FreshMinistry recently emailed Edward Hallowell, M.D., who wrote the preface to Worry: Controlling It and Using It Wisely to ask him “What harm can come to someone from worrying too much?” Here’s his reply:

Excessive worry, or what I call toxic worry, can make you sick, it can cut down your enjoyment of life, and it can hamper your productivity. Toxic worry is bad for every system in your body: it increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes, it impairs digestion, it causes shortness of breath, it causes all kinds of musculoskeletal aches and pains, it produces headaches and migraines, it even interferes with sexual functioning.

While toxic worry immobilizes the sufferer, good worry is a useful guide. The way you tell the difference is to look at what the worry does to you: if it freezes you up, then it is toxic worry; if it leads to constructive action, then it is good worry. The good news is that toxic worry, like high blood pressure, can be brought down into the normal range where it can serve as a useful guide, rather than a dangerous foe.

The current economic downturn is creating an extra burden for American workers as stress in the workplace grows. ComPsych, a Chicago based employee assistance provider, says they have seen a 23-percent increase in requests for crisis and stress-counseling from their client companies in the first quarter of 2003 compared with the first quarter of 2002. They say more and more workers feel unable to keep up with the demands of their jobs.

Nearly 35-percent of workers report an increase in anxiety and stress-related physical problems at work over the past year according to The Martin Company, a workplace communication firm. Rising unemployment, smaller workforces, and a jobless recovery fuel the rise in stress. 27-percent of the workers surveyed reported a rise in emotional problems like insomnia and depression.

Studies have shown that employees exposed to stresses such as layoffs are more likely to engage in violent behavior. Employees who worry about losing their jobs are also less safety motivated and sustain more on-the-job injuries.

Carol Kauffman, a psychologist and instructor at Harvard Medical School says, “It (stress) surfaces in morale, which has a tremendous impact on how hard (employees work. They work more but less effectively.”

—www.usatoday.com, July 30, 2003, Rising job stress could affect bottom line, by Stephanie Armour, Illustration by Jim L. Wilson and Jim Sandell.

Uncertain times can cause us to worry and fret, but Paul provides an answer that works every time: pray.

Philippians 4:6-7 NIV “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Email was supposed to make our lives easier, but the tradeoff may be that it also makes our lives more stressful. A new study from Australia suggests the daily barrage of email may be more than annoying; it can be a major source of daily stress in the workplace. The study conducted by the Australian Psychological Society surveyed hundreds of male and female managers, and researcher Amanda Gordon says the results apply to anyone with a hefty e-mail inbox.

According to the survey, sixty-nine percent of the people surveyed reported that having to deal with a load of email is mildly to moderately stressful. Two in every one hundred reported high levels of stress due to the daily load of e-mail.

Electronic mail has become the primary method of communication in the workplace. Though email has given workers easy and quick access to each other, it has added an additional burden to workers. Gordon says eighty percent of those surveyed spent more than 20 percent of their workday dealing with email. Most said they dealt with between 20 and 50 work related e-mails a day plus spam and personal messages.

Gordon says the usage of email has also brought an unfair expectation that people could respond quickly. She says, "When you add another stressor in your normal working day, it becomes cumulative. There are people who are consulting psychologists about workplace stress and as we talk about it we discover that e-mail is part of it." Gordon adds, people are stressed by concerns about is interpretation of e-mails. She says, "Because you don't have the verbal cues of speaking with someone you don't always necessarily know what they're talking about, so sometimes people misinterpret whether they're angry or not."

—http://www.theage.com.au, Emails adding to workplace stress, November 10, 2003. Illustration by Jim L. Wilson and Jim Sandell.

Proverbs 12:25 NIV "An anxious heart weighs a man down, but a kind word cheers him up."

Brad Hawley had a colleague who assigned his English class the responsibility of writing an essay on "Beowulf, the Epic Warrior".On student, who claimed to have run spell check on his paper, turned in his report with the title, "Beowulf, the Epic Worrier."

The best definition I've ever heard of worry is "shoveling smoke."Beyond being a waste of our time, it demonstrates a total lack of faith. Because when we worry, we are not trusting that God will work our circumstances out for good. But it is easy to replace positive action for worry. If we are going to be an epic warrior, we can't be an epic worrier.

Philip. 4:6 (NLT) "Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done."

A new Gallup poll suggests the level of stress among Americans has not changed much in recent years. Since 1984, between 33 percent and 42 percent of Americans continue to report they are under stress frequently. Most recently, 38 percent of respondents said they experience frequent stress and 39 percent said they sometimes feel stressed. The major causes of stress reported were parenting children under 18, work, and not having enough time to do the things people want to do. One in five respondents said they rarely experienced stress, while 3 percent said they were never stressed.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/30/health/webmd/main2414493.shtml. Illustration by Jim L. Wilson and Jim Sandell.

Philippians 4:6 (ESV) "do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God."

In Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a relentless God, Francis Chan writes “Worry implies that we don’t quite trust that God is big enough, powerful enough, or loving enough to take care of what’s happening in our lives.”

--Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a relentless God, P. 42 Illustration by Jim L. Wilson

Philippians 4:6 (AMP) “Do not fret or have any anxiety about anything, but in every circumstance and in everything, by prayer and petition (definite requests), with thanksgiving, continue to make your wants known to God.”

In a new collection of letters, Editor Joseph Galliano has compiled advice from today’s luminaries to their own sixteen-year-old selves.

--Ed. Joseph Galliano, Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self, referenced in The Week, December 9, 2011 p. 48-49 Illustration by Jim L. Wilson and Rodger Russell

Novelist Stephen King tells his sixteen-year-old self to stay away from the recreational drugs that captured him for ten years. Hard Rocker Alice Cooper suggests he should have looked for “a really good lookin’ church girl” and avoided the trashy girls who are only exciting for about five minutes. A lot of advice concerned what companies to invest in; Starbucks, Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc.

If you had a chance to talk to the person you were when you were sixteen, what would you tell you? I think one of the best things I could tell myself is not to worry about so many things. Most of the things I spent all that time worrying about, never happened.

Matthew 6:34 (HCSB) Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Actor Christopher Walken is a nervous wreck. He refuses to fly. When he travels he wants to be driven in a Limousine. He doesn’t like to go outside in London because he is afraid he will look the wrong way in traffic while crossing a street. He tells his wife, “Stay in the hotel. Don’t go out there. It’s too dangerous.”

Someone should tell him that worrying like that will give him ulcers but then he would just have one more thing to worry about. --Jim L. Wilson and Rodger Russell

Philippians 4:6 (HCSB) Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.

In Crazy Love, Francis Chan writes, “Worry implies that we don’t quite trust that God is big enough, powerful enough, or loving enough to take care of what’s happening in our lives.”—Jim L. Wilson and Stephen Argilla

Worry can disable or paralyze us making us ineffective for God’s use in reaching out to the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Matthew 6:25-30 (ESV) (25) “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? (26) Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? (27) And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? (28) And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, (29) yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (30) But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

We worry about a lot of things. Do we have enough money? Will our children be OK? Many of us worry about our relationships or our careers. Statistics show that only 8% of the things we worry about are a genuine cause for concern.

Praying and trusting in God is much more productive than worrying. After all, He is the one in control. —Jim L. Wilson and Marla Harper.

Philippians 4:6-7 (ESV) do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. (7) And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Larry David was a co-creator of the television sitcom, Seinfeld. The success of that show has made David a multimillionaire. His success however didn’t stop his mother from worrying. Larry David said his mother would ask him, even after Seinfeld was the No. 1 show on Television, “Are they going to keep you? Do they think you’re doing a god job?”

She worried about him so much when he was younger that she once wrote to the New York Post’s advice columnist, seeking advice on how to save her youngest son from a life of poverty. After he was wealthy he would book his parents first-class plane tickets to visit him and his mother would downgrade the tickets to coach telling him he needed to keep his money.

Her worry kept her from enjoying his success, and he has taken after her. By his own testimony he worries too much about the future to enjoy the present.

Anxiety, worrying about tomorrow, keeps the Christian from loving God completely today. It messes up our witness for Christ. No one is inspired by a worrier. --Jim L. Wilson and Rodger Russell

Philippians 4:6 (NKJV) Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God;

A new study from Norway concludes that hypochondriacs are at a greater risk for heart disease. Researchers tracked volunteers’ heart health for 12 years and found that those with health anxiety were 71% likelier to develop cardiac problems. —Jim L. Wilson and Rodger Russell.

Philippians 4:6 (HCSB) “Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.”

Scientists at Yale University have actually identified a 'worry gene.' But they say that while you may have inherited it, you can overcome it. Researchers have found that about forty percent of the things we worry about never happen.

That means only eight percent of the things we worry about are even likely to happen!

The aphorism 'worry is just interest paid on trouble before it comes due’ in most cases it never comes due. Think; when you worry, there's a ninety-two percent chance you're paying interest on a debt that's not even yours! How foolish is that? —Jim L. Wilson and Stephen Hayes

Matthew 6:25 (HCSB)“This is why I tell you: Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothing?”

In the trail of debris left by the disintegration of Comet Encke, Czech astronomers have discovered two large asteroids. The orbit of the Earth regularly takes us through this trail of debris, called the Taurid shower, creating a dazzling display of shooting stars. Most of the rocks are so small they vaporize when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, creating the aerial display, while some larger ones survive to strike the earth as a meteorite. If we were to collide with one of the newly discovered large ones, one is 650 feet in diameter, the other 980 feet, it would be catastrophic. The impact would be large enough to wipe out all life on entire continents. Astronomers warn there are probably even larger asteroids hidden within the Taurid shower. On the bright side, our next encounter with the debris trail is not until 2022.

Anxiety about something so obviously out of our control is fruitless. The Bible tells us that anxiety is fruitless anyway. Rather than worry about things, we should trust God who has us in his hand. —Jim L. Wilson and Rodger Russell.

Philippians 4:6 (CSB) “Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”

In Psychology Today, Raj Persaud, M.D. says, “This essential difference between us and animals; they get anxious, but they don’t worry, holds the secret to mental health. Rumination transforms relatively safe situations into unsafe predicaments.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/slightly-blighty/202010/surprising-approach-coping-covid-19-stress

“Therefore I tell you: Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothing? Consider the birds of the sky: They don’t sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth more than they?