RUN LIKE A CHAMPION

Healthy Emotions – Part 2
Sammy Tippit: Yesterday we were talking with Dr. Walt Larimore about emotional and mental health and how it affects your overall health. We want to continue that discussion today in our devotional time. Walt, you were talking yesterday about the three groups (the grumblers, the gloaters, and then those who were grateful) and how much of a change it made in the health of those who were grateful.

What about people who have been abused, people who grew up in an atmosphere, a home environment, where they were put down on all the time and so they just naturally think negatively? I mean, how do they deal with it?
Walt Larimore: Here’s how I think about that, Sammy. Take aspirin… You know, more and more people are taking that little tiny baby aspirin, that 81mg aspirin, to prevent colon cancer, to prevent cardiovascular… It doesn’t matter how depressed you are, how angry you are, how irritated you are, how much you’ve been abused in the past. That aspirin is designed to work irrespective of where you’re coming from.
I tell people to think of gratitude as being an emotional aspirin you can take every day, irrespective of the wrong, irrespective of the harm, irrespective of the background, irrespective of the injustice, irrespective of the abuse. Gratitude is part of God’s divine design to begin to heal us.
I tell my patients, “Keep a gratitude journal.” If you’re a person who enjoys meditating in the evening, you can do this before bed, or you can do it right when you get up in the morning. For a 30-day period, just every day write five things you’re grateful for. Initially, you may have to look. As you get better with this exercise, you’ll find things during the day that you’ll remember. That night, take three to five minutes and just meditate on those things you’re grateful for, to thank the Father in heaven, to thank your Creator for the blessings he has bestowed.
Now there may be a lot of things that went wrong that day, but you can find five things you’re grateful for. As you begin to meditate on that, it not only changes you emotionally; it changes you physically. The studies show blood pressure improves, heart rate improves, metabolism improves. Emotionally we begin to improve. It affects our relationships, our job performance, and it even affects us spiritually as we begin to see God’s fingerprint every day in what he provides.
Sammy: What about worry? A lot of people are very anxious today. You know, the future, family, fortunes. Everything around us! There’s a lot of worry I find and especially in the economy. How do men deal with worry?
Walt: Well, Scripture throughout tells us, “Be not anxious. Do not be anxious. Do not fret. Do not be afraid.” But it’s hard to apply that. I’ll give you a story from my own life. You know, I’m self-employed as a writer. I volunteer at a clinic taking care of uninsured folks. But income is an issue. I was fretting about it this last January. I got fretting about, “Where is it going to come from, and how are we going to handle the bills?”
Barb, my wife, got kind of irritated. She went downstairs, and she came up. She brought five little piles of paper. She put them down: one, two, three, four, five. She said, “These are the taxes from this year. These are the taxes from last year. That’s the year before and the year before. Do you know what? God has provided every year. Why are you worrying?”
It was a good reminder to me that I can choose to take that worry upon me, or I can release it to my Father. For me, learning how to daily depend upon his provision, be thankful for his provision, and be a good steward for what he provides can make a difference.
Sammy: We need to make some lifestyle changes periodically maybe to be good stewards and then also to just cast it on him if we know we’re doing the right thing, we can trust him.
Walt: That’s where a mentoring relationship has made a difference for me. I mentioned earlier, I’ve had a mentor for 25 years. Every week of the month, we would meet. The first week of the month, Bill would have me bring my checkbook and my credit card bill. He would help me look at how I was stewarding those. The second week of the month we looked at my schedule. How was I stewarding my time?
The third week of the month he would call Kate and Scott and find out what type of dad I was being. The fourth week, Sammy, was the hardest. He’d call Barb and find out what type of a friend and what type of a husband I had been. If there was a fifth Tuesday (we met on Tuesdays), then he would call my partner and meet with my employees. That type of mentoring helped me as a man to begin to get my priorities right. That can help reduce some of that worrying and anxiety.
Sammy: This is good stuff. We’re going to have some more tomorrow with Dr. Walt Larimore. We’re going to be talking about relationships, which gets even more difficult here. We’re going to dig a little bit deeper tomorrow. We look forward to it.