Breathe

We’re a month and a half into 2026 and your chest is still tight, isn’t it? All of the New Year’s resolutions you planned to implement have already fallen through, because the problems of 2025 followed you here. Your anxiety, stress, and fear of failure still gnaw at you every second of every day and it seems like the pit of darkness which is your mind is growing ever deeper and ever darker. As the walls are closing in, maybe you have come to the conclusion that one of your biggest fears has come to fruition — you are a failure. Today is the day that your anxiety will finally take you over because the stresses of this life are just too much to handle anymore — but that’s not true — and you know it.

Deep down in that tight chest of yours you know that there is still a fight left in you. You’re not ready to quit. You’re not ready to throw in the towel just yet, because something inside of you knows that even though you considered giving up, it was never an option to begin with. The only reason your chest is so tight is because you’ve accepted the weight of the world as your responsibility, and last time I checked, nobody asked you to. You’re carrying weights that probably aren’t even meant for you, and burdens you can’t even call your own. What’s the deal? Why are you doing that?!

I think it’s safe to assume that somewhere along the line a situational fire broke out in your life or the life of somebody close to you, and you were left standing there with the fireman’s hose trying to put it out, but unsure of where to point the water, and that situation that was already bad somehow seemed to get worse.

In Building a Non-Anxious Life by Dr. John Delony, he states that, “Anxiety is just an alarm system. Nothing more and nothing less.” In the book, he talks about this exact situation where his anxiety alarms were going off, and because he didn’t know how to cope with the situation he was in, it didn’t get better. It wasn’t until he stepped back and realized that anxiety isn’t the problem, it’s just the warning bells your body gives when it’s uneasy, that he realized he could do something about it.

He goes on to say, “It was like the smoke alarms were going off in my kitchen, and I decided to Google ‘fire’ and start reading. Sure, I learned a lot about fire, but my house still burned down around me.”

To be quite honest with you, I started the first paragraph of this blog a week ago, but because the thought of getting started, rolling my sleeves up, and just writing something made me nervous, I’ve been putting it off. I’ve been hiding from the thing that I’ve been most excited to do, this.

You see, sometimes as humans, we might hide from a number of things or responsibilities, because it’s easier to put them in the back corner of our mind and try to forget, than it is to deal with it. We’ve lived our lives like this for years, but what happens when smoke comes billowing out from underneath that locked door you finally forgot about?

Whether it be anxiety, stress, or fear, at some point it must be dealt with, and we can either deal with it when it comes up, or wait until it’s burning everything down.

For me, I guess I would say the thing I put away the most is a fear of success, but what happens when I’m old and at the end of my life, and I look back to see I never did the things I deeply wanted to do? I assume I would be an elderly shell of the potential that was wasted, and the heartbreak of a life not lived would finish me off. Sure, I could look back on good moments, but time does not refund the dreams we never pursue. This is a good problem though. I don’t fear failure, because I know it is inevitable. I fear success, because I know it’ll ask more of me, and it’s a scary thought to realize mediocrity is no longer acceptable.

Maybe it’s different for you. Maybe you grew up in an abusive household, mentally or physically. Maybe you’ve always been the scapegoat everywhere you go, and you don’t know why. Maybe every room you walk into, you feel like a stranger. I don’t know what the cause of the tightness in your chest is or what sets off your anxiety alarms, but I do know a way out.

We see in John 1:5 a sentence that reads like this: “And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” This specific passage is speaking of the arrival of Jesus and the oneness of God, but with this revelation, we can also realize that Jesus is the light that can and will dispel any darkness in our lives. Fear, stress, and anxiety all have to bow at the mention of the name, Jesus. There is no weight too heavy for him to carry, even when you’re struggling to stand.

So, hand it over. Let it go, and don’t look back, look up. The thing that you have had locked up in a place nobody can see, snarling and ready to pounce on you… let it go and breathe.

The song Breathe by Maverick City Music reads like this:

This goes out to the worried,
This goes out to the stressed,
Sorting out a million thoughts running through your head.

Please don’t hold your breath,
Just breathe.

’Cause it’s a miracle we can breathe,
There’s power in the way that we breathe.
Release your heavy burdens,
And let everything that has breath, praise the Lord

This is why we have breath, so praise the Lord.

The bottom line is this: We were created to worship and praise God, and anything that gets more attention in our lives than Him is an idol. I know I keep circling around fear, anxiety, and stress, but there is a reason for that. Too often, do we give the weights that so easily beset us dominion in our lives. If we’re not careful, these things that try to cripple us will become our idols.

Overcoming these things that make our chest tight is coming to the realization that the only thing we can change sometimes is ourselves. We’re not always going to have control over every situation or outcome, but we can control the way we let it affect our soul. We don’t have to let these things take root in our heart to a point it debilitates us at a later date, we can take control of our emotions and responses now.

2 Corinthians 10:5 says: Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

It’s easy to let a million thoughts run through our head all at once and cause panic, but we must take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and redirect our thoughts toward Him. If these thoughts are taking us away from Him or creating stumbling blocks in our lives, we must remove them at once.

It’s not God’s will for us to live in anxiety, but to live in peace, for He is the God of peace, and when we surrender to that, it will pass all of our understanding. We won’t even care to understand because we know He has a perfect plan for us.

So, I’ll leave you with this quick exercise. Close your eyes and take the deepest breath you can take. Fix your thoughts on your Creator and His faithfulness to you, and slowly let out that breath. Feel better? I bet you do.

Never forget that He is the breath in our lungs and if our chest is tight, it’s because we have allowed something to move in that is not from Him.

Yes, anxiety is an alarm system, but when those alarms are going off, we must keep our eyes peeled for the smoke and give the Lord room to step in and extinguish the things trying to take our eyes off Him.

Remember, just breathe, because it’s a miracle we can breathe.