Anxiety: When Imagination is the Enemy

We all love a good fairy tale. Mythical lands, strange and exotic creatures, and magical powers that can solve every problem from the mundane to the severe. But imagination, with all its sparkle and shine, can actually be to your detriment when you have anxiety.

Anxiety is sometimes hard to understand or communicate because it doesn’t usually come from what can be physically confirmed. In other words, it doesn’t stem from what is actually happening or what others can readily see or understand. Most of the time, anxiety comes from what could happen in the future.

Anxiety leverages your God-given creativity and sends you into an imaginary land of extreme and negative future outcomes that is convincingly real.

An Overachieving Imagination

People with anxiety are often highly perceptive, creative, emotionally aware, and future-oriented thinkers. Anxiety hijacks your brain’s natural warning system and wreaks confusion. The same inventive mental ability that allows someone to envision possibilities is also pretty creative when it comes to conjuring up future catastrophes. You’ve heard the idiom “too much of a good thing.” This can be said about your imagination, too.

Your God-given creativity is a blessing most of the time. But your ability to think about the future in realistic detail can make things tricky. When paired with your imagination, which is capable of complex thinking and multilayered scenarios, this creativity can feel like it is working against you if you suffer from anxiety.

As your anxiety creates fictitious future scenarios, your brain begins to react to them as if they’re real, which starts a chain reaction. When your brain doesn’t accept these images and ideas as creative works of fiction but as authentic and urgent warnings, a process begins. Your brain signals your body to be on high alert. Muscles begin to tighten, the heart begins to race, and soon you’re fully in crisis mode over something that isn’t real.

When Thoughts Spiral

The problem doesn’t lie in the imagination itself. Imagination is one of the greatest gifts God gave us. It’s what allows authors to write novels, musicians to compose songs, and inventors to create new things. Imagination helps you do more than create, too. It is what allows you to empathize, solve problems, and add beauty to the world around you.

Anxiety takes that beautiful gift and weaponizes it for its own good and purpose. It doesn’t adhere to normal, reasonable boundaries. Instead of your imagination being directed by truth and reality, it becomes directed by fear. Through the clouded and convoluted lens of anxiety, an unanswered text can suddenly become evidence that something is wrong with a relationship. One unfamiliar symptom turns into a terrifying diagnosis.

Unfortunately, the anxious mind doesn’t just stop with one possibility. It keeps building, one tragic brick at a time. It pushes you to think about what will happen next and next and next, never being satisfied with the most likely cause, explanation, or outcome. You convince yourself that one minuscule situation or weak piece of evidence is proof that you’re surely heading for doom.

Because your body responds to these imagined dangers as if they are real, anxiety can become physically exhausting. Your nervous system goes into survival mode, responding as if the threat were real and imminent, to situations that only exist within your imagination.

Reclaiming Your Imagination

Anxiety uses your creative mind to pull you out of the present moment and thrust you into a tragic future. It forces you to mentally discard reason, logic, and real evidence and live in that imagined future as if it were the present reality. But if imagination is a God-given gift being abused unrightly, surely that imagination can be recaptured and used for good.

Taking Your Thoughts Captive

Scripture tells us to “…take every thought captive to obey Christ,” (2 Corinthians 10:5, ESV). That verse, while widely retold, is still underrated because it really is an important key to overcoming anxiety.

The words sound so simple, but in reality, they offer a very profound, life-changing idea. It is not always an easy one to execute because we have an inherent tendency to trust ourselves. While you are likely to trust the thoughts in your own head, not every thought that enters is deserving.

Jesus was obviously aware of the human tendency to borrow future trouble. “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:34, NIV) The advice Jesus offers may have been given in the Sermon on the Mount thousands of years ago, but His advice is still applicable today. Try the following strategies to heed Jesus’ advice.

• Set Daily Boundaries: In the Lord’s Prayer, there is a request for daily bread. Not weekly or monthly bread, but daily. When your mind starts to spiral toward what might happen a month from now or what life will look like in a year, actively pull yourself back to what is happening in the next 24 hours. Ask yourself what you need to do in the next few hours, not what might happen in the future.

• Control Only the Controllable: Much of your anxiety can come from trying to control things that are simply outside of your authority to control. You can’t control the economy or other people’s opinions or an unexpected health event, so stop trying.

To help take your thoughts captive, draw two columns on a piece of paper. Write down everything that’s driving your anxiety and put what you can actually do something about today into one column. You can write that apology email today, but you can’t restore an entire relationship, for example. In the second column, write down those things that you can’t control and hand that column in its entirety over to God.

• Curate Your Media: We live in an information-saturated world. Through modern media, we are exposed to more global tragedy than any other generation has experienced, and that is partially responsible for why anxiety is rising. But you don’t have to allow negative input into your life unfiltered. Establish a routine that doesn’t include doomscrolling and protect the first and last thirty minutes of your day from email or news.

• Feed Yourself Scripture: If you feed your soul with Scripture, you will find peace. The Word has a unique ability to bring peace into even the most tense situations. Take time to read Scripture. Memorize key verses. And when your mind starts to travel to uncertain and dangerous places, latch onto the Scriptures to help guide you back to center.

• Seek Therapy: While taking your thoughts captive can be a spiritual practice to help anxiety, some anxiety stems from biological factors or past trauma. Seeking therapy can be another way to help take your thoughts captive. If you’re struggling with intrusive or unbridled repetitive thoughts or symptoms of generalized anxiety, therapy can help.

Through therapeutic practices like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), you can learn to spot cognitive distortions, which are essentially the fiction-writing techniques that your anxiety uses to make imagined disasters feel like imminent reality.

Rewriting Your Creative Parts

Taking your thoughts captive doesn’t mean that you have to shut your imagination down entirely, but it does require you to reassign the authorship. Anxiety wants you to believe that you are the sole author and authority of your future. It wants you to envision a future where you are helpless and living in the worst possible version of it. The good news is that as a child of God, you’re not the one writing your future at all, and neither is your anxiety.

A Bright Future

Imagine what could happen if that same vibrant, deep-thinking mind of yours was allowed to envision good possibilities instead of catastrophic and tragic ones. The same mental capacity that can map out disaster scenarios is also capable of imagining what life could look like with God’s goodness overtaking it.

If you would like support in navigating your imagination and anxiety, please contact Joseph Bennett to schedule an appointment with a licensed Christian therapist. A Christian therapist can help you take your thoughts captive, find peace amid anxious moments, and transform your thoughts into hopeful dreams of a beautiful future guided by God.