Safer Coping Strategies for Men — Part Three

Anxiety can be debilitating, leading to sleepless nights, physical discomfort and emotional distress. Anxiety can leave one wrapped up in fear and terror. Sometimes, anxiety feels like an an internal alarm, triggered and ready to be set off by anything — as in the media coverage around the corona-virus and the new normal or way of life we are experiencing in lock-down and social distancing globally. Does it not come as a surprise to you that the levels of anxiety has increased both nationally and internationally on an unimaginable level?

In Safer Coping Strategies for Men — Part One and Part Two, we shared two techniques for coping and reducing our levels of anxiety, by firstly challenging our thought processes and thinking patterns and disproving our fears and secondly by casting our anxieties and concerns to God.

Our focus for today’s blog is to explore together the following quote from Proverbs 12:25 as our third Safer Coping Strategy.

“Worry weighs us down; a cheerful word picks us up” Proverbs 12:25

A number of variations of this quote have translated it to “heaviness in the heart of a man maketh it stoop”. What does it mean for a man’s heart to be heavy? My understanding is that a man with a heavy heart, is a man who is anxious, deeply unhappy and sad. He is a man who is grieving, full of regret and depressed. We learn from this verse that a heavy heart makes a man stoop, which is to bend one’s head downward. Stooping is a characteristic trait when one is feeling anxious and depressed. Shoulders are hunched and heads are down. The upper part of the body is slouched and eye contact is avoided.

The quote from Proverbs 12:25 provides a powerful technique to help us breakthrough and break-free from worry and anxiety. This technique involves speak an affirming, and cheerful word over our lives. Other translations of the quote, refer to a “kind word”, an “encouraging word” and “a good word”.

Grab a pen and paper. write down five life-giving, affirming words of encouragement that you can say to yourself to restore the joy in your heart or to cheer you up today. If you are not able to think of anything immediately, write about how somebody a personal friend, mentor or a person in the public eye encouraged you or how their words cheered you up.

Once you have written them out, say the words out loud, and be aware how encouraged, joyful and glad these words made you feel. King David in the Bible is an example of one man who applied this technique, when he was severely distressed on hearing that his enemies wanted to stone him. King David overcame his anxiety and picked himself up emotionally by “‘encouraging himself in the Lord his God” 1 Samuel 30:6

Let me end by affirming that you, my friend, are more than a Conqueror. You are an Overcomer. You have a hope and a future.