How to Let Go of Anxiety and Stop Worrying
Do you struggle with anxiety and wish you could just get over it once and for all? There is true hope for relief and peace for those of us who deal with this in our daily lives, so today I’m sharing what I’ve learned about how to let go of anxiety and stop worrying!
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Be anxious for nothing.
I’m sure you’ve heard or read that bit of scripture countless times. It and the verse that follows are some of the most often quoted verses in scripture regarding anxiety and worry. But if you’re anything like me, you’ve read them so often—you might even have them memorized—that you can almost gloss over their deeper meaning.
But today as I was reading Philippians 4, I slowed down and really read verses 6-7 and let them soak in. And just within that first verse, God revealed 5 things that seriously just jumped out at me. So let’s take a look at verse 6 and really grab hold of the wealth that lies within just this one verse!
Yes, it’s only one verse, but like so many in the Bible, it’s chock-full of wisdom! Here are the 5 huge takeaways from this single verse.
Verse 6
Do not fret or have any anxiety about anything, but in every circumstance and in everything, by prayer and petition (definite requests), with thanksgiving, continue to make your wants known to God. | Philippians 4:6, AMPC
We have a choice
The very fact that it says “do not fret” and “do not have any anxiety” lets us know that we can choose not to. This is huge!
I can just imagine myself saying to God, “But Lord, I can’t help it! I’m so anxious and worried about this thing. It’s constantly on my mind and it’s making me worried no matter what I do.”
And I can just imagine God saying, “Don’t let it.”
“Do not fret.” It’s not only an instruction, it’s also an empowerment.
We have the ability to dwell in that space and give reign to anxiety, or we have the choice to let go of it. It almost seems impossible, but it’s right here in God’s word to us.
I also noticed that the verse says “do not have any anxiety.” So not only are we instructed to let go of anxiety, we’re to let go of all of it.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt pretty good because I was less worried about something as time went on, or I was less worried about this situation than I was the last one. But how would it be to let go completely?
It’s so hard to imagine! I’m the kind of person that would be described as being anxious, not just getting anxious depending on the situation. It seems to be my default setting. But I’m not going to label myself that way anymore.
Because God is bigger than that and He’s declared here in verse 6 that I can choose to let go of anxiety and have real peace.
Are you holding on to anxiety as part of your identity? I’m challenging you right now to look to Jesus Christ as your only identity instead. Let’s live under the words that Christ died to give us: righteous, redeemed, blessed, and having the peace of God!
Nothing is insignificant
How often have you felt bothered by something or worried about some situation only to tell yourself that God has bigger things to deal with?
I’ve been guilty of this. I don’t usually find myself consciously thinking things like, “God wouldn’t care about that,” but there are many times that I just don’t think of bringing something up to Him.
And I think it’s because I see it as a little thing.
But look at our sins. So we lose our temper and say something insensitive. It wasn’t even necessarily mean, just something we let fly out of our mouths without thinking. What’s that in comparison to someone who’s committed murder?
We have a scale by which to measure the severity of sins from our human viewpoint. But God has said that sin is sin and we’ll all face judgment, regardless. He’s a holy, righteous, just God, and He can’t abide any sin. Yet here we sit thinking, “Meh. It wasn’t that bad.”
So what am I getting at here? That we seem to have a similar mindset when we judge what’s worthy of God’s attention. But here’s the thing we forget: He loves us! He’s our Abba Father. He wants to be involved in our lives.
“In every circumstance and in everything,” He says.
It’s crazy how we can be deceived into thinking that God is too busy. Umm, He created time. Pretty sure He operates outside its bounds. But it’s so foreign to us that it’s easy to forget.
He’s all-powerful and controls the whole universe. He created this world and each of us so uniquely and yet we have this notion that He’s not interested or that our problems are too small.
But 1 Peter 5:7 says, “Give all your worries and cares to God.” All. Not just what we deem to be the big ones. All of them.
It’s this wonderful dichotomy that God is our holy, almighty Creator, the Author of the universe, and the fearful Judge of mankind, yet at the same time, since we’ve been granted adoption as sons and daughters through Christ, He’s also our loving Father.
And in fact, our heavenly Father wants to be involved in the details of our lives even more than our earthly parents ever did.
Remember when you were little and you tried to show your mom or dad something and they were just too busy (or maybe uninterested)? God is never busy. He’s never uninterested. He doesn’t get distracted from us.
He wants to know what we’re going through. He wants to be a part of it. He tells us clearly here in verse 6 that He wants us to come to Him with everything and at any time.
Nothing we feel or think or are going through or are concerned with is insignificant to God.
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Decide to be thankful
“With thanksgiving,” it says, tell God about your requests. This should automatic, shouldn’t it? To thank God when we come to Him asking for something?
It hasn’t always been the case for me! Especially if it was something urgent. I would immediately go to Him, but it would be some kind of pleading, scrambling, begging prayer about how much I needed help RIGHT NOW.
Now I get it. Sometimes life is life and those are the kind of prayers that pour out. Sometimes in an emergency, all I can muster is “Lord!” or “God!” And I know He hears those prayers in those times!
But for most of the times that we come to God throughout the day, we have no need to be that dramatic or that urgent. And we need to prioritize thankfulness.
God laid this on my heart a few years ago, and I often start my prayers with it now:
“Father, thank you that I can call you Father!”
It’s such a simple thought yet so astounding to me:
How much He loves us!
How much He has given to us!
How prized we are to Him that He would send His own Son to suffer in our place!
The privilege we have to now be His sons and daughters!
To be joint-heirs with Christ!
The majesty of His creation!
These are just some of the ways we can present our thanksgiving to Him in prayer.
What about what He’s done in the past? This brings forth our gratefulness to tell of His deliverance and provision, and it also builds our faith!
Looking back at all the blessings He’s bestowed upon us, on the fact that God Almighty is with us in every moment of our day, for everything He’s worked out for our good, even those situations that might have been meant for evil.
I was anorexic, but God delivered and healed me! (Read my anorexia story here.)
I lost my very best friend, my mom, to cancer—but God has seen me through! (Find out how I made it through here.)
I came from a broken broken home at a very young age, but God has blessed my marriage immeasurably!
I’m battling a chronic illness, but God is using it to teach me priceless truths! (Read about my endo journey here, and find out what I’m learning here.)
I had no choice but to quit my job when I couldn’t afford to, and yet God has shown me that He is my Almighty Provider, not the “almighty” dollar! (Read how I quit my job here, and how I learned to trust God with money here.)
And when we’re bringing our requests to Him, we can thank Him for what He will do about it! Having a thankful attitude toward our Lord helps us appreciate and treasure Him for who He is. It gets our minds off of ourselves by focusing on Him and His goodness. And that, in turn, is going to help us let go of anxiety and stop worrying.
Coming into God’s presence with thanksgiving forces us to renew our mindset. When we begin to dwell on His power, His righteousness, His unchanging character, and His provision, it switches our mindset from one of anxiety and worry to one of positivity and strengthened faith!
Be specific
When the Lord showed me this point, I just almost couldn’t believe it. Because, even though I really try not to dwell in this headspace, I deal with feelings of insecurity and inferiority a lot.
Yes, I know that God loves me. Yes, I know that He cares about the things I care about. I know that He wants to be involved in the smallest details of my life, and I talk to Him throughout the day.
BONUS: That’s praying without ceasing, by the way, praying your way through your day. It’s not all about some mystical, magical, holy-attitude, flat-on-your-face, three-hours-long, sad, solemn ritual. It’s simply talking to the Lord. Just talking to Him throughout your day in everything you encounter. It’s having a relationship.
I know all these things. But oftentimes I neglect to pray for myself. And no, I’m not saying that to sound all “holier than thou.” Because honestly, that’s an embarrassing thing to admit. It’s foolish of me not to take everything that concerns me to the Lord.
But maybe sometimes we think, “Why? God knows what I want. He knows every thought I think. He knows how I feel. He already knows my requests without me even having to say anything.”
But He wants an intimate relationship with us. A two-way relationship. He wants us to spend time with Him.
And besides that, here’s the bottom line, as with all things we’ve been instructed to do by the Lord: we don’t have to justify our reasons for obeying, we just need to do it.
God’s told us to present our specific requests to Him. We don’t have to know why, we just need to do it because He’s told us to.
Confession: When I read this part of the verse, that I should not only be making my requests known to God, but that I should be specific about them? I was like, “Woah.”
Immediately this thought came to me, “Have you not received because you haven’t asked?” It reminded me of these verses:
You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure. | James 4:2-3, NLT
Woah now, James is getting down to business with this. Obviously, we don’t want to ask for anything that’s not within God’s will for us. So our requests need to be well-intended and they should be for things that will glorify God.
It might not be in God’s timing to provide for that request at the moment, so we need to keep on asking. It also might be that God has something even better for us than what we’ve thought to ask for, but we need to open that door up to Him in faith.
Being specific in our requests also shows our belief in God’s love for us. Because to even approach Him at all in that way is an act of faith that we believe in His will to bless us and provide for us.
So don’t be afraid to be specific. In fact, we’re instructed to do so!
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Keep asking
The fifth thing that God showed me in verse 6 of Philippians is just one example of why I really love the Amplified Bible.
I love the King James, I love the New Living Translation, but the Amplified expounds on the intricacy of this verb conjugation that I otherwise would’ve missed:
“…continue to make your wants known to God.”
I touched on this a little bit in the fourth point above, but how important is this to know! It’s not a “one and done” thing here. God desires us to have a true relationship with Him.
Think about something you wanted as a child. Maybe a bike, or a book, or an outfit for a special occasion, whatever it was. Maybe it was something you wanted to do or a place you wanted to go.
So you went and asked your mom or dad. And they said no. You were upset and sad, and you might even have felt a little defeated. But then something inside you didn’t want to give up. You weren’t satisfied.
Just because your parents told you no once, did that stop you from asking them again? And again? And again?
It sure didn’t stop me. Lol.
And you know what? Because I continued to ask, my parents could see how important that thing was to me.
And it started conversations we might not otherwise have had.
And after having some talks, sometimes they agreed and granted my request!
Other times they would tell me, “Not now.” The timing wasn’t right.
Other times they would explain that by allowing me to do this or have that, I’d miss out on learning experiences.
And if my request wasn’t appropriate for whatever reason—after all, our parents were usually much wiser and could see things that we would often overlook or not understand as children—they would explain that there’s something better for me in store.
Isn’t that crazy?! Because think HOW MUCH MORE our Heavenly Father?
That’s all I can really say: How much more our precious, loving Abba Father would take care of us!
Continuing to bring our requests to God shows our faith, our trust, and our obedience.
Obedience is such a valuable thing. It’s acknowledging that God is all-wise and that we’re trusting Him to the greatest degree. How can we possibly hold on to anxiety and continue to worry if we’re placing our lives in the hands of Almighty God?
Continuing to come to God in prayer again and again with our requests brings us into a closer relationship with Him. He doesn’t just want us to run to Him for 30 seconds when we have a problem and then ignore Him til the next big issue pops up. Our earthly parents expect more than that, how much more our Heavenly Father.
He wants to be invited into our daily lives, into a relationship with Him. It’s the absolute surest way to be able to let go of anxiety and stop worrying.
When we speak to Him in prayer, listen to Him through His Word, and be open to the prompting of His Holy Spirit in our daily lives, anxiety and worry have no choice but to take a back seat.
Be anxious for nothing
So when anxiety starts trying to creep up on you? Don’t let it. When it starts to influence your thought life, don’t let it, and instead go straight to God.
Here’s a quick recap of how to let go of anxiety and stop worrying as prescribed in Philippians 4:6:
- We have a choice
- Nothing is insignificant
- Decide to be thankful
- Be specific
- Keep asking
After all, if we’re focusing on the Lord and His goodness, if we’re spending time talking to Him, if we’re speaking out our thankfulness… our mindset is bound to change!
Think about this for a second:
Philippians 4:6 is only 32 words long.
It’s only one sentence.
But look at how much God has said to us in this one verse, it’s incredible! It’s essentially a one-sentence tutorial on how to let go of anxiety and stop worrying. I love it.
And yet, God goes on to give us verse 7 in order to really cement our assurance and give us a picture of the fullness that trusting Him is going to accomplish.
Join me here for a closer look at Verse 7 and how to have unshakable peace no matter what! (coming soon!)
Free Bible-reading cheat sheet – My list of top 5 resources
Get the password for the library with the free Bible-reading cheat sheet here by filling out this form:
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