A 4 Step Guide to Overcoming Knee Jerk Doom and Worry

Do you ever do this? Do you ever hop on social media and see a post from someone you went to high school with or someone from your church or someone that’s even close to you in real life now and the post is bad news and It’s the kind of bad news that all of us are afraid to receive ourselves? And then you turn around and have this knee jerk doom reaction–that is going to happen to me?

Do the feelings of fear creep in and you brace for impact? Like are we next??

This is a surefire way to lay down your peace and live under the dark cloud of constant fear. 

a challenge

I’m going to challenge you today to think of the last post that you saw that brought up an emotional response–faster heartbeat, fearful thoughts and intense anxiety. You thought to yourself, “what would I do?” and you began picturing your own child or family member suffering through these scary experiences. We’ve all done it. 

As part of cognitive behaviour therapy, I encourage people to think through how they would actually handle that situation and face their fears head-on. As an exercise, I ask them to consider how they would process how to give this back to the Lord so they can get out of the pool of panic. 

Today, I want to share a protocol with you that I use. It helps me armor up and play out the best way to handle common fears and dangerous situations should they become reality. This becomes a valuable lesson and trains my brain to get to the first step automatically. This is helpful as we are bombarded daily with sad and tragic news and can easily “go there” in our minds and immediately personalize it. I call this knee jerk doom. 

I want us to be a people who can maturely understand when knee jerk doom is happening, how to handle it and how to move in faith when we experience anxiety. 

when will the other shoe drop?

When you’re experiencing a calm and peaceful season where things are good, it can be really tempting to believe that the other shoe is about to drop or it’s just a matter of time until your next season of suffering. We are often tempted to go ahead and enter that season of suffering, so to speak, so it won’t hurt as much later (or so we think). A natural reaction to hearing someone else’s bad news or tragic circumstances is to dive in to that imagined threat and begin worrying. Perhaps it’s one of our survival instincts. When we have deep fears that we haven’t addressed with the Lord yet, we can easily be provoked when someone shares heart-wrenching news.

I’ll give you a couple examples. Recently, an acquaintance of mine shared that she found out that she has cancer. She’s sharing some of her healing journey and how people have been so wonderful. She has a child the same age as one of my children and my immediate thought, my knee jerk doom thought, was I don’t know how I would handle that. 

As a CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) coach, I teach people how to first turn those questions into statements. So, I coached myself and turned the question, “how would I handle that?” into a statement. This helps reveal the thoughts and anxious feelings underneath the surface. 

I recently listened to a podcast by my friend, Lisa (Farmhouse on Boone), where she discussed the birth of her eighth child. She said she usually she ignores labor until she can’t ignore it anymore. And she also admitted that the week before went into labor, she started to have these feelings of anxiety about labor and trying to mentally prepare for contractions. And she said, “You know, I’ve done this so many times and I’ve had wonderful births and all that, but I realized that I was entertaining stories that were causing my anxiety levels to rise. I also realized that I didn’t have the hormones in place in order to be able to endure labor.” She explained how there are certain hormones that are released in labor that actually help you to decrease pain, but they only come when you need it. It was in that moment that I realized this: We receive the grace from God to endure suffering only when we ourselves need it. 

the grace to endure

Have you ever watched somebody walk through a season of suffering, yet they seem to have so much peace and express how they have been taken care of? I have no shortage of friends who are walking through really hard things right now. I have noticed that those who are follower of Jesus Christ, have more tenderness towards the Holy Spirit and they can see all the ways that God is currently providing for them and helping them keep in this place of calm reassurance. They are receiving a grace that empowers them for the thing that they are currently suffering. Unless we are in a season of suffering ourselves, we do not need to be sustained with that kind of grace during times when we are playing hypothetical knee jerk doom reactions in the face of other people’s bad news. 

A few weeks before my son was born, someone shared a story of how their friend gave birth to a full term baby that was no longer alive. The baby was stillborn and that story created a knee jerk doom reaction within me as I was just days away from having my own baby. My brain immediately went to work about how that was going to happen to me. The question I was asking was “is that going to happen to me now?”  But I didn’t have the grace to endure the actual suffering and the real reason was because I myself was not in a season of suffering. I was having a fear response without actually having a tragic situation unfold. 

Have you experienced knee jerk doom? This seems to be a common story among friends of mine. It seems we all experience in one way or the other. 

Maybe you recently heard someone lost their job and this has been something that you’ve been afraid of happening to you and you have made their current suffering mean that you are next?  Maybe it’s not job related. Maybe it’s with your parents, maybe you just found out that your friend’s parents unexpectedly died. We’re in a season where our parents are getting older and so we begin entertaining that story. Maybe we’re next. Maybe we’ll lose one of our parents to a heart attack, a car accident or some other horror and what will that be like? How will the kids handle it? How will that feel? We begin preparing ourselves for future suffering.

But the truth is, you don’t know when their days are up. And you don’t know when your days are up. It could be 5 years from now, it could be 15 years from now, it could be 20 years from now, you have no idea. But your friend’s story has made you entertain the thought that you are next. 

Understanding that knee jerk doom is likely something you’ll have to contend against in daily life is helpful. We are more connected online than we ever have been before, and there are no shortage of suffering in our newsfeed. I want to invite you to take a different path when it comes to knee-jerk reactions and irrational fear.  

my 4 step process

Here’s a four step process that I use when I experience knee jerk doom. It may be a good idea for you, too. 

Step number one is to take the small step to acknowledge the actual suffering of your friend or acquaintance. Pray for them immediately. Reinforce to yourself that this has happened to them and not to you. 

Step number two is to lay this story and this deep fear of yours at the feet of Jesus. It’s ok to tell Jesus that you have an intense fear of this happening in your own life. 

Step number three is invite the Holy Spirit to guide you out of the deep feeling of fear that you have about this happening to you.  Ask the Holy Spirit to guide you into the next proper step and to give you the grace that you need in order to face it. 

Step number four is be on guard for knee jerk doom. Every one of us has stories of suffering and we need to be mindful of what some people will call triggers. I don’t want to call it a trigger because I think it can be something deeper than that. Again, that’s why I called this knee jerk doom is because we can spiral into the negative thoughts so fast. Being on guard means recognizing that when I log onto social media, I am going to see posts about others’ suffering along with funny cat videos and recipes (it’s wild out there). My brain will go to great lengths to activate knee jerk doom and that’s when I go back to step number one.

I want you to think of Apostle Paul who was writing letters. Before he was being beaten in prison, he didn’t need the grace to endure that suffering. He needed it in the moment. What we’re being invited into is to trust that as we suffer, we will be afforded the grace to endure. Just like Lisa, my friend, said about the hormones that are released during labor to help endure the pain, we will be given what we need when we need it. It’s not helpful to us to try to suffer before the thing has actually happened in order to kind of brace ourselves. That is an example of laying down our peace.

we’re in labor

I want to leave you with a word of encouragement because I know these days feel really dark and there’s, again, no shortage of bad news. Jesus said before he left that we would endure trials and tribulations and that the end days would be like a woman going into labor and that it would be painful, and then we would give birth to great joy as we see Christ’s return. 

But I want to remind you that we don’t know what stage of labor we’re in in these last days. We don’t know if we’re dilated to one and we don’t know if we’re dilated to ten. All we know is that there’s a lot of groaning. There’s a lot of contractions. There’s a lot of wars and rumors of wars and rumors of earthquakes and rumors ofnterrible things happening. We know we are in the last days because God said it would be like labor. There would be these moments that we would get squeezed and it would be difficult and it would be painful and we would have to pant and breathe through these contractions. But friends, we don’t know the time or the hour. We only know that we’re in labor.

We are waiting for the return of Christ. And as a person who has given birth eight times, I know that early labor can be just as uncomfortable as transition. Every single contraction is leading to the Lord and His return, but we don’t know where we’re at. We don’t know. There’s no way to check if we’re at one centimeter or nine. But God said, go therefore and make disciples and don’t forget, I am with you until the end of the age.

And yet there are going to be times in between our contractions where we are going to smile. We are going to be thankful for the people around us. We are going to be able to enjoy a good meal. We are going to be about to take a nap and to rest. And those things in and of themselves are good and they are gift to be enjoyed.

And when we experience knee jerk doom, instead of entering into fear, let us instead put on the armor, put on the belt of truth, put on the sword of the spirit, put on the helmet of righteousness,  and the shoes of peace.

run to the Lord

We must walk in peace and do the mission that God has given to us here on earth. And I pray next time you hear bad news of somebody going through a time of suffering, you would run through this list and you wouldn’t make it mean that you’re next. Instead you, in faith, would run to the Lord instead of sinking into doom and gloom. That is not where the Lord wants you to be. He does not want you running worst case scenarios. This is going to rob you of the peace that God so graciously gifted to you when he did his mighty work on the cross. Instead of laying down your peace, let us instead fight the good fight and allow this maturity to wash over us and bring peace.