Can worry help you on this edition of Truth and Love?

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association

of Certified Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems

that people face.

On February 28th, the Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled, Don't Worry if you

always worry, it may help you. The article was by Elizabeth Bernstein and talked about the

problem of worry relying on the testimony of experts in the field of psychology.

Worry is, of course, a problem that is experienced by everyone in the human race sooner or later,

and it's something that the Bible spends a great deal of time talking about.

And on the podcast this week, we want to analyze Bernstein's

article, talk about how she understands the problem of worry, and see how that relates to what

Jesus says about the problem of worry in scripture. Bernstein lists three different kinds of

worry. She talks about adaptive worry, which she describes as a good

kind of worry and helps with problem solving. She talked about chronic worry, which is a kind of

worry where people worry all the time about all kinds of things. And she talked about

pathological worry. Also people who worry all the time about all kinds of things,

but in pathological worry, it affects your actual day-to-day functioning. After Bernstein

described those different kinds of worry, she talked about several different causes of worry.

And she quoted a number of experts in the therapeutic and psychological community and saying

the causes of worry relate to genetic causes, relate to environmental causes, and have to do with

triggering brain areas that maintain arousal, which are related to fear.

The last part of Bernstein's article talked about what people can do to help address the problem of worry when they struggle with it and need to change.

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