Anxiety in the Connected Age: Causes and Remedies

The most anxious generation faces loneliness despite living in a hyper-connected world, highlighting the need for community and trust.

### Understanding Anxiety: The Interplay of Physical and Spiritual Factors
* 🌍 We live in the **most connected age in history**, yet it is paradoxically the **most anxious generation**, largely due to feelings of **isolation despite online connections**.
* 🤝 Johnny Ardavanis and Hank Bowen discuss the themes from "Consider the Lies," focusing on the "**recipes**" or contributing factors that can lead to **anxiety**.
* 🏀 Personal anecdotes highlight how physical well-being, like injuries, can influence mental states, emphasizing the **intertwined nature of body, soul, and mind**.
* 📖 Martin Lloyd Jones argues that both physical and spiritual aspects contribute to anxiety, and the Bible illustrates this through figures like **Moses and Elijah**, who experienced **profound lows** despite their faith.
* 🧠 Factors such as natural temperament, physical infirmities, exhaustion, loneliness, trauma, and grief are identified as **significant contributors to anxiety**.
* 👥 Loneliness, even in a digitally connected world, can exacerbate feelings of despair, as **true community and transparency** are often lacking in social media interactions.
* 💔 Grief is acknowledged as a natural part of life, but **prolonged grief without resolution** can lead to **deeper despair**, underscoring the **importance of community support** in the healing process.
* ✨ Ultimately, the discussion pivots towards recognizing the need for a **greater understanding of God's character** as a source of **hope and strength** amidst anxiety.

we live in the most connected world in human history, connected age, and yet it's the most anxious generation we've ever had. Part of it is because even though there's this connection that people feel online, we live largely very lonely lives. A life of isolation is antithetical to a life of deep faith and deep trust. All right, welcome back to dial in. This is Johnny Ardavanis, and I'm sitting here with Hank Bowen. I should say my name is Johnny Ardavanis rather than this is Johnny Ardavanis. But, Hank, we're here. Everything going well today? Everything's going fantastic. I'm excited to dive in and continue the series, dive in, dialing. Okay, I like it. So, we're walking through some of the major themes of Consider the Lies, finding perfect peace in the character of God. In this episode, we wanted to talk about some of the root causes, some would say, but I call them recipes or contributing factors because I don't necessarily want to make it sound like

certain things cause us to be sinfully anxious, but you, what's the term you used? I said it would be foolish not to consider that there's fertile ground from which we could be tempted. Yeah, certain things that are recipes for anxiety. Um, and in this episode, we want to talk about some of the physical contributions, uh, different things about our body, or what happens with our sleep, and different patterns of life that would contribute to that anxiety. And I'll use a different, just a personal story to start. I remember, I've told you before that I've, uh, loved to play basketball, and I share this in the book, but I'm not like a legitimate basketball player. I'm kind of like the wannabe LA Fitness guy. Like, I used to have the finger sleeves like Alan Iverson. You're kidding. Oh yeah. Are you kidding me? That's brutal. Yeah, like I, the tattoo sleeves, but I had no tattoos type of thing. That's not in the book. Yeah, no, I know. They made me take that part.

out you know like um used to play all the time and in basketball. I uh tore my rotator a couple of times. I've had multiple surgeries on my shoulders, and one of the things that I realize quickly is that different injuries. I've told you I broke my knees. I've torn my shoulders. I've broken a lot of different body parts and ligaments. Johnny's actually incapable of giving a high five. That's actually very true. I know, yeah, and there's a reason my nickname is Mr. Glass um, but part of that I just begin to realize very quickly that your physical um well-being does play a component into the way that you're just thinking mentally. This is never to excuse an ungodly worry, but it is to maybe express the reality that we are body, soul, and mind um aw toer. I wrote down in the book that he he says often it takes a whole Bible to make a whole Christian, and it's just the reality that no one passage of scripture provides a comprehensive framework for

any particular topic or subject. Therefore, it would be extreme and unbiblical to say that the root cause of anxiety is always physical. It would always be extreme and unbiblical to say that the root causes or recipes for anxiety are always spiritual, although I do believe it's much more spiritual than physical. Martin Lloyd Jones, who wrote the book Spiritual Depression, and I kind of derived a lot of the way I thought about this topic in particular from Martin Lloyd Jones's preaching and writing, he says that we are embodied beings and we can't demarcate our spiritual lives from our physical lives. So, in that regard, I go into a little bit of the story whenever I preach on it about Moses and Elijah at the mountain transfiguration. You have Jesus there with Peter, James, and John, and then it says that he was transfigured before them, and then on his right and on his left, you have the two heroes of the Old Testament, Moses, who is the lawgiver, and you know you would

argue the most important person in the Old Testament. Then you have the Law's greatest teacher and proclaimer and prophet, and Elijah. And if you had to really consider the, yeah, the two most bold, faithful, godly characters in the Old Testament, Moses talked to God face to face, and Elijah is taken up to glory in a chariot of fire. And yet, the reality is in scripture, uh, those two figures that have a lot to commend about them. Also, the Bible includes their lapses in trust and departures from joy and their own battle with both anxiety and depression. And so, I wrote down several different things, uh, in the book. And when I teach through it, I want to be fair because the Bible does speak to the condition of our heart. But there's some contributing factors, even physically, that would, uh, be those recipes for anxiety. Anything so far? No, we're good so far. And so, I think you were going to list out maybe a few of the different situations in which we could find ourselves maybe especially prone to kind

of fall into a state of anxiety, and I think if I'm listening to this, I'd be thinking through these would be oftentimes the situations in which I should actually be kind of proactively raising my guard, um, and taking almost a physical inventory of our any of these things ringing true, and is that maybe a place where anxiety is beginning to spring up? Yeah, absolutely, and the first of those, and I wrote down five or six, the first of those would be just your natural temperament. Uh, Martin Lloyd Jones talks about this a lot in his book Spiritual Depression, but when God does save an individual, he does give them a new heart, but that doesn't necessarily change their natural temperament or their disposition. There are people that wake up and they're extroverted, and every day is great, and every day is awesome, and there are other people that are naturally more prone to introspection and to kind of, uh, calculative and analytical personalities that might be more prone to despair. It says in James 5:17 that Elijah, who is

going to call down fire from heaven. He's going to shut the sky, and there's not going to be an ounce of rain for three years. He's going to heal, and he's going to do a lot of mighty things and slay the false prophets of Baal. There's at one point that he is going to run for his life, and in First Kings 19, he begs for God to kill him because there's just these massive swings. First Kings 18, he is man, this guy is a baller, and in First Kings 19, he's saying, God, it is enough for me, just kill me. He's suicidal. Um, and you have to consider in James, it says that Elijah was a man like us, and I think in large part, James may be referring to the power of his prayer, but is also just referring to maybe just his natural temperament. He had some monumental lows. He had some deep seasons of just kind of maybe a personality or temperament that I talk about where he might be more prone to despair. The

second thing that maybe might be a contributing factor for anxiety and despair would be just physical infirmity. When God is talking to Moses at the burning bush, he gives him a commission to go to Pharaoh and say, Hey, let my people go. And Moses says, Send someone else. And God responds and begins to proclaim the mission once again. And then the reason for Moses's anxiety at the thought and the daunting task of going to Pharaoh and the mightiest army and empire on Earth is that he stuttered. And so, there's this physical infirmity that maybe provided or prompted this social anxiety for Moses. But that was the number one thing that he thought of: I can't do this. I don't talk good. And that's to your earlier point when you were saying, when you were going through, you shared with us personally just even prior surgeries. I mean, very practically, it's one thing to struggle with a stutter, but then also for those who are going through something like a reconstructive shoulder.

surgery being laid up in bed, unable to physically exert yourself, can be a very, very lonely, isolating position. Well, yeah, and because God made us embodied creatures that were made to exercise and, you know, when we, different things like that. And so, even Charles Spurgeon, I talk about him, he's probably most known for being the prince of preachers and being one of the most well-known expositors in history. And yet, Charles Spurgeon is very well known for his lifelong battle with depression that he contributed to a gout condition that would really prompt significant degrees of pain. He said over the last 20 years of his life that it was a great mercy of God for him to get a good night's sleep because of his gout. So, whether it's a stuttering mouth, a gout condition, a thyroid irregularity, there are different things from a physical perspective that I want to clarify never excuse ungodly worry but do provide different recipes and contributing factors or fertile ground for us to be

anxious because we're embodied creatures. The third would be exhaustion. In First Kings 18, I've told you that Elijah's coming off of a three-year drought. He really calls down fire from Heaven. He defeats the prophets of Baal. They slay at least 450 prophets, maybe 850 depending on the way you read the passage. Then he runs from Mount Carmel 20 miles. He beats King Ahab in his chariot, and he goes to the city expecting national revival. And then when he arrives, he hears that Queen Jezebel is hunting for him, trying to kill him. And he goes from there, and that's when he says, Oh God, it is enough. Take my life. But you just have to think about the exhaustion that comes from a 20-mile sprint after a three-year famine and drought. And there's real factors that Elijah was totally wasted. He's fatigued, and that's never an excuse for disobedience, but we're vulnerable creatures. That's why in Psalm 103, it

says that God is mindful of our frame. He knows that we're dust. We're not made from steel; we're made from the dust. God made us to sleep, and sometimes, you know, even in that scenario with Elijah, the main theme of the book that I'm writing is on how God proclaims his character to those who are anxious. But before God ever proclaims his character to Elijah, he first gives him a nap and a snack because God made our bodies, and he's mindful that we are embodied beings. And as Martin Lloyd Jones says, you cannot demarcate our physical lives from our spiritual life because they're wedded together, and there's an intricacy and interdependence in ways that we may not fully fathom. Yet the Bible speaks about with a great level of clarity. The fourth thing I think that might be a contributing factor is loneliness. You know, in Genesis 2, God looks at his creation, everything is toov, it's very good, it's good. And but in Genesis 2, it says there's something was

not good, and it was not good for man to be alone. And of course, this passage is about Adam and finding a helpmate and Eve, but I think the reality of it and the principle of it remains true. It's not good for man to be alone. You know, one of the interesting things about the world in which we live, we live in the most connected, connected world in human history, connected age, and yet it's the most anxious generation we've ever had. And part of it is because even though there's this connection that people feel online, we live largely very lonely lives. And so that loneliness, however it may feel, you can live in a crowd of people and yet live a very lonely life because you're not fully known and not transparent. We live kind of secret lives. That loneliness is a contributing, I think, factor for both anxiety and despair. And sometimes what people who are anxious and despairing think they need is isolation. Like Elijah, he went outside of the promised land thinking that may be the solution, and

yet God was so gracious to bring him out of that because sometimes what we think is the remedy for our anxiety and despair is actually just perpetuating it by prolonged seasons of loneliness, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. And especially, I think today, to your point about the prevalence of social media and just constantly being connected with one another, it's probably a conversation for another day that we can dive into more deeply, but suffice it to say, uh, quick interactions on social media and hiding behind a screen is not the biblical community or the biblical model laid out for living in community united with brothers and sisters in Christ in a local church context where they truly get to know you. Um, that's not, uh, the same as the social media kind of, Hey, like from afar, yeah, I have 2,000 friends, whatever that means. Yeah, and I, at the end of the book, I have a chapter on that. Faith is a community project, meaning like that if the remedy that God provides for the anxious is to have a greater and enlarged and magnified view

of his character. Sometimes we read a book on it by ourselves and think that we can implement these truths by ourselves, but the reality is faith is a community project. That's why God gave us the local church. And so, a lot of people may attend church, but there's no verbiage in the New Testament for anybody attending church. You belong to the church. You participate in the church. And so, really, a life of isolation is antithetical to a life of deep faith and deep trust. So, that would be the fourth. The fifth maybe contributing factor, a recipe for anxiety and despair, would be trauma. And I know that trauma is kind of a trigger word because it's become so relative. You know, someone say, Yeah, I had kind of a traumatic situation. Like, Well, what does that mean? But in the Bible, bare minimum, there are some traumatic experiences from God's people. And like, I would say David, who Mary Saul's daughter is anointed king, and then we often talk about the Psalms that David wrote when

he's saying, Oh God, you are my rock, you are my stronghold, you are my deliverer. I will trust in you. David's not writing that from a Jerusalem palace; he's writing that in the caves. David, and many people don't realize this, is anointed king as a teenager, and then for the next 10 years of his life, he's running for his life from his father-in-law, the guy that was supposed to love him, take care of him, provide for him, and is the one that's hunting for his life with his army. And David's in the caves with his mighty men saying, Oh God, help me to trust you, help me to trust you. And there's a true level of trauma there, you know. Even when you look at Elijah, Elijah experienced real trauma because all of the other prophets of God were slaughtered. That's real significant tragedy, and there's a lot of different other stories in the Bible that you could highlight, but the theme that is worth even examining is, and we'll talk about

this in future episodes is that God's goodness is so pervasive, and his love is so sure that it has the power to pervade even the darkest and most evil moments of our life, and his sovereignty rules even there. The sixth um I was a catalyst for anxiety or recipe for anxiety is grief, uh, especially even for despair. The Christian life is not one high after another high after another high. Our lives are often lived in the valley of the shadow of death, and in that Valley, it's often where we experience true levels of grief. You know, grief because of a lost loved one, a lost friendship, a lost baby, miscarried child. Um, grief is not wrong, uh, at all. Prolonged seasons of grief are not wrong, but when grief takes place without as its own Terminus, rather than carrying that grief to God, that grief can ultimately turn into a deep level of Despair and depression. It speaks to a need. We return to the toer quote. I feel like more than any other quote maybe in this podcast, but

it's there for a reason, and that another reason it strikes me to be reading through the totality of scripture is that by following the stories. I mean, you get to First Kings 19 after First Kings 18, but if you kind of pick up the story in First Kings 18 and leave it, you're maybe missing the fact that these real men and women who live these lives are facing these very real challenges that are very akin, oftentimes more extreme, but for many folks, very relatable to many of the challenges people are facing today. Yeah, well, the Bible is unfailingly relevant. You know, sometimes we read the stories of different heroes in the scriptures, and we wonder, do they ever fail and falter like I do? And then we read of the reality that Moses was anxious, Abraham lied, Noah got drunk, David killed and committed adultery, Elijah, the prophet of boldness and faithfulness, begs God to take his life. And none of these stories excuse any sin on our part, but it does go to show us

that God is so gracious to help and redeem all of those who are made in His image. And there's no perfect people in the story that God is writing, only a perfect God. Yeah, and so, yeah, I'm encouraged by that. And I think just even as you take those different contributing factors, I think, and we turn a little bit, you know, I always want to end with a remnant of hope, you know, sometimes even when we think about Jesus issuing the prohibition, Do not be anxious, right, in Matthew 6:25, and we'll get here in a couple weeks. Sometimes we imagine those Israelites sitting on the hillside of the Mount of Beatitudes. That's so different than us, you know. What could they possibly be anxious about? There's no this or this or that. But we often fail to remember that they were under the regime of Rome. It was literally Rome and the tetrarch that chopped off the head of John the Baptist, the greatest prophet and preacher that they had seen in 400 years. The Roman Empire was known

for raping women and crucifying their enemies for 40 miles leading up to a city so that the whole world would know that you can't mess with Rome. So when Jesus is telling his followers not to be anxious, it's not like they're growing up in an environment that is so different than the one that we live in today. There was the constant prospect of fear and brutality and ruthlessness from the Roman regime, and yet he's still going to tell them, Do not be anxious. Thankfully, and we'll talk about this in the episodes to come, he doesn't stop there. He doesn't just say, Snap out of it. He gives them all the reasons why they should trust him and who they have as a Heavenly Father. Absolutely. So last episode, we looked first and foremost at culture today wants to tell us to look inward to kind of find the root cause of all of our anxiety, blame it on them, or, and the general thrust of the argument you're setting up for us, is actually first we need to consider our heavenly

father. We don't consider our inner child; we consider our heavenly father. Yeah, um, today it strikes me there's actually a lot of reasons to be anxious. You mentioned the J.I. Packer, yeah, quote, um, basically saying the world is a mad place. The natural response would be to be anxious, and so the uncommon response that we're gifted through Jesus is actually joy amidst suffering and peace that surpasses all understanding. Absolutely. And so then, as we go forward, I think it might be helpful to delineate exactly what we're talking about. You even mention in grief it's okay to grieve for a period of time, but we don't want the grief to be an end in and of itself. Maybe the question practically would be can we set ourselves up to understand where does grief become sin, where does worry become anxiety, where do natural cares of this world start to teeter over into a sinful attitude towards God. Yeah, so in the next episode, I think, yeah, delineating between, you know, a grief and maybe an ungodly

Joy Paul says we are sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, so sorrow definitely has a place in the Christian life. Paul says he's sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, so how do you marry those two realities together? And then secondly, I would say, when does care and concern become an ungodly worry or anxiety? And I often use worry and anxiety interchangeably, but to have care and concern, those are good and godly things. But the same word is used throughout the New Testament to define good concern, godly care, and then sinful anxiety. And so we'll talk about that in the next episode. Awesome, I'm looking forward to it. All right, thanks Hank. Yep, thanks. [Music]

Physical Recipes For Anxiety - Does My Body Affect My Mind? - Jonny Ardavanis

Dial In Ministries

The Connection Between Physical Well-being and Anxiety

Despite living in a highly connected world, the current generation experiences high levels of anxiety and loneliness.

Physical injuries and health issues can contribute to mental well-being, highlighting the interconnectedness of body, soul, and mind.

The root causes of anxiety are multifaceted, involving both physical and spiritual factors, making it important to consider a holistic approach to addressing it.

The Impact of Temperament and Infirmity on Anxiety in the Old Testament

Moses and Elijah are two of the most significant figures in the Old Testament, both displaying boldness and faithfulness to God.

Despite their greatness, the Bible also highlights their struggles with anxiety and depression.

Contributing factors to their struggles include natural temperament and physical infirmity, with both characters experiencing monumental lows and moments of despair.

The Impact of Physical and Emotional Factors on Anxiety

Surgery and physical limitations can lead to feelings of loneliness and isolation.

Charles Spurgeon's battle with depression and gout highlights the physical factors that can contribute to anxiety.

Exhaustion, as seen in Elijah's story, and loneliness in a connected world are also significant factors that can exacerbate feelings of anxiety and despair.

The Role of Community and Trauma in Anxiety and Despair

God's grace can alleviate anxiety and despair, but prolonged loneliness can perpetuate these feelings.

Social media connections are not a substitute for genuine community, which is essential for deep faith and trust.

Trauma, as experienced by biblical figures like David and Elijah, can have a significant impact on one's life, highlighting the importance of community and support in overcoming such challenges.

God's Goodness in Times of Grief and Anxiety

God's goodness and love can pervade even the darkest moments of life, offering hope and sovereignty.

Grief is a natural response to loss, but prolonged grief without turning to God can lead to despair and depression.

The stories of biblical figures show that everyone faces real challenges and failures, highlighting God's grace and redemption for all.

Jesus' Message on Anxiety in a Brutal World

Jesus' followers lived in a harsh environment under the Roman regime, yet he urged them not to be anxious.

The common response to the world's chaos is anxiety, but Jesus offers joy and peace amidst suffering.

The discussion will explore the balance between grief and sin, as well as the distinction between godly care and sinful anxiety.