029: Living with anxiety

In one sense, serious anxiety—the kind that could be called “clinical anxiety” or an “anxiety disorder”—is like other common medical problems: it afflicts quite a lot of us, it has various identifiable forms and physical symptoms, and it can be treated. But of course, suffering from an anxiety disorder is also different from having diabetes or heart disease, because it is a dysfunction not just of a bodily process, but of how we think and feel. This makes the experience of clinical anxiety doubly hard to cope with. Its physical symptoms and everyday consequences are hard enough, but there is also the confusing and disorienting experience of “me” being anxious or terrified, when another part of “me” is trying to explain to myself that there’s really no reason to be so anxious. Moore College lecturer Paul Grimmond knows about this firsthand, and in this episode, he not only explains what “clinical anxiety” is and what it feels like, but shares his insights into how we should think about and respond to anxiety as Christians. For show notes and episode transcript, visit https://ccl.moore.edu.au/2019/06/05/podcast-episode-029/