Christian Night Routine for Anxiety and Stress
You lie down to rest, but your thoughts persist like tidal waves; replaying moments, rehearsing tomorrow’s demands, whispering fears about what could go wrong. As a Christian, you want to settle into peace, but your body and mind seem to operate on a different rhythm. You want rest, but the weight of unfinished thoughts steals the quiet you crave. You need a Christian night routine that will combat this anxiety and stress.
When our day has unfolded and the things we feared have happened or not, we are left with a heavy mind. Even when the fears did not happen, which may be the case most of the time, it is as if they did. That is the problem with fear: it makes us live through something in the mind even when it doesn’t happen. Experiencing that fear in our bodies takes its toll.
Have you ever been so anxious about an anticipated moment, but when you get to the moment, you are absolutely fine and even confident? This cycle doesn’t stop just because you weren’t anxious at the time you thought you would be. This isn’t about getting to a moment and not being anxious, it’s about being anxious about a moment you know is coming, whether a scheduled meeting, or an occasion.
The imminence of a thing creates its reality in our minds, and because it hasn’t yet happened, the mind, through anxiety, says: anything can happen. In this case, it is anything negative that can happen. We often do not consider that because “anything can happen,” the best outcome is among what can happen. Because anxiety is not about “what could happen,” it’s about: how negative will the thing that happens be?
When You Are Anxious At Night
When we are in the nighttime, the toll of having felt anxiety throughout our day creates more anxiety. The cycle that needs to break is not being anxious about certain things; it is not having an anxious way of thinking about things.
In How to Start Your Day Without Anxiety as a Christian & Christian Morning Routine for Anxiety (and Depression): A Biblical Path to Peace, I go deeply into how to annihilate an anxious way of thinking through the Holy Spirit and His Word. As spiritual beings, we are in a body, so this time around I want to cover physically practical things we must consider to not be anxious at night and to further this into the day.
The first thing to do to for your Christian night routine for anxiety and stress is to make sure there isn’t a need to poo. I found that sometimes I’m not anxious, I just need to take a poo. Constipation, in the sense of not having defecated in days or more, is a factor in inclining our bodies to feel negatively instead of positively. If you know you haven’t pooed in days, and perhaps you haven’t had natural food like fruits and vegetables, have some.
I’ve particularly found that any fruit will encourage pooing more than anything else. If you still find that you don’t feel like pooing, move on to step 2 and hopefully it will trigger the poo. Step 2 is exercise. This is a mental health exercise, not a physical health exercise.
It isn’t physical exertion to shape your body, it is a physical exertion to shape your mind positively. Exercise primarily releases endorphins into the body and it is known as the body’s natural painkillers and mood lifters to achieve a sense of well-being. That’s not all. More “happy hormones” that are released are dopamine, serotonin, and endocannabinoids.
What Can Create Happiness?
Dopamine is a pleasure (reward) chemical, serotonin is for mood regulation which is perfect for anxiety and depression, and endocannabinoids produce calmness. These chemicals do more excellent things to the body, and all these act as set systems to evade stress and anxiety within our bodies.
Exercise (physical exertion) is a form of medication for anxiety and depression from God our Creator and Father. This exercise for these purposes doesn’t need to be 30 or 45 minutes. You need to physically exhaust yourself through exercise enough to trigger their release, and so it can take even 5 minutes to greatly combat anxiety and stress for your Christian night routine.
Currently, I can do 30 squats without stopping, but I remember when 5 squats were 5 squats too many away from 10. I was tired at 5 already. However, 5 wasn’t my physical exertion because it’s when I got tired; 10 was my physical exertion, especially by also doing this set more than once. We also would not want to do too little to not trigger these chemical reactions, so we must discern when we’ve reached physical exertion.
Another example is that I would finish 50 squats in over 15 minutes, but now I finish these same 50 squats, with a little warm-up exercise, within 5 minutes. These still get me to physical exertion. Though as my endurance builds, my physical exertion may change and take more to reach. And, if fruits didn’t manage to make you take a well-deserved poo, exercise will surely give it a good go.
Toxic Products & Foods Make Us Anxious
The third step is making sure that your food is real food, not just ultra-processed foods that are filled with chemicals and things that aren’t food. Do you see how your body works? Doing one thing, will trigger many other things.
This doesn’t begin and end with exercise. It is regarding everything we do pertaining to our bodies. If chemicals that are not food are what we are ingesting, will you be surprised for those to cause us fatigue, anxiety, depression, stress, etc., ? I should hope not.
Even the sugar in fruits is pure healthiness because it isn’t manmade processed sugar that’s bleached with chemicals. Just as we need salt for taste in most of our food, we therefore have an abundance of healthy salt which is pure sea salt or natural salt. Natural sugar and natural salt are good because they come from nature (without pesticides—organic) just as we come from the earth.
We must prioritise food that comes from the earth. Today, there is great knowledge about all the healthy swaps you can make regarding chemically filled make-up, food, utensils, clothes, cleaning products, hygiene products, and more.
Natural & Plant-based Knowledge Content
There are a few Instagram account suggestions I would love to share with you to help you get away from toxic products and foods that can condition us to live in anxiety and depression and any other disease. This first young woman whose content I will share is not a Christian: please do not consider anything spiritual she has to say, like, yoga and all that new age spirituality.
Only consider what has to do with healthy swaps and health products and foods you can make. I believe her most knowledge-based content is in her earliest content—scroll all the way down and start there. This first account is: “plantofzen”. I reiterate, her account is not for spiritual advice, so do not consider anything she says or suggests about spirituality. Our spirituality is Christ through the Holy Spirit and His Word, not Buddha meditations, yoga, crystals, or any of that.
Other crucial Instagram accounts are:
- @neri_plantbased_recipes
- @scienceofessentials (which guides you in making your own plant-based products)
- @plantcrazii
- @herbalacademy
- @yhwhempyrealherbalskincare
- @raw_vegan_vibes
- @health1solutions (which introduced me to Barbara O Neill and her natural healing perspective)
- Search and watch Barbara O’Neill’s full interview (podcast) or lecture video content on YouTube
- @homefitlivingessentials
- @clarisseflon
- @plantyou
These practical ways to reduce anxiety for a more calm nighttime, along with the first two articles titled How to Start Your Day Without Anxiety as a Christian & Christian Morning Routine for Anxiety (and Depression): A Biblical Path to Peace, as a pack of 3 will equip and encourage you in the Lord to fight back against anxiety (and depression) so that the peace of the Lord is disturbed and deterred by nothing.
Joy Better than Happiness
As you’ve seen how happiness is relatively easily controlled by exercise or the food we eat, it is not wise to rely on it for our overall health. As (relatively) easy as it may come, we know that it can be gone from us just as quickly. We ought to rely on the Lord’s joy as an anchor for our happiness.
Our happiness must not be controlled by other factors alone. Those things, like exercise and nutritious foods, must be from the Spirit of knowledge, so these are rooted in the Holy Spirit, who enables us to have His fruit of joy and peace.
Being Doers of the Word
Christ should never be replaced by anything in our lives, but everything in our lives must be there as having come through Christ. This way, we proclaim with our lives that we are not out of this world, we are merely in it. It is written, “He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, And herb for the service of man: That he may bring forth food out of the earth;” – Psalm 104:14 KJV.
Let us ensure that the meat and animal products we consume are grass-fed. And let us not forget the original diet in the Garden of Eden that was purely plant-based because nothing was ever killed, and God called it good. Let the earth, as indicated by God’s Word, become our main source of food for our physical sustenance. Let us not be destroyed for a lack of knowledge as in Hosea 4:6, dear brethren. Let us not merely be hearers of the Word, but doers.
May your mind be renewed, your faith be strengthened, and your peace be anchored in Christ, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
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