Taking Control

 

     This week I had the opportunity to be a part of some really interesting discussions about anxiety, depression, and crises family situations. Throughout the course of our discussion, I found myself both amazed by the agency our Heavenly Father has given us and taken aback by the adversary’s ability to cause us to limit its power. Agency is one of the most powerful things we have in this life and if we use it properly, we can accomplish miraculous things, however if we let satin begin to take our agency and use it in poor destructive ways, we can find ourselves in very dark places. But that is not our heavenly fathers plan for us. Its far better than that. It is for us to be able to use our agency to become something great and to be worthy of being called suns and daughters of God.

     I will preface this with the fact that this with what I am going to say will most likely counter what you have heard in the world today, but I hope that it will be a light to those who are open to the ideas. But before we get to that I want to talk about anxiety and depression in the purest and natural form. Anxiety is nothing more than our bodies natural fight, flight, or freeze responses to danger around us. That’s right anxiety is a totally natural thing that all of us are capable of.  Anxiety is our bodies natural way of trying to resolve a problem and avoid danger. Depression is a step furthest than that, depression is when our brain believes there is no way to escape the danger and that we will forever be doomed to whatever circumstance has caused our anxiety with no hope of ever changing it. Now, this is where things get really interesting and the part of the explanation of why these things are on the rise.

      You see our brain doesn’t really make decisions based off reality, its our spirits job to discern between truth and error, not our brains. Our brain makes designs based on what we perceive to be reality not reality itself. For example, your asked to say a few words Infront of a crown of people. Immediately anxiety sets in, you hear rate jumps, your blood pressure shoots up and your palms get all sweaty. In a nutshell your body is preparing to either fight or flight. But why? There’s no real danger nobody there is actually going to attack you. So why did our body do this? Because our thoughts led our brain to think there was a real danger. You see this is the key.

      Your brain can only react you can’t change that. However, you can change what its reacting too. Your thoughts. If you don’t think the crown your Infront of is going to attack you, neither will your brain. You won’t feel anxiety if you don’t give your brain anything to trigger it. this is where the agency in anxiety and depression lies. This is where you can take control of it again. Now this is a lot more than just “tell yourself happy thought’ your brain will immediately reject it if you don’t even believe it yourself. The thought that places the false perceived ones MUST BE ABSOLUTE TRUTH. Truth is the key to cure anxiety and depression. If we could stop perceiving the world around us as threatening and stop telling ourselves that we are miserable then we actually wouldn’t be.

       Now there is a third factor to this. Circumstances. But I’m here to tell you that circumstances don’t control your anxiety and depression do. They merely influence your thoughts that then control your anxiety and depression. but this is often the fall of ourselves. We tale a circumstance that’s kind of bad and tell our brains its horrible. For example: Say the father of a child is sent off to war. Not an idea situation but there is a start difference between “the government stole my dad and is going to get him killed” and “My dad is a hero”. You see how the first one cause anger but the second one inspires dignity. The situation didn’t change. Only our thoughts did. If this generation could but learn to use our agency to control our thoughts and therefore our brain we could bring about miracles in the world of mental health.