fact that I wasn’t going to have biological children, and in Christian circles, there’s a lot of weird baggage around, women and childbirth and weird stuff around that had to work through. 

And I just kind of stuffed it down and not dealt with it. And so when this opportunity arose to go on this retreat, I said, okay and I did it. And I came out of it and I was ready to adopt, like I had worked through all that stuff, which was really cool.

You can actually watch this retreat and my experience, it was filmed. It’s called Last Resort. It was filmed. It was originally aired on PBS network, so you can watch it on demand there, but now it’s also streaming on HBO max. If anyone is interested in watching that, but that gave me so much more hope because I just wasn’t ready to take the next step to adopt.

And now, we already started the process. We’re really excited. We did all the educational classes and we just really excited to see what child God wants us to parent. 

Carrie: That’s great. We have to be able to allow God to fully close one door so that we can be ready to receive and open that next door. I’m glad that you were able to just receive from God on that and be able to fully process through those emotions. I’m sure we’re pretty. 

Becca: Yeah. And like it was interesting for me because I think there’s this mentality sometimes in Christian circles that like something needs to be Christian in order for God to work through it. And in reality, like God can work through, like God’s God. And so like, I, even though the retreat I went to wasn’t necessarily Christian and like it had indigenous cultural practices and it like, God worked through that so that I could then be ready to adopt. So I think finding ways to listen for God in places that you wouldn’t necessarily expect.

Carrie: Yeah. Yes. That’s a good point to bring up. I’m glad that you talked about that because God works in all kinds of different ways through different people and even people that don’t know him. Well, thank you for giving us the gift of your time today and I’ve really enjoyed having this conversation and I know it’s going to be a positive impact on so many of our listeners. 

Becca: Great. Well, thanks so much for having me and I hope everyone is able to live a little bit more simply.

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production By The Well Counseling in Tennessee and our original music is by Brandon. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

31. Using the Gospel to Overcome Negative Self-talk with John Stange

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 31. Using the Gospel to Overcome Negative Self-talk with John Stange

I had the privilege of interviewing John Stange, a lead pastor, professor, coach, counselor, certified speaker and author. John has written several books and his recent one is called “Dwell On These Things.”

Pastor John Stange shares with us his struggles with anxiety and his great wisdom and insight on overcoming negative self-talk through looking at God’s perspective toward us. We also talked about dealing with perfectionism as I am also a recovering perfectionist. 

  • John Stange’s personal journey through anxiety, having sleepless nights, negative self-talk and excessive worries about “what if’s.”
  • Analyzing the root of his anxiety and preaching the truth of the gospel to his own heart
  • Factors that make people who are serving the ministry quit their role after a short period of time
  • “Why walk a defeated life when Christ already secured victory over our sins?”
  • Questions to ask yourself if you really want to understand Bible scriptures
  • Helpful concepts about seeing yourself through God’s eyes based on John Stange’s book, “Dwell On These Things”

Links and Resources:

John StangeDesire JesusDwell On These Things 

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Transcript of Episode 31

Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 31.  Today’s episode is with John Stange who is a pastor and author. He’s recently written a book called Dwell On These Things based on Philippians 4:8. John has some great wisdom and insight into overcoming negative self-talk and seeing ourselves the way that God sees us.

So let’s dive right in. 

Carrie: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. 

Pastor John: Well, happy to be here, glad to be with you.

Carrie: Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Pastor John: My name is John Stange. I have been in full-time pastoral ministry for 23 years and my wife and I have four children. Two are in college, two are in high school. And in the midst of my ministry, serving as a pastor I’ve also gotten quite involved in podcasting and writing and have really been pursuing both of those as avenues where I really have a great opportunity to hopefully encourage people in their faith and hopefully help in a variety of ways. But that’s where I’ve been spending a lot of my time in addition to my service to the church and my ministry, just to my family. 

Carrie: One thing that I’ve found really interesting about you in my research is that while you do have a degree in the Bible, you also have a master’s degree in psychology. How did that process develop? 

Pastor John: Well, one of the things that I noticed when I became a pastor is that a lot of your preparation to become a pastor trains you to teach and preach the Bible and teach and preach theology. And that’s very helpful, but there are two other aspects to your role as a pastor that you really need to figure out a way to invest in one is leadership. So I spent a lot of time just studying leaders and going to leadership training and reading books on leadership and really invested in that. But then the other thing that is typically asked of you is that you be involved in a lot of counseling. And so when I was deciding what to do for a master’s, I decided to pursue counseling and psychology because so much of my task as a pastor involves counseling.

And it probably wouldn’t surprise you to discover that over the course of this past year in particular, I had more counseling than at any other time in my ministry. To the point where I actually had somebody tally up in one given week how much time I was spending on counseling when things were at their worst. And they said a full 29 hours of my week is being spent just counseling. In addition to all the other things that you have to do. So I actually had to figure out a way to balance that a little bit better because it was becoming quite excessive, but that is definitely a role that pastors are asked to actually step in and help out with. And so I wanted to make sure I did it well. And when I got my master’s, I thought, you know what? I’m going to pursue counseling, psychology. Learn these tasks and learn these skills so that I could serve our church even better, hopefully.

Carrie: I think that’s an important point because you can be a really great teacher and lack people skills and being a pastor, you have to find that balance between being able to communicate the word of God and also being able to relate and lead people, like you just talked about.

Pastor John: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And I’ve seen that a lot where people are really skilled in a particular task, or they have a lot of knowledge in a particular area, but they really struggle to take that from their brain to another life. And because that relational piece seems to be missing, so yeah, I agree.

Carrie: I’ve also interviewed a few people on the show who started out as pastors and ended up becoming therapists. And those stories are really interesting as well as kind of like an outflow of just the ministry that they were doing. 

Pastor John: Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. That’s great. 

Carrie: We’re talking about anxiety today and incorporating that with spirituality, obviously. And I’m curious about your particular struggles with anxiety. 

Pastor John: Yeah, it’s interesting because I don’t know that at one season of my life, I would have really thought of myself as being particularly anxious. In some respects, I tend to think I’m an easygoing person. And then as life went on and I took on more responsibilities and as I was trying to lead my household well and try to lead our church well, I started to notice seasons where I would really struggle to sleep. 

I’m not a great sleeper to begin with. So I’m just going to confess that I think there’s something biological there that factors into that, but it was even worse than normal. And I can remember certain times where I would just find myself looking out the window of my bedroom, just looking outside, wondering in my mind why can’t I sleep.

And then as I try to lay my head down on the pillow, I would be thinking about all these what-if scenarios. What if this happens with your family or what if this happens with the church or what if this happens with your finances, all sorts of things. And I realized that I was becoming a rather anxious person.

I don’t know that I always demonstrated that to other people, but within my own mind. In fact, I actually think I tried to make a pretty strong effort to not demonstrate that to other people just to kind of portray that everything was fine. But in my own mind, I have to admit to you I really have gone through seasons where I felt particularly anxious and kind of went on a journey to try and figure out what’s at the root of this and what can I do that would be actually be helpful so that this doesn’t become such a dominant feature in my life.

If I’m going to be doing the things that I think God’s called me to do, I can’t be paralyzed by anxiety constantly. And I can’t give this full sway over myself. So I need to call it out into the light and I need to do something that’s going to actually help me overcome it.

Carrie: What was that process like for you? 

Pastor John: I had to kind of analyze what was at the root of it at first. And what I noticed about myself is that I was trying to control too many things, and I was trying to do too many things without help. And I don’t know if that was a pride issue. I think that’s part of it. I, you know, I think certainly it was a pride issue in some respects, but I also think it comes from this thought of not wanting to burden other people with your problems.

And then also just this thought that sometimes you get in your mind when you’re trying to lead, this is your responsibility. So you just think, look, this is my job. I have to handle this. I can’t give this to somebody else. I just have to do it. Right. It’s just my role. And so the first thing I needed to do was just figure out what was at the root of this.

And again, it was just control issues and a desire not to burden other people and just, you know, the burdens that come from leadership. But the solution for me was multifaceted. And a lot of these things I think come back to preaching the gospel to your heart, where sometimes if you’re trying to do too much, it’s almost like you’re trying to take Christ’s job and do it instead of relying on him to be the strength that we need. And so it was almost like a works-based false gospel that I was starting to preach to my heart that can be very unhealthy. And when I phrased it that way in my mind, my theological triggers went off and said, “Wait a second. You can’t preach something false to your own heart. You have to stop this.” And so I thought, all right, well, what does it look like to actually apply the truth of the gospel to my own heart? What does it look like to be content in Christ and to trust him to do the things that I can’t do and to rest in the fact that he is perfect? I am not, and I’m fine with that.

And so this was part of the journey that I went on, but when I started analyzing that seeing what was at the root and then preaching the truth of the gospel to my heart, that really made a huge difference. 

Carrie: I can really relate to that because I started this podcast and I was doing entirely too much. And I ended up hiring an assistant this year and it was super scary in the beginning.

Just the sense of like, “Okay. I’m like, yes, it’s a great thing that I have help, but I’m also like having to let go of control of things that I’ve been doing and what’s going to happen if I start letting go of that control and somebody else is gonna take over, and I think we do that with God so much in our own lives. We try to take control over things that we have no control over, even things like our own health like I’m up at night worrying about all of these things that could be happening to me are going on. And instead of saying, okay, I don’t have control over this. God loves me. He cares about me. He’s for me.

And I think that’s what you’re talking about in terms of having a theology of how God sees us. And really speaking that into ourselves is so important. 

Pastor John: Yeah, exactly. I agree. A hundred percent. 

Carrie: So, talk to us about negative self-talk because I think a lot of people really struggle with that. And what have you found to be helpful in your life?

Pastor John: There’s a variety of things that I have found helpful. And one of the things that I’ve noticed that is helpful for me is to know that I’m not the only person that wrestles with this. So when you serve in a public role, right now you’re putting yourself out there publicly doing a podcast, right?

So you’re just basically, you’re subjecting yourself to the opinions of others. And that could be a challenging task to do no matter what role you do it in. So you can imagine when I became a pastor I was subjecting myself to the opinions of many, many people and my opinion being sometimes the harshest and frequently, I would find myself preparing a message.

So I’ll use a sermon as an example. I’d prepare a message. I’d have it all straight in my head. I’d get up and I’d preach it. And then afterwards I’d have this thought that it didn’t go as well as I thought, or maybe the feedback I got on it wasn’t exactly what I was anticipating. And I would find myself spending the rest of Sunday beating myself up over perceived weaknesses in my presentation or times when I tripped over my words or ways that I could have said something better or something that I forgot to share that I meant to share or someone’s reaction that I misinterpreted or whatever it may be. And I just have all these thoughts going through my mind. Just the imperfections of what I had just shared and all this negative self-talk about, oh, why can’t you be as good of a speaker as this individual or that individual. And that’s a very unhealthy thing to start drilling into your mind. And I would suspect that’s probably one of the contributors to a lot of people who serve in public ministry roles quitting after a short period of time because they just spent a lot of time in self-accusation instead of refreshing their heart with the truth of the gospel and preaching the same message to their own heart that they just preached to their congregation. And eventually, I needed to get to the spot where I started to see the opportunities that I was being given to speak or to lead as opportunities to help people, not opportunities to look good while you’re helping people. And what I mean by that is this: Yeah it was a big change in my mind. I thought I used to wrestle with after I would preach a sermon, or lead a meeting, or whatever it may be. “How did you look doing that? Did you do okay?” And it was basically “how did you look doing it?” And then somewhere along the way, the Lord helped me to flip that in my mind to say, “did you help somebody?” And judge what I had just done by whether or not I was seeking to glorify God and help people. And when that became the measuring stick that really helped me with probably the major area of negative self-talk that I was wrestling with. Just trying to understand what it looks like to glorify God and help people Instead of worrying about how I looked while I was trying to do it.

Carrie: I think that’s been probably one of the greatest gifts that this podcast has ever given to me, just like, you know, through the Lord’s work, it’s showing me that it doesn’t have to be perfect to help people and I consider myself a recovering perfectionist. So I know that I have to go back and listen to these episodes and we joked. Before I hit record, there was a squeaky chair in one of them and it drove me crazy like I can hear that chair. And probably other people are listening to this in their car or they’re in the bathroom getting ready in the morning and they don’t care. You know, they’re probably not even noticing that. And somebody is going to be really blessed by that episode. But here I am and all I’m focused on is that annoying chair in the background.

Pastor John: Right. Instead of thinking of all the ways that you’re producing helpful content, you’re just hearing that chair that needs a little grease or a little oil.

Carrie: Right. So now I’m like, you know what? It goes out. There’s some people that like it and it’s helping some people and that’s all it really matters and it doesn’t have to be perfect in order to benefit other people. So that has been an unexpected gift, I guess, of going through this process.

You actually were really gracious enough to send me a copy of your book, “Dwell on these things” and I am really enjoying it. So I appreciate you for writing it, and you encourage readers to dwell on 31 different truths in God’s word. It’s written a little bit like a devotional, right? To kind of read one each day.

Pastor John: Yeah, it could be used that way for sure. Yeah. I wanted it to be useful in that way. If someone wanted to use the chapters in that kind of fashion, they definitely could. 

Carrie: So would you be willing to share a few of these with us and how they can transform our thinking and self-talk. 

Pastor John: Sure. There’s a variety of things that are mentioned in the book that kind of point us to things that the Lord is trying to communicate to us that sometimes we forget to communicate to ourselves, or we forget to repeat to ourselves after he’s communicated them. And so when you look through the book, you’ll see on day one, we talk about the fact that you are loved more deeply than you realize, and we start off the book with that concept because we want that to be a baseline for what we’re thinking about as we start to adopt God’s perspective toward us as our perspective toward us, as well as we work through the book, we talk about the blessing of walking by faith rather than by sight to experience greater joy.

I think a lot of times we think that there are all sorts of things we need to see ahead of time or know ahead of time to be able to actually experience contentment in life. But scripture shows us that we can walk by faith. We don’t have to walk by sight If we’re going to experience the greater joy that the Lord wants us to have.

I think something else that’s in the book that is most certainly a helpful concept for any of us. If we’re feeling anxious or just worried about a variety of things is the fact that scripture encourages us to have hearts that are ruled by the peace of Christ. And so when we get into the third section of the book that we talk about letting your heart be ruled by the peace of Christ.  And I can tell you just from experience, there are all sorts of things that I have tried to soothe my heart within this world or all sorts of things that I have told myself, this will bring you peace if you just acquire this or achieve this or obtain this or whatever it may be. And there’s nothing this world offers me that has ever produced lasting peace in my mind or in my life.

And when you look at what scripture teaches us, scripture teaches us that we can let our hearts be ruled by the peace of Christ. And when his peace is ruling in our heart, we’re actually being ruled or led by something that’s everlasting, not something that’s temporary, not something that’s just here for a moment and then goes away.

Some of the chapters in the book talk about ways in which we can live out the things that the Lord has taught to us. And so there’s a chapter where we talk a lot about giving grace to those around you. And that can be a very helpful thing for us internally as well, because we start to realize that we don’t have to demand perfection from ourselves. And we don’t have to demand perfection from others. And as recipients of the grace of God, we can demonstrate the grace of God to other people. And I love what scripture tells us in the book of acts, where it reminds us that Christ taught that it’s better to give than it is to receive.

And in a moment like that, where you’re giving grace to somebody else. I think we even have the opportunity to see how that plays out where just giving grace to somebody that ends up being a blessing in our own life and in our own heart. So those are some of the concepts. There’s 31 different concepts that we focus on in the book, but those are just a few of them-just a sample of some of the things that are in the book that I truly hope will be helpful to others. If they’re trying to develop a perspective of what does it look like to actually talk to yourself like God talks to you and repeat a message to your heart that actually lines up with the truth of his gospel. 

Carrie: That’s good. I know that in my counseling practice specifically, I work with a lot of people who have OCD sometimes like there’s a form of OCD called scrupulosity. And we’ve talked about it on the podcast before. It’s where you have all of these intrusive thoughts about God. You know, maybe God is angry at me. Maybe I’ve sinned. Maybe I’m going to hell, even though I know that I’m saved, those types of things people tend to ruminate on. And a lot of times people I work with are somewhat spiritually confused because they’ve sought out teachings to try to soothe some of this from a variety of different sources. You know, this person says you can lose your salvation. This person says you can’t lose your salvation. How do I know who God really is? And I know a lot of times people say, “okay, well in order to know God read the Bible that’s his word that’s his love letter to you.” How do we form this healthy theology of an understanding of who God is if there are so many different teachings that are saying are based on scripture. 

Pastor John: Yeah, that could be a tough thing for a new Christian, in particular, to try to discern. Thankfully we have the internal witness of the holy spirit and he points us in the direction of truth. So I believe that any suggestion I give needs to come under the fact that the holy spirit will actively point us in the direction of truth. I do believe he does that. So I would encourage anyone that’s really wrestling with that to just begin with prayer and trust the holy spirit to lead you in the direction of truth. And then as we’re looking at scripture, I think it’s also helpful to know that when you’re reading through the Bible if you really want to understand the Bible, you need to ask the question, what does this section have to do with Jesus? Or maybe I could say it this way: how is this portion of scripture trying to point me to Christ?

So if I’m in the book of Genesis, I need to be asking that question. If I’m in the Psalms, I need to be asking that question, but I mean the gospels or the letters of Paul or the general letters or the book of revelation, the whole thing is trying to point our minds to Christ. And specifically, when you look throughout scripture, you see the message of redemption as the Lord is trying to redeem lost humanity. And he’s trying to redeem fallen creation, right? Like it’s all, there’s this message of redemption all throughout. And so that points us to the gospel and the gospel is if you want to summarize the gospel, you could summarize it this way. It’s the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ.

And so in Christ lived the perfect life that we could never live. He lived that on our behalf. He walked a mile in our shoes. He’s our merciful sympathetic high priest. He knows all details of all things, and he actually walked it and lived it. And he did it perfectly without sin. And then in his death, he paid for our sin.

He took our sin upon himself so that ultimately we could be justified so that we could be declared righteous because he who knew no sin became sin for us. And then in his resurrection, he defeated the power of sin, the power of Satan. And the power of death. And he shares that victory with all of us who believe in him with anyone who trusts in him.

So the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ, I think it all comes back to that. So now, you know, let’s think about some issues that sometimes we deal with and let’s plug it into that metric. If I’m dealing with, and we were just joking a few moments ago about perfectionism and the desire to kind of get everything right.

You know, whether the chair’s squeaking or whether all the words we say are exactly right, or whatever it may be. We deal with perfectionism. Well, let’s plug that into the gospel. Well, scripture tells us that we are not perfect. But Jesus is, and he came to live the perfect life for us because we couldn’t do it, which tells me I need to stop pressuring myself to be perfect because I’m not perfect.

And if I’m pressuring myself to be perfect, I’m preaching a false gospel to my heart because Christ came to this earth and was perfect for me because in my own strength I couldn’t be perfect. And so, you know, so that’s one element of how I think preaching the gospel to our hearts. Actually helps and it helps point us in the right direction. But then when you get to issues like Christ’s death, you know, I think sometimes we think that we have to be some sort of sacrificial martyr who can’t ask for help or can’t ask for assistance that we need to somehow, you know, die for our own sin or suffer for our own center, whatever it may be. And yet Jesus came to this earth to die in our place because we couldn’t die for our own sin ultimately, and have any sort of redemptive aspect come out of that.

And so Jesus who is perfect died in our place. And then scripture tells us that he rose from the grave. He defeated sin, Satan, and death. And so that victory gets shared with me because I trust in him. He’s already secured that victory. So what sense does it make for me to walk a defeated life or to just spend all this time telling myself how I’m defeated in this area or this area, or this area? Christ already secured victory over my sin Christ secured victory over my faulty thing.

He secured victory over death. I don’t even need to live in the fear of death because he’s already secured victory over it. He defeated death and even the deception of Satan or the accusation of Satan scripture tells us Satan loves to accuse God’s people. And I think sometimes we repeat Satan’s accusations in our own minds, almost like we’re trying to do his job for him. And that comes right back to the resurrection as well because Christ secured victory over sin, Satan, and death. And so Satan is defeated. So I don’t need to act like Satan is victorious. He’s been defeated. And so for me, it comes right back to preaching the gospel to my heart and understanding that the message of the gospel is woven all throughout scripture.

And if someone teaches something that does not line up with the truth of the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ, then that gives me a good metric to know how I can actually filter that out and not welcome that into my thinking. 

Carrie: That was a lot. That was good though. It was a lot. I was really trying to filter in thinking through some of the things that we just talked about like is God mad at me? Well, you know, God loves you. God loves you. He sent his son to die for you. There’s no greater love than that. Nobody else is going to be out here giving their life for you. 

Pastor John: Right. When you look theologically, what scripture says, it says, you know, prior to coming to faith in Christ, we were under the wrath of God, right?

We were like, yes, you were under the wrath of God. It speaks of that in the book of Ephesians. Okay. But then Christ came to this earth and took the wrath of the father upon himself so that we could become objects of mercy. Instead of objects of wrath. And so scripture actually says, you’re an object of mercy now. So if scripture is telling me I’m an object of mercy and that Christ already took the wrath of the father upon himself, then why don’t I just believe what it says instead of just trying to make it up. You know, it’s like, we’re trying to make up the opposite of what scripture says because we want to make ourselves feel bad sometimes.

And it’s like, let’s not torture yourself. You know, just believe what it says and believe what he is. 

Carrie: Or sometimes we try to take over maybe the role of the holy spirit and almost like over-convict ourselves. Sometimes people can air on one side or the other, right. Then they’re never open to correction or conviction. But then on the other side, it’s like, let me pick apart and confess every single thing I’ve done. Even the things that I know I’m already forgiven for. I keep bringing up the past sins over and over and over again. And we’re just really torturing ourselves at that point. 

Pastor John: Yeah. You’re absolutely right.

Yeah. We’re prone to extremes. 

Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So tell us where people can find “Dwell on these things”.

Pastor John: “Dwell on these things” can be found literally anywhere. So you’ll be able to find it on Amazon. You’ll be able to find it at Barnes and noble. You’ll be able to find it pretty much any store you go to and which I’m really excited about the wide release that the book is receiving. But if you’d also like to find out some more information about it, or if people would like to read the first three chapters for free and just kind of see if it’s for them, just go to my website: desireJesus.com and you can read the first three chapters of the book right there on the website for free.

The publisher gave me permission to be able to post that. And so that’s right there. You’ll see a link to it right on the front page of the website. 

Carrie: That’s great. And we’ll put a link in the show notes too. So since our podcast is called hope for anxiety and OCD, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, a time where you received hope from God or another person.

Pastor John: Certainly. So in 2008, my wife and I feel like the Lord was calling us to move to Langhorne, Pennsylvania, which was a couple of hours south of where we were living up in the Pocono region of Pennsylvania. And we felt like the Lord was leading us to move here and replant a church that was just about to close down.

And you know, shut its doors forever. And so we moved here to get involved in church planting, church revitalization. And I remember at the time being very convinced that the Lord had called us to do that, but that doesn’t come with any guarantees. So when you’re moving to a new area, you’re not certain if you’re going to be able to connect with people. And I believe that the Lord was paving a way for us to do so. And in my heart, I did believe that it was all going to work. But I remember at one point very, very early in the process, this was just a couple of days or a couple of weeks, I guess I should say before we moved down to this area, I agreed to do a wedding down in this area, in the building that we were going to use. So in the church building. And I remember at that point, there weren’t really very many people that were part of the church. There were just about six or so active people that had been part of the church that hung on to help us plant the new church. And I remember as the wedding was about to get underway, I started watching people pull into the parking lot and I saw one car pull in and another car pull in and another car pull in and before I knew it, the parking lot was filled and I thought, wow, this is exciting to see for this wedding. I’m just hopeful that the day comes when we have worship services here, that people will actually become part of this church, that we actually have the opportunity to build a church. And I just remember looking out at that full parking lot and just praying to the Lord, just a very simple prayer.

I just prayed, Lord, may it be so. May this be the type of thing that we get to see again when this church really gets underway, not just for a special event, but for the believers gathering together for worship gathering together on a Sunday morning gathering together mid-week whatever, whatever the Lord willed. And so I just remember having filled with the hope of Christ in that moment. And just a confidence that the Lord was going to help facilitate that even though I was certainly tempted to drift toward anxiety in that process because it was certainly a big step of faith for our family to come and, and move to a new area and try and get the church going.

But I remember sometime after that, a few years after that, when the parking lot really was filling up on Sunday mornings and looking at that in my mind, coming right back to standing on that porch and thinking, all right, Lord, this is wonderful. You answered that prayer. You filled us with your hope.

You gave us confidence in you. And now we get to see with our eyes, the type of things that we were seeing by faith for the past several years. And that was a real blessing to me. It was confirmation that when the Lord leads you in a particular direction, it’s best to just obey because he’s got the details already figured out. And sometimes he asks us to make big steps of faith. And so we just go and we get to see what he has planned on the other side of that step. 

Carrie: It’s so beautiful when you’re able to just look back and see how far the Lord has brought you in a particular area and things, and all the challenges that there were, I’m sure along the ways of like, are we ever going to be able to do this? Is this ever going to grow? That’s awesome. 

Pastor John: Yeah. You’re right. Big challenges. 

Carrie: Well, thank you so much for being on the show and talking with us about preaching the gospel to our hearts. I think it’s been a great conversation. 

Pastor John: Well, Carrie, thanks so much for having me on. It’s been a real pleasure.

_____________________________________

I felt like we had a little bit of therapy on myself today on this episode, talking about my perfectionism and difficulty letting go of responsibilities and delegating them to my VA. In all seriousness, I really needed those reminders today that Jesus has overcome sin, death. Nothing is too difficult for him.

As I like to remind myself on a regular basis, God is way bigger than my problem. So allow that to encourage you today. If you would like to stay up to date with what’s going on on the podcast, you can join our email list at www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Thank you so much for listening. 

Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of by the world counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam. 

Until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

30. Developing Self Awareness with Lola Sodunke

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 30. Developing Self Awareness with Lola Sodunke

In this episode, Lola Sodunke of Joy In Purpose Podcast shares her wisdom and insights about self-awareness and how it can lead to a greater connection with God.

By listening to our conversation, you will learn about:

  • Self-awareness and its importance
  • Setting boundaries and learning your values and beliefs 
  • Ways you can become self-aware as a Christian 
  • Involving God in your self-awareness process

Links and Resources:

Lola Sodunke, MA
Joy in Purpose

Support the show 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 31

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 30. Today, I got the opportunity to sit down with Lola Sodunke where she talks to us about self-awareness. She did a great job incorporating how God is involved in our self-awareness process as Christians and our Christian community that we’re around. I really hope this interview blesses you today.

Carrie: Lola, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Lola: First of all, thank you for having me on the show. I’m really excited to be a part of your, this episode is a little bit about myself. So I will say that I am a child of a Nigerian immigrant. So I came to the United States with my parents.

I came with my parents. I was 12 years old. So I have what will be considered a bi-cultural upbringing. So being Nigerian and living in the United States, I am a fourth-year doctoral student in a counseling psychology program. It’s been an amazing experience. I’ve gotten opportunities to work with clients. We’re dealing with depression, anxiety, trauma. I’ve also got into the experience of administering psychological assessments to understand client’s strengths and weaknesses, and then potential problems and cognition or emotional reactivity. And most importantly, I really like administering psychological assessments because it also helps inform treatment recommendations. 

I’m very passionate about the field of psychology. So I like doing community outreach at my church and just providing opportunities for people to ask questions and provide psycho-education and mental health topics. 

Carrie: Awesome. That sounds really good. So are you hoping once you get your doctorate to focus on psychological testing? 

Lola: Yeah, I would like to because I really like how we can integrate that. Like I said with treatment recommendations and even for the older population, it’s helpful for assessing diagnosis for dementia, for the different types of dementia.

Sometimes some people have TBI traumatic brain injury to see where they’re at and then make sure to make recommendations to help improve their quality of life. 

Carrie: Right. On one of our first five episodes, we talked about assessment and about the importance of that and the difference between anxiety and OCD. Why it’s important to differentiate those in terms of getting the treatment and help and support that people need.

So that’s really awesome that you’re going to be contributing to that. Today, we’re talking about self-awareness, which I guess is a big concept. So how do you define that? 

Lola: Yeah, it is a big concept. I guess for some people it could be overwhelming. I became passionate about this topic because I realized how people become sufferers wherein therapy you see that light bulb moment.

I also noticed that it can also be a reason why people come to therapy when they realize some things about themselves that they would like to change. So self-awareness is a skill that we can work on. It’s basically a way to be able to understand yourself, understand other people, and understand how other people view you.

So when there’s something called internal self-awareness, think about being able to look at your personality. So looking at yourself as objectively as you can. Even though we have our own blind spots and biases, knowing your strengths, your weaknesses, your thoughts, your beliefs, your motivations. What emotions do you experience on most days?

Are you still one that is generally sad? Always anxious. Sometimes we just go through life and we’re just going. Self-awareness allows you to be able to pay attention to different parts of your life. You can focus on my feeling fitness-wise. How am I doing psychologically with my relationships, with finances, with friends, if you have kids with your kids, with your spouse.

So self-awareness is being able to look at yourself as objectively as you can. There’s also something called external self-awareness. Like I was saying earlier, external self-awareness is how other people feel about you. As much as some people might say, they don’t care what other people think. We also know that no matter how smart you are, if you don’t have a good social network, you’re not going to progress much in life.

You might be good at your job, but if you don’t have a good relationship, they don’t see you as a good leader, you might not get promoted in your job. So I’m not talking about when people just don’t like you because they don’t like you, but where people and we’re tribal, so we are made for human connection and social connection.

So it’s important to also know not to be hyper-focused on it to also to have people view you. Are you telling that maybe you just sit there and you’re smiling, but then you think you’re having a good day? So you’re just being yourself and throughout the day, people are like, are you upset? Are you okay? Because they’re interpreting your body language and your facial expression is different. In your mind, you’re happy. You might even think I thought I was smiling. Other people see it as if you’re frowning. Self-awareness, there are two components to it. How you see yourself and also other people see you. There’s a healthy balance and there’s an overboard, or sometimes you could be in a group in a social group where the social norm is gossiping, but then internally your values telling you that you don’t gossip.

You know that you don’t fit in with that crowd so you don’t associate yourself to that. Sometimes there’s a social norm, there’s a social group and it’s toxic. So being able to also navigate your own beliefs, your own values, and then navigating the values of this other external social group and seeing does it align with you?

Because sometimes some people they’re part of a group and because they’re so self-aware of the group and they want to please the group. They’ll just go along with the group. So there’ll be the one there’ll be gossipy, but internally it doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t align or doesn’t align with their values.

So it’s important to know where you stand with how you view yourself and also how you view other people. And to some extent, how they view you. It’s important. 

Carrie: I agree with that. Let’s kind of break that down a little bit. I think one of the things that we learned from this pandemic was that in America we’re such a go, go society.

A lot of times we don’t take the time to just sit and maybe self-reflect and check-in with ourselves. How am I actually doing? Am I stressed right now? What are the signs that I’m stressed right now? How does that manifest in my body? And then I think too about what you said about other people and how they perceive you.

One of the things I had to learn earlier on in my life was that I have a thinking face. And that my thinking face really disconnects me from the people that are around me. And actually, they think that I’m mad, but I’m not mad. I’m just really lost and kind of deep in thought. And that actually inhibited some of my early client work. Someone came out with me and was able to give me some feedback on my session and found that was really helpful. Another friend from church who said, “you know, I wondered when I first met you if you ever smiled.” So then it was my effort really like, I probably need to smile more, especially when I’m around other people.”

And it wasn’t that I wasn’t happy, but that was really how I was perceived. And maybe I think maybe I wasn’t fully as happy as I am now, but I wouldn’t say necessarily that I was in a depressed state or anything of that nature, but people could have perceived me that way. And I think this is important in terms of anxiety and OCD.

Oftentimes we also have misnomers about how other people see us like, “Oh, well, those people think I’m a bother” or “I really shouldn’t speak up here because then they’re going to see me as too aggressive or mean.” Oftentimes that’s not even how people are perceiving the situation. If I set a boundary, people are going to think that I’m mean. That may be true in your family system, but it may not be true in the larger societal context, which is kind of what you were saying there a little bit earlier.

Lola: Absolutely. This is why it’s important to know your own values and your own beliefs because it’s not just about other people. First, it starts with you.

What do you value? What are your own beliefs? How do you see yourself? What is important to you? I gave an example earlier about gossiping. If gossiping is not something that you want to engage in, even if you are in a group of people and that’s what they do, they might not like you but you know that’s not something that I want to do. It’s the same with setting boundaries.

What is the most important thing to you? It’s important that I go to bed at a certain time. So you stick with that time. Sometimes you think that other people are going to be upset, but then you also have to give yourself time to stick to that boundary. To really see that other people are upset or maybe they were just using you and monopolizing your time.

I just have to realize I have to let certain people go. You have to have a balance in what do I think of myself? How do I view myself? How do I want to be in this world? And how do I want other people to see me? It can be tricky and it takes time. This is what I encourage people to do on their own. And when they’re still having issues with what they to seek the help of a therapist. We are always objective. And sometimes it was saying it out loud “I like to go to about a certain time.” And then Frank always likes to talk till midnight. After seeing it, I realized my boundaries are important for my own well-being and engaging in that. Another example that you give that was really helpful was you talked about how a client shared something with you or a friendship or something with you.

So those are like two people that their opinion was important. If a friend from church that they’ve already known you for a while. They know you’re a good person. I know they’re saying something to you. So you’re able to take it in and say, okay, they might be right about this. And this is not what I’m thinking. So I can change it. We want our client to know that, okay, this is my thinking face. It’s not about you. I’m thinking. I’m processing. Maybe thinking of the next question to ask you and things like that. Also, the people that we talked to that this feedback confirms is also important. I can help us to navigate where we want to make the changes and what changes we want to make.

Carrie: Right. Is this person giving me feedback because they’re trying to help me? And it helped me improve as a person or are they trying to tear me down or make me kind of go the path that they want me to go on. I think those are helpful questions for us to ask when we’re receiving any kind of constructive criticism.

I’m curious for you to put kind of like a spiritual lens over this. How do ourselves as Christians becoming more self-aware? Do you feel like that leads us to greater connectivity with God? 

Lola: You know what I think that’s a great question. I don’t think that you should go into self-awareness and leave God out of it. As a matter of fact when people ask me how do they develop self-awareness? I say it’s a skill that can be developed. Start in your prayer time. Ask God to open your heart to what he would like for you to change about yourself. Also, some of us are only focused on the negative. We don’t even recognize our strengths.

So going to a prayerfully where you take your paper, your journal, your pen, and even start with your strengths. Ask him to open your eyes. What are my strengths? Because some of us, we pick ourselves apart with our anxiety, with our worry that we don’t even know what we’re good at. So look what your strengths are. 

What are the things that other people have said that you’re good at? Write down your strengths. What are your weaknesses? I need them to address those weaknesses because sometimes I put focus on our weaknesses. It’s like there’s grace. Even start with one thing at a time.

What are scriptures that are aligned with the thing that you’re trying to change, and just also invite God into it. Invite your Christian circle, your support group into it. And also, like I said, go to someone that you trust. It’s easier for some people to be more self-aware than others.

So sometimes we have to ask a friend, trust a friend, not just anybody. Trust a family member. And if you’re someone that you feel like you’re sensitive to criticism, tell them that so that they can use that in their feedback to you. “I’m really nervous, but I want to grow. I don’t want to stay the same.”

What are some things that I can change? What are my strengths? my weaknesses? You tell me one strength. Tell me one weakness. If you feel like you’re going to be overwhelmed. You can also ask them what are ways that you think I can change.  How can you hold me accountable? So, this is why we can rely on our brothers and sisters in Christ. Whatever you want to share, whatever you’re working on, they can hold you accountable and be prayerful about this. Sometimes you’re focused on one thing. Maybe on giving back to other people. Maybe you’re someone that has internal self-awareness, you’re good there, but when it comes to reaching out to other people, making sure that you’re being kind, you’re being patient, you show other people grace. Maybe that’s something that God wants you to work on. So I would say be prayerful as you’re navigating stuff for when it’s and what to work on and also invite your brothers and sisters in Christ to hold you accountable. Someone that you trust, that you have a relationship with that you trust. Be gentle on yourself. Like I said, you can start with one strength and one weakness. We’re all working progress. So don’t feel like, “Oh my goodness. I have all these weaknesses.” Many of us have a lot of weaknesses and just take it one step at a time.

Carrie: I absolutely agree with that because I think some of the clients that I work with have multiple issues or multiple diagnoses. They have a lot of stuff that they’re working with. And so always starting small. The small changes in our lives and the slow and steady progress. That’s going to be the most sustainable.

But I like what you said really about allowing God to reveal those things to us in prayer in terms of behaviors that we might need to change in our lives. Oftentimes just having clients be able to develop the tolerance to sit with things that are difficult is really important. Sometimes we’re in a lot of pain and we use unhealthy ways to get out of it, whether that’s stuffing, whether it’s exploding.

Whether it’s just complete avoidance like I’m going to pretend like that’s not actually there. Do you feel like maybe knowing some of those things, the ways that we get out of self-awareness, do you think that that’s helpful for us as well? 

Lola: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll give an example there. People don’t want to hear any bad news.

Someone is like, the old teacher that you knew, something she’s going through, something that like, “No, I don’t want to hear it.” It’s like they put a blinder on. They just want to ignore. I don’t want to hear any bad news, only good news. You have to ask yourself. Okay. That’s good for the moment, but it’s not good with helping you build relationships. Self-awareness is paying attention to the patterns of your life. What patterns do you gravitate to? How do other people see you? Maybe when you’re by yourself you’re cool, but other people see you as angry as exploding. It’s important to know your patterns, but like I said, it takes time to work on those things, to move away from them. But even recognizing those patterns is powerful because then you can look at yourself in an objective manner and say, do I like being like this? Do I want to continue in this way? And then the next step is, what can I do about it? This is where your community comes into play and then seeking therapy to help you with that.

It might make you feel uncomfortable to know that while I am one of those persons that when someone does say something that might be sad news or bad, I just ignore it. And I just don’t want to hear. I just shut them down. How does that make that person feel? I don’t even come off as self-compassionate. It might make you feel bad in the moment, but the goal is to work on it and to improve because it’s going to help you to connect more with other people and help you to have more fulfilling relationships. 

Carrie: Absolutely. I think what you’re talking about is especially true in very intimate relationships. If you will have a hard time being self-aware and you have a spouse or boyfriend, girlfriend, that’s probably the person that you could ask first tell me one strength or one weakness. If you’re not married, just a very close friend that you spend a lot of time with.

It really knows you because oftentimes when we’re in relationships with other people, that’s where we notice our differences in terms of how other people approach situations. And we can become really frustrated by that because they don’t approach situations the way we think that they should or the way I like. They don’t do it the way I would do it.

And then it causes us to kind of look in the mirror and go, “Oh, well, why do I approach this situation this way?” or “Why did that make me so distressed when they acted in that manner? And that those types of times are really good for self-reflection. Anytime that you get really worked up about something or you have a conflict in a relationship instead of avoiding that really kind of trying to be curious about it and be reflectful on yourself as well as the other person. How were they impacted when I shared something? How was I impacted when they shared something? That’s good. 

Lola: Yeah, absolutely. 

Carrie: Do you feel like that it’s possible for people to be too self-aware because someone might say, “well, you know, in Christianity we really just need to focus on the needs of others and being giving to them. You know, I don’t want to focus on myself too much.”

Lola: Okay. Yes. Okay. I really liked that question. I think that sometimes we can be too focused on certain areas of our life. Like I said, some people know their strengths, some people know their weaknesses. I’ll give an example. Let’s say you’re prepared for a presentation as you’re about to get up, you realize you forgot to add an image to a slide and that’s all you’re focusing on. Oh my goodness. And you’re nervous. You’re focusing on your heartbeat. You’re focusing on the peak you have in your stomach. You’re sweating. In that moment, I will ask someone to pay attention to what’s going on in their body. Why don’t we try external self-awareness?

Are people in the audience connecting with the topic? How come you’re not noticing the person that is not in their head? The other person that is raising their hand to ask a question. So you have people who are focused more on external self-awareness. They care about pleasing other people more than what is their values and their abilities and their motivation.

So I think as Christians, and I think it’s the same criticism with this personal development. As a Christian, I would never tell anybody to focus on something without including God into it. We all have our own area of growth and you have to be willing to be open to what area of growth God wants you to focus on.

There’s some people that they’re so self-aware that they only notice the problem in certain situations. What about the positive things that are going on? They can tell you the problem. They can tell you the problem with the particular project and maybe they’re right about those problems that will come up in a particular project. Maybe you don’t have the answer to that problem and still want the answers to that problem. What about the good things that are coming out as a result of this? I think with anything we can pay too much attention on it, but the best way I can answer this question is to say, bring God into it.

There’s also a healing that comes in when you’re focused on yourself and focus on being the best you. You’re also more gracious to other people if you’re more patient with yourself. You’re more likely to extend that grace to other people by being patient with them. If know that you have flaws and weaknesses, you’re also able to be gracious like they have flaws and weaknesses.

Like the Bible says. I’ll put it this way before we correct someone else’s wrongdoing, it’s important to you to correct our own wrongdoing as well. And to be able to make sure that we’re making those changes in our life. When you know that you’re a human being and you’re a sinner, it’s easier for you to be able to say, you know what. I have baggage too. I have things I’m working on too. So I’m not perfect as I’m trying to correct you in what you’re doing wrong or whether I think that you could be doing better.

Carrie: Absolutely. Grace is one of the topics I’d love to dive into the podcast at some point in time. I absolutely agree with what you said, that when we are able to receive grace from God ourselves, it’s so much easier to give grace to other people like it has to flow through us and out of us. That’s very good. I know that you have a podcast. Um, can you tell us a little bit about your podcast? 

Lola: Yeah. So my podcast is titled Joy In Purpose. The name of that podcast came about because on this path of fulfilling your purpose, whatever it is, some people are at a stage where they’re like, I don’t even know what my purpose is.

We all go through disappointments and failures and good times as well. I noticed that sometimes when we go through road bombs or we’re facing people telling us no, it can really bring us down and make us question ourselves. So that’s why on this journey to purpose, on this journey of navigating our purpose and fulfil our purpose, there’s going to be disappointment along the way. So my podcast is talking about the journey of purpose and just finding the joy in purpose, finding the joy within ourselves in purpose. So I invite other people to talk about their journey of purpose. Just talk about what I call their purpose stories.

And I also curate conversations related to purpose and mental health.

Carrie: Awesome. So at the end of every podcast, I like for our guests to share a story of hope because our podcast is called hope for anxiety and OCD. So this is a time where you received hope from God or another person.

Lola: This past year, 2020, and even this year, societally, we’ve all gone through a lot. And for me also with my program, there’s a lot of work, dissertation papers, classes. Just this year has just been stressful, just a lot going on. And the previous year too. Recently, I got awarded a scholarship from my program and the scholarship was determined by the faculty and they picked myself and another applicant to receive the scholarship for the summer semester.

And I am so grateful for that. So in the middle, a lot of things going on. To me, it felt like, “Wow, hope.” That’s hope. It just really made me look up and just be appreciative of God and his faithfulness. 

Carrie: Yeah, it’s just always so good. And when you’re in that moment of provision of like, oh God came through for me in this situation. It just gives you encouragement that next time you’re facing another situation that he’s going to open a door, come through for you.

This has been a really great conversation on self-awareness and I really appreciate you being on the show and sharing your wisdom with us. We wish you the best in your studies. 

Lola: Thank you very much. I’m glad that you had me on to speak with your audience. I really appreciate it. 

———————–

I hope this interview causes you to be curious about how you can become more self-aware and what that looks like in your process.

Something I realized that I forgot to tell everyone about is that we now have hope for anxiety and OCD t-shirts. Isn’t that fun?  I designed this t-shirt on Teespring. And so if you go to our hope for anxiety and OCD website, and then click on the store, it’ll actually take you to an external site when you click on the t-shirt.

I don’t actually print them here or mail them out or anything like that. There is another company that does. I did order one just so you know, I wanted to feel it and see how it looked. The color is great. The printing is high quality and it’s a super comfortable shirt. So if you are looking for a way to help promote the podcast, or you just want to add a t-shirt to your collection, you’re welcome to go onto www.hopeforanxietyandocd/store. You’ll also find my ebook on there as well, which helps you find a therapist that’s a good fit on the first try. Thank you so much for listening.

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.

Until next time, May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

6. The Science Behind Engaging with Music for Anxiety Relief with Tim Ringgold

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 6. The Science Behind Engaging with Music for Anxiety Relief with Tim Ringgold

In episode 6 of Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I interviewed author and speaker Tim Ringold. Tim provides insight into how the brain and nervous system function when a person is stressed. Then, he explains how people can use music to calm down when they feel anxious.

  • Spiritual pain
  • Neuroscience behind how music calms the nervous system
  • Practical ways to utilize music when stressed
  • Difference between listening to music passively and engaging with it

Resources and links:

By The Well Counseling
Tim Ringold
Music Therapy
Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey (ACES)
Book: The Hard Questions

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 6

Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 6      

In today’s episode, I am talking to music therapist and public speaker, Tim Ringgol. Tim has a vast knowledge of how music affects the brain and how we can engage with music and utilize it in a very specific way to help us calm down. I learned so much from interviewing Tim. I’m really excited to share this episode with you. 

Carrie: Hi, welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD. 

Tim: Thanks so much for having me, Carrie. It’s great to be here.

What Does A Music Therapist Do?

Carrie: I know a little bit about you but I actually don’t know a whole lot. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do? 

Tim: Sure. I’m a Board-Certified Music Therapist, which is someone like a physical therapist who uses exercise to help people in a clinical setting. I was trained in school how to use music in a clinical setting to help people. People help themselves with music all day long. Sometimes, it’s like tales of the obvious to people like, “Oh yeah, I do that all the time.” There are situations where the targeted use in the hands of a clinician where music really can help people in certain circumstances throughout the lifespan. So that’s what my training is. We all know it’s good for our mood and it’s good for our spirit. 

My training is really how music affects the brain and the body and particularly the nervous system. That’s kind of what I get excited about to kind of empower people to understand their nervous system and how to regulate it with music.

Carrie: That’s really awesome. I’ve been a therapist for over 10 years and I can’t remember ever actually meeting a music therapist. 

Tim: I know we’re a rare breed. There’s only about 8,000 of us nationwide. Contrast that with like there’s 900,000 members of the APA. I am usually the first music therapist someone meets. 

From Rock Musician To Music Therapist

Carrie: So how did you become a music therapist? 

Tim: I started out as a musician first. I started out on stage when I was four and started singing right out of the gate. I was pursuing a career as a rock musician because that seemed like a very healthy, stable financially, no, none of those things apply when it comes to rock music. If you want to get a degree in music performance, it’s either opera or musical theater and I wasn’t interested in either of those. 

So I went rock and roll cause I’m totally a rebel, but I grew up like Catholic, Connecticut, prep school. All the boxes of conformity and then I was just like, “I’m not any of this”  and I kind of exploded when I was 22 and I joke that I came out as a musician and my family was devastated. They were just like, ”Oh my God. It must’ve been the drugs.” No joke. They said that. So I was like, “I’m so sorry to disappoint you” and then there was an intervention with my family because “rock music is crazy and it’s unhealthy.” These things aren’t true. That was my lifestyle. 

When I wanted to settle down, I was engaged and I just couldn’t imagine the future being on the road and being in a committed relationship, having kids, trying to stay sober, trying to stay faithful on the road. 

One day, someone sent us this cute little book for an engagement gift called “The Hard Questions.” A hundred questions every couple should ask before tying the knot. It talks about career and family and yadda yadda.  

My wife, she had her MBA at that time. She could see her future like corporate clear- pie charts, graphs and I just looked into the black hole of the music industry and I was like, “Oh my God. What am I going to do with my life?” and she just encouraged me, “If you want to go back to school, we can afford it.”

I don’t want to marry like a grumpy never-was so I scrolled from A to Z in the index of majors at my local university. I just scrolled like, “Is there anything interesting here?” And sure enough, I bumped into the two words, “music therapy” on this scrolled list. I was like, “Oh, stop it.” I had been a musician and I was an athlete. I used to work in physical therapy, but I found it to be just tissue. It was like, I didn’t touch the emotions. I didn’t touch the spirit. It didn’t go deep enough for me. 

I wrote a paper in college called music versus medicine because I thought I had to choose one or the other. Then I found a field where I could combine the two, and my life literally changed direction in a single moment. I have not looked back since. 

Tim Scaling His Impact By Traveling And Speaking About Music And Mental Health

Carrie: Wow, that’s awesome. So now you actually travel and speak to people about how to reach for music.

Tim: Yeah, that’s it. I noticed early on in my internship that I enjoyed speaking about music. I like doing music therapy, but I also really just love talking about it. One of my colleagues said to me, “You know, you’re a good music therapist, but the American Music Therapy Association should literally just hire you to go around and talk about music therapy because you’re just really good at talking about it” and I was like, “Thank you. I like that idea too.” 

So I got booked in. One day, I got an email and it was the National Hemophilia Foundation who had found my blog that I’d written about my special needs daughter, and then here’s a dad, a special needs dad who knows how to use a non-opioid based approach for pain management. So they said, “We’d like you to come speak at this summit that we’re doing and you’ll be faculty and we pay faculty.” It was like 15 times how much I made an hour as a music therapist. I am a speaker but this is a whole different world. 

That began this kind of quest that I’ve been on for the last seven years to just speak more and more because then I also realized that I could plant the seeds about how to use music yourself to really big groups of people really fast. For me, it’s always been kind of like this journey of wanting to help the most people. [00:07:29] It’s almost like a numbers game. I want to go wide. I like going deep with one person but after a while I was in the treatment room, working with one patient at a time. There are so many patients a week because there’s only so much of me that can go around. I don’t know what the right word is but just I couldn’t scale my impact. I couldn’t clone myself.

When I got up on a stage, I could have 800 professionals in a ballroom all getting the same message at the same time and I was like, “Oh yes, please.” That developed into what I do full-time now. Now I have a clinical staff that does the music therapy and I do all the speaking.

Carrie: Awesome. You’re also the second person that I’ve interviewed who said somebody else told them, “Hey, you should be doing this. You have the talent, skills, and abilities to be doing it” and they weren’t doing it at the time. It’s just always interesting how other people can see things that we can’t see in ourselves. That happens in therapy.

Tim: Totally. There’s a phrase that I use which is, “you cannot see the frame when you’re in the picture.” You have blind spots all around you. Your peripheral vision only sees so far but everybody else sees all that way around. They see a dimension of you, you just can’t see. That’s why being willing to hear what others have to say is a really useful ability because the listener can’t see this right now. We’re on zoom, I can wave my hand to you, but right now I can’t see my hand but you can. In my perception, there’s no hand except there’s a hand, right?

So how many times in life are we walking around and there’s something right there, everybody else can see it, but you’re like the last one to get it. That in and of itself is so much of my work in mental health. It’s because there’s such a stigma around mental health. Unwilling to turn and look and see that there is something amiss right next to him. 

The Importance of Recognizing Mental Health As Essential To Physical Health

I had one teen who told me once, he goes, “Yeah, that’s like addiction man. Everyone else sees it before you.” Oftentimes, we will feel discomfort, “dis-ease” symptoms in our body. We’re the first to know when it comes to our physical health, when it comes to our mental health because there’s such a different attitude about mental health in the culture. When we feel dis-ease or discomfort mentally, we don’t have the same freedom to just go, “You know what, I keep thinking about killing myself.” This is not normal because I’m designed to survive like my DNA is programmed for survival. So why do I keep thinking about killing? That doesn’t make any sense. Being able to have the freedom to just say that out loud and not be institutionally locked up for 72 hours. Your doctor, your physical doctor is not a mandated reporter if you’re having physical symptoms. They don’t physically lock you in a physical hospital for 72 hours for anything. You can get up and walk out at any time. You’re free to be called AMA against medical advice but physically you’re free to do what you want, mentally, it’s another story. 

We have a completely different relationship to mental health in this country than physical health. I think that’s a real challenge for people because the human experience, everybody’s having physical symptoms and everybody’s having mental symptoms.

If you’re not free to talk about the mental symptoms, the way you do with the physical symptoms, what people do is they wait until their body turns it into physical symptoms. Then they go try to treat the physical symptom which is the symptom, but not the source.

Carrie: That happens with anxiety all the time. People will show up at the ER, “I think I’m having a heart attack,” “I think I’m dying” and they will get fully checked out and the result will be, “We think you had a panic attack.” 

Tim: Yes. Anxiety attacks and “I can’t breathe. I physically can’t breathe” and it’s a somatic sensation.

Carrie: Absolutely.

Tim: Just like depression can be a somatic sensation of heaviness. Anxiety can be this somatic experience as well of being like, “I can’t catch my breath” and they physically can’t. You can see their shallow breathing and they’re starting to hyperventilate. 

My daughter has anxiety and I watch it and she’s 14. It’s kind of a fascinating journey of adolescence, puberty, hormones, and mental health, and like trying to navigate, when is this hormones of adolescence and puberty? When is this an anxiety attack?

As a clinician, I can tell you, there are times when I can see when we are crossing into the red zone where there were having a panic attack and she cannot recover her breath and I have to work with her and it’s really scary. If we took her to a hospital, they’d check her out and they’d be like, “there’s nothing wrong with you” and then they’d say something like, “it’s a panic attack. We don’t treat that here.” So it’s a real challenge in our culture. 

Tim’s Sex Addiction Experience And Its Connection With His Religious Orientation

Carrie: Absolutely. You talked a little bit about growing up Catholic and I’m curious what your experience of that interaction between mental health and the churches because that’s super interesting to me. 

Tim: I’m happy to tell this story because I think it’s instructive for a lot of other people’s experiences of growing up in a religious family. For me, I believe in a kind of a bio-psycho-social-spiritual model of the self. You’re having this experience of being you in four dimensions and you can experience pain in all four dimensions but that presents in your brain the same way. It doesn’t matter if you’re suffering grief or you’re suffering from a bruise. Your brain doesn’t know the difference in terms of where it shows up as pain. The signal is pain. It could be emotional pain. It could be physical pain. If you’re getting bullied, it’s social pain. You can have spiritual pain. 

I didn’t really understand this until maybe my mid-forties. I’m in long-term recovery for sex addiction. My ACEs score is zero. So I have zero adverse childhood experiences which is a massive predictor of addiction and mental health in adulthood. If those who are listening have not been exposed to ACEs, it’s a really valuable tool to look at. It scientifically validated the adverse childhood experience survey (ACEs).

I would be in 12 step rooms and I’d hear guys talking about physical abuse, sexual abuse, and I felt like, “What’s the matter with me? I don’t have anything wrong with me” and then finally as I started to look in this four-part dimension of spiritual pain, I realized in my house, I was crying myself to sleep when I was eight years old, convinced that I was going to hell because I didn’t say my “Our Father” the night before when I was going to bed.

I had this imagery of me falling asleep. I equated it to falling to hell because I couldn’t stay awake. It was so hard to stay awake to say my prayers but it was so easy to just fall asleep. So I started to see images and arch of hell like they’re the most horrible, glorified, horrifying, traumatic visual things that I’ve ever seen in my life were pictures of people describing this religious thing called hell. So I grew up totally traumatized by the idea that I was going to hell because I was told there were these rules you had to follow. You get one chance and there’s this whole idea of sin. When you grow up in the Catholic and in the Christian world, you cannot walk five feet without having that word thrown at you. As a kid, it was like a math equation. At a certain point, I was doomed. I was doomed by the things that every human being does. I was like, “This is an equation where there’s no way I don’t end up in hell, and wait a minute, I’m not a murderer. I’m not a rapist.” I’m like, “If I’m ending up in hell, everybody’s ending up in hell.”

Now I have an eight-year-old and the image of my son crying himself to sleep because he’s afraid he’s going to hell, breaks my heart. Except that was my childhood and no one knew. I never told anybody because I was scared to death to talk about that kind of stuff.

I think a lot of people leave the church when they get old enough to physically leave the church for a really good reason because well-intentioned people put the fear of hell into them. I mean, we talked about put the fear of God into somebody. I can’t square myself with anybody who thinks that the idea of an all-loving God and the fear of God at the same time can hold the same space like, “Cool. That’s for you.” Great but I’m not signing on to anything where I am afraid of my creator, that I am afraid for my eternal soul like that has no place in inspiring me to be a good person. It didn’t work. All it did is it inspired me to find pornography because as soon as I found it in pornography, I found relief. I found something that captivated my imagination. It took my mind completely out of the terror for a period of time while I was in the very same place that I was crying myself to sleep, alone in my room at night. 

So when people have to understand that addiction is not a problem, addiction is a solution to a problem. People who don’t have a problem, don’t have an addiction. Most adults recreationally use drugs and illegal substances and alcohol and then they spontaneously stop using it after a 10 year period. The data on it is overwhelming. 

Carrie: And food. 

How Does Childhood Trauma Impact The Nervous System?

Tim. And Food. They come to a decision, “Oh, this isn’t working for me” and they just stop whatever it is. They just stopped doing it. For a small percentage of people who have adverse childhood experiences who have trauma, who are chronically stressed, their nervous system has been hijacked by past events and current events, and they’re now reaching for something in an attempt to self-soothe their nervous system. It becomes a feedback loop where they reach for something to self-soothe. It works in the moment. It causes problems afterward. They feel shame, guilt, pain of some sort, disconnection. So then once again, they’re in a stress response their brain craves to be self-soothing. So then they reach forward again and it becomes this vicious circle that they can’t get themselves out of.

When I work with people to help them understand this cycle, it’s like the stressed brain craves relief by design. So when you have depression, when you have anxiety, you have this in your brain and in your body, you feel discomfort. The brain’s job is to comfort itself. A craving is a design, it’s well-built.  The reason we can’t withstand cravings is because they’re supposed to work. We want to self-soothe. We want to self-regulate. 

Our nervous system has three gears. It wants to be in what we would call a safe-default-relaxed-aware” state which would be identified as the ventral vagal state. That’s where our nervous system is running. The parasympathetic aspect of our autonomic nervous system is running the show. Our prefrontal cortex is online. We’re able to be creative. We’re able to connect emotionally. We’re able to consider the past, consider the future, all the best parts about being a human being. Why we’ve dominated the world in terms of the natural landscape. They’re all available to us when we’re in that state. Most of that goes offline though when we are called upon to either outrun a tiger or fight off a tribe. 

We have this second gear, this sympathetic nervous system response, the fight or flight gear where the amygdala suddenly activates and takes over and kicks the prefrontal cortex to shotgun and says, “I’m going to get us out of here.” Now we are in reactive mode. We’re not in creative mode and it changes our body physiologically like blood sugar changes, blood pressure changes. Hormones are released in that moment. That’s really great in the moment and then the moment is designed to pass, but in our chronically over-scheduled, overstimulated 21st-century world, we’re now getting that stress response chronically daily, multiple times a day. 

The brain and the body are not designed to work that way so it’s overwhelmed. It gets stuck. It gets in this feedback loop, and now it’s like, “Oh, I’m stressed out. Why am I stressed out?” Because I’m so used to being stressed out.  

That is a real challenge. It presents huge physical problems like type two diabetes, massive connection to chronic stress because what it does to your blood sugar like the same diet if you’re stressed, versus if you’re not stressed. Your body metabolizes the same diet differently. So it has real health implications, heart implications, stroke implications, addiction, low libido, anxiety, depression get exacerbated. All of these when we get stressed are at risk and we live in a culture where there is no break. There’s no slow down. 

The Science Of Music And Its Impact On Mental Health

For me, my job is to teach people where are these moments happening in their day and then how do we insert music into these moments. The funny thing about music in nature and with our nervous system is that when we make music in some way with our body, or we listen to music that we enjoy, our nervous system regulates. So it turns the stress response off fast. 

Carrie: It’s incredible. 

Tim: It is incredible. We know this intuitively like you’ve been in a funk. A song comes on and there’s transformation like the science behind it. You know how we are in the Western world, we have to study it and then tell you it happened and we’re like, “thanks, I already knew that” 

My whole degree, Carrie is tales of the obvious, chapters one, two, three, four. “Let me tell you about music,“ “I already knew that,” “but here’s how it works,” “Oh, okay. Now it’s real.”

A lot of times I’m telling people what they’ve already experienced and what they already do, but now they understand like it’s legit. That this isn’t wishful thinking. This is a real stimulus-response experience in the body happening at a preconscious level.

I used to work in the hospital where I would go into the ICU. I was referred for patients who had elevated blood pressure, heart rate, and respiratory rhythm. Even though they were in a coma I would slow their heart rate, their blood pressure, and their respiratory rhythms down just with my guitar. 

Carrie: Wow. That’s great. 

Tim: That’s really, you know, really? They’re in a coma but their ears are still receiving these auditory signals from the environment and our bodies is a rhythm machine. You can slow down your body’s rhythms by introducing a slow tempo in the environment around it.

I would just look at their heart rate on the monitor like it was a click track or a metronome, and I’d start playing along with it. After about five minutes, I start to slow down my guitar and their body would slow down in response and that was when I really was like, “Okay, this is legit.”

How To Use Music To Relieve Anxiety

Carrie: Do you encourage people to listen to certain types of music when they’re anxious or when they’re depressed?

Tim: It’s a really great question. People will want to know what’s the right and wrong stuff to listen to. So there’s a couple of things one is with anxiety, a lot of times your focus is no longer in the present. You’re kind of wrapped up. It’s a kind of a disembodied experience as a trigger to an embodied extense of panic. The disembodied part is you’re up in your head, perseverating over a future that you’re convinced is going to happen.

Carrie: A bad future.

Tim: Yeah, not an exciting future because the brain is designed not to thrive, it’s designed to survive. So the brain defaults to a negative scenario out of survival because a false positive keeps you alive, a false negative, “You’re a lunch for the tiger.”

The way that our nervous system and our brain designed itself for survival was to default to a negative potential. This could be bad. We have a very old operating system. It’s designed to do that. So people naturally default to the negative. There’s nothing wrong with you. That’s your survival instinct. The problem is they get caught in a feedback loop about it and they believe the thought. It’s just a thought and it’s designed in a certain way, but we believe it as the future and then we get stuck in it. Then now we’re no longer present. We’re out of our head. We’re out of our body. We’re up in our head. 

The first thing we want to try to do is when we reach for music the style of music isn’t so important as that it’s something that is enjoyable to me. It’s very personal. It’s like flavor. It’s very personal, but I don’t want to stop with just reaching for it to listen to it.

I want to make music with it. So if I’ve got my phone and I’ve got my earbuds in and I put on a playlist of music that inspires me, that I’ve already put in there for just such an occasion. What I want to do is I want to either tap along on my body with the beat, with the music. I want to hum along with the melody. I want to actually audiate, which is like when you sing in your head but not out loud. So you can sing along with a song in your head and you’re not actually using your mouth but your brain is doing all of the calisthenics to produce the pitch and the tempo and the words in your head. Then what happens is you just activate your vocal cord. If you want to release that out into the environment, you can just sing along in your head. You can sing along out loud, even better, but in any way that you can activate your body to match the music, then your body is involved. That’s a huge component for people with anxiety is because getting back into your body brings you back into the present moment because the only place your body is, is in the present moment. 

So the challenge with remembering that is you got to remember it, but if you just turn on music and you try to play along with the beat or tap along with the beat, you’re just trying to keep the beat and by virtue of trying to keep the beat now you’re back in your body and you’re back in the present moment because music is time-based. When we play music in order to keep the beat, we have to be present. The challenge with listening to music is listening to music can become a very disembodied experience.

Carrie: Passive versus active. 

Tim: Yes. It engages your imagination and your memory. So you can be listening to a song and you can float away. The song can take you to where the song is. It’s a disembodied experience when you just listened to the song. You’ve had this experience where you listened to a song that you have heard before and you have a memory associated with that song. So suddenly you’re no longer in the present moment. You are a back wherever that was, and it could be good, could be bad. 

The same thing can happen in the future. You can hear a song and it can trigger your thoughts and your feelings and your emotions about the future because there’s nothing holding you. The song itself isn’t holding you in the present moment unless you try to engage with it with your body.

When You Have Anxiety, Choose Music That Lifts You Up

So that’s why for people with anxiety, it is really, really critical that you have music you enjoy that you know that lifts you up.  When you put it on, you go move your body to it. What I tell people to do is to have a power playlist. It’s three songs that fire you up. When you feel the anxiety strike, you put the playlist on, put in your earbuds, get up and go for a walk and you walk to the beat because everybody walks in rhythm.

If you can’t go walk to the beat and you have to be stationary then tap along with it or hum along with it, but be in the present moment, making music with the music. You don’t have to be a musician to do this because when you clap to the beat, you don’t consider yourself a musician. If you tap your leg to the beat, you don’t consider yourself a musician, but you’re doing the very same thing. [00:30:55] You’re activating your body in the present moment. I think that’s more important than the actual material that’s in the music.

When it comes to the material, that’s in the music, here’s what we know from research. Typically, if you are struggling with depression or anger particularly, what’s going to happen is the music you reach for might do one of three things. Typically, people will reach for music that matches their mood. That’s normal. We want to validate where we are intuitively. So angry people, if they listen to angry music, it may do one of three things. It may reduce the anger because they now have this resonance with something they feel validated. It’s cathartic, so it actually reduces the anger. Sometimes it doesn’t do anything to the anger. It has no effect at all. They just engage in the music and they feel as angry as they did beforehand. Sometimes it actually exacerbates the feelings of anger. I would submit that anger and anxiety are more related than anxiety and depression, because I feel like anger and anxiety are hyper regulated, hyperactive states. Whereas depression is kind of a hypoactive state. There’s this correlation, but not identical but correlated. So if you’re in a hyper-regulated hyperactive state, there’s the chance that you could exacerbate that. 

We’ve read from research with teens were the same with depression they listen to sad music when they’re depressed. The music doesn’t make them sad. They were sad and they reached for the music that matched their sadness.

The music either makes them feel better, it doesn’t change the sadness, or actually exacerbates it makes it worse. It’s really important for people to notice what’s happening in their body. As they’re listening to the music they reach for because there’s no stamp of this than that when it comes to music. 

We’ve even had anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is like an oxymoron but case studies where kids will say, “I used this music at one time to actually make myself feel worse” and then the song changed. The meaning of it changed. I felt better. Then the song became like a badge of survivorship that I made it through and the song took on a new meaning. And now when I hear the song, I actually feel more inspired and it’s like, “Wow, that’s really complex.” People don’t want complex. They want simple solutions. 

Difference Between Music-Listening And Music-Making

So when it comes to music listening, music listening is very nuanced. It’s very complex and that’s why I try to encourage people music-making because music-making is a motor cortex embodied physical experience happening in the present moment. It is not really subject to these nuances of context. It’s just, “Here’s the beat.” “The beats happening now.” “Oh, the beats getting faster.” “Okay. I got to keep up with the beat right now.” There’s no emotional discussion about the beat. There’s the beat. I’m going to tap along with the beat.

If you’re feeling elevated and you want to slow your heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory rhythm down, the principle we use is called the ISO principle and the law of rhythmic and treatment.

So you start with music, that’s uptempo to match how you’re feeling, and then you pick music that gradually slows down. Your playlist would be like the first song is the fastest of the three. The second song is a little bit slower in tempo and the third song is a little bit slower than that but not shocking.

Carrie: Sure. Just gradually going down. 

Tim: Yeah. If you’ve ever been to any kind of cardio class or DJ, if you really pay attention, the music they pick usually starts slow during the warmup and then it picks up but gradually it peaks. Then at the end, during the cool-down, the tempo, the speed of the music slows down. The intensity of the music slows a little bit because we’re warming down or we’re bringing down at the end. That kind of tempo arc or speed arc, if you will, that’s really what your body responds to more than anything. It’s going to respond to that. 

Integrating Music With Spirituality

Carrie: I’m curious about if you could integrate spirituality in that because as someone who’s gone to church her whole life, typically you start out with the fast praise and worship song, everybody’s clapping. Typically nobody starts a worship set with a slow song unless they’re really trying to stir you up.

Tim. No, but I will submit that the band or whoever’s running the soundboard oftentimes has prelude music before the opening song. That prelude is usually lower, slower tempo intensity than the opening song. There is usually some sort of entrance, if you will into this experience and it doesn’t start here. At least that’s been my experience.

Carrie: Yeah. I would agree with that.

Tim: It’s so funny how different aspects of the world of music don’t necessarily talk to each other. In music education, they teach a certain way, but if they knew the research that is in neurologic music therapy, they would teach music completely differently. The two worlds don’t talk to each other. Music ministry doesn’t talk to music therapy. There are two completely different silos. They take completely different classes or we don’t exchange notes. We don’t exchange research like, “Hey, here’s how to use tempo.”

They probably do it intuitively but if you knew, then you would really do this, I would submit that intuitively if I think about the music director at our church. I’ve subbed as the music director and I’ve played in the praise band on and off for several years like there is an ebb and flow of tempo and intensity of the songs based on where we are in worship that tend to match where the worship is.

When we’re doing the anthem either right before or after the message It’s not the fastest tempo song we do. The fastest tempo songs are usually the opening and closing. We’ve kind of more in like a contemplative. It’s like where the ballad is. The anthem is the ballad. It’s the feels where all the feels come in. It’s like back in growing up in music, your first record, the first single from the pop star, it’s upbeat, it’s fun. Maybe the second one’s like that and then they introduce their ballad. It’s like the second, third or fourth, but no artist ever releases their ballad as the first track on their record.

Carrie Absolutely. It’s been absolutely incredible having you on the show. I appreciate so much you taking the time to do this and talk to us about a variety of different things. It was neat to see the interaction between all of them. 

Tim: Cool. Thanks for having me. 

___________________________________________________________________

I really appreciated Tim’s vulnerability and being willing to talk about spiritual woundedness and spiritual pain.

I think that there are going to be other people who listen to this episode and really relate and resonate with that. If you’re in that situation, I just encourage you in Jeremiah 29:13, it says, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” That’s a promise. 

If you are looking for God with your whole heart, I believe that you will find Him.

How Music Helped Carrie In The Midst Of Divorce

I made a critical blunder on this podcast, just kidding. It’s not a critical blunder but I did forget something. I forgot to ask him,

“What was the time that you received hope from God or another person?” So I thought I would share a little bit with you just personally if you needed a hope story for this week because quite frankly, we’re living in a world where we need more stories of hope.

I wanted to tell you about how music has given me hope. There were a couple of songs in particular when I was going through my divorce that were popular at the time. One was The Kari Jobe song, “I Am Not Alone.” That meant so much to me because at that point in my life, that’s exactly how I felt. I felt completely alone and the song just reminded me that God was always with me. 

The other song that was popular that really resonated with me was a Jeremy Camp song called “He Knows.” It was this sense of Jesus knows like every pain and every suffering and every hurt that you’re going through and He can relate to that. He can relate to you in that human nature of suffering. 

Every time those songs would come on the radio and I was driving around for work. I would just sing at the top of my lungs and it was like those words provided such a level of hope and encouragement to me like, “I’m going to get through this.”

So I just want to encourage you. What songs are meaningful for you in this season of your life right now? God can really use music to speak truth over our lives if we will just engage with it. 

You can find helpful resources at hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Feel free to hop on over to the contact form. I would love to hear from you. I want to hear your story of hope and let me know if we can share it on the show sometime. I would love to compile some of those together. What’s a time for you that you experience hope from God or another person? Hit us up on the contact page and let us know. 

Thanks so much for listening. 

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam. 

Until next time. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.