Let the peace that Christ gives control your thinking. It is for peace that you were chosen to be together in one body. And always be thankful. Colossians 3:15
I recently had a conversation with a client who has suffered from chronic anxiety. Recently, he has had an adjustment to his antianxiety medication which he feels has been helpful. As a former pilot, he used the analogy of being in a cockpit where there are many alarms that blink, and one needs to pay attention to their warnings. Most are standard alerts that one must deal with, but one can be overwhelmed with the volume of such alerts.
He stated that anxiety is like a blizzard of alerts going off in his brain, and he must attend to the ones that are most important. There is a sort of filter that helps deal with such alerts. With no medication, the alerts in his head all seem to have equal value of assessing danger. Everything looks like potential disaster. It can feel overwhelming. With the medication, he feels that he is better able to filter the alerts that are critical, and to defer the ones that are not of immediate priority.
Indeed, we all filter our thoughts and responses. A healthy prefrontal cortex helps us to not “say the quiet things out loud”. A good anxiety filter helps us to prioritize the things that are critical and in need immediate attention from those things that can be deferred or even disregarded.
So, the role of medication is not to solve our thinking problems, but to give us the extra margins to better filter the things that are critical, and things that can be deferred.
Prayer: Lord, thank you for the amazing way you have given us the mechanisms to process and relay information, Amen
Reflections of a Counselor 