Sermon Quotes on Stress

Daniel Amen and Lisa Routh

What you allow to occupy your mind will sooner or later determine your feelings, your speech and your actions. Thoughts . . . have a real impact on how you feel and behave.”

Healing Anxiety and Depression (New York: Penguin, 2003), 184.

Donald Ardell

There is an optimum level of tension which we require in order to perform well. When stress exceeds that level, exhaustion and burnout are the result.

Betty Arnold, Missionary

I love going back to the States but was really struck by the fast pace that was everywhere. The lifestyle is slow and relaxing here in Africa. America is years ahead on progress and also years ahead on stress.

Henry Ward Beecher

The little troubles and worries of life may be as stumbling blocks in our way, or we may make them stepping-stones to a nobler character and to Heaven. Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.

Corrie ten Boom

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it only empties today of its strength.

Anthony Bloom

Learn to master time, and you will be able—whatever you do, whatever the stress, in the storm, in tragedy, or simply in the confusion in which we continuously live—to be still, immobile in the present, face to face with the Lord, in silence or in words.

Beginning to Pray, Paulist Press.

Edmund J. Bourne

For some people, a lack of purpose and meaning in life can provide fertile ground for the development of panic attacks and phobias.

The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook, 5th ed., New Harbinger, 2010, 448.

Edmund Bourne and Lorna Garano

The truth is that it’s what we say to ourselves [the self-talk of our thought life] in response to any particular situation that mainly determines our mood and feelings.

Alain de Botton

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

Status Anxiety, Pantheon.

Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman

The American Institute of Stress notes that 75 to 90 percent of visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related complaints . . . A Harvard study shows that people who live in a state of high anxiety are four and a half times more likely to suffer sudden cardiac death than nonanxious individuals . . . An international investigation reveals that people who are unable to effectively manage their stress have a 40 percent higher death rate than their nonstressed counterparts.

Transforming Stress: The HeartMath Solution for Relieving Worry, Fatigue, and Tension (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2005).

Winston Churchill

A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it: but the tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened not merely by rest, but by using other parts…Many men have found great advantage in practicing a handicraft for pleasure. Joinery, chemistry, bookbinding, even bricklaying—if one were interested in them and skillful at them—would give relief to the overtired brain.

French Proverb

Fear and restlessness kill more than do illnesses.

Harvard Business Review

The American Psychological Association’s 2010 Stress in America survey finds that three-quarters of Americans experience stress at levels that increase their risk of developing chronic illnesses, including heart disease, diabetes, and depression. I think two factors are responsible:

HBR Guide to Managing Stress. Harvard Business Review Press. Kindle Edition, 2011.

Frank Herbert

“The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”

Dune

Elisabeth Kuhn

Excessive, untreated stress can actually kill you. When you’re stressed, your body produces the hormone cortisol; which is designed to get your rear in gear as part of the fight-or-flight mechanism. However, this hormone is meant to be released only occasionally in small doses—when stress causes it to be secreted for long periods of time, the body reacts with a variety of different health consequences.

Effects of Stress.

David Lewis

Unless we can discover ways of staying afloat amidst the surging torrents of information, we may end up drowning in them.

George Macdonald

It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down. For the needs of today we have corresponding strength given. For the morrow we are told to trust. It is not ours yet. It is when tomorrow’s burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.

George Macdonald

Where there is no choice, we do well to make no difficulty.

Mary Brophy Marcus

A study from Yale said the best way to deal with stress is to do a small act of generosity for someone else.

“Doing Small Acts of Kindness May Lower Your Stress,” CBS News.com, December 15, 2015, (accessed June 3, 2016).

Francis MacNutt

Too many Christians are broken in a destructive way—so badly broken that they cannot carry out the great commandment of loving God and neighbor. Their inner turmoil prevents them from carrying out God’s will, and yet, paradoxically, they may still believe that such a sickness is God’s will. Therefore, they feel no inclination to ask for release from what they believe God is imposing on them.

Healing, Ave Maria, 1999, p.61.

Fred Rogers

In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.

The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

Mort Sahl

My whole life is a movie. It’s just that there are no dissolves. I have to live every agonizing moment of it. My life needs editing.

Charles Spurgeon

Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.

John Stott

A Christian’s freedom from anxiety is not due to some guaranteed freedom from trouble, but to the folly of worry and especially to the confidence that God is our Father, that even permitted suffering is within the orbit of His care.

Lily Tomlin

Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.

Arlene Unger

A study in Berlin even found that the part of the brain that processes fear and stress (the amygdala) was healthier in people who lived within a kilometre of a forest. To help soothe your spirits and promote feelings of happiness, take a forest bath…

How to be Content: An inspired guide to happiness White Lion Publishing, 2018, p. 38.

Arlene Unger

Mess creates stress.

How to be Content: An inspired guide to happiness White Lion Publishing, 2018, p. 116.

Arlene Unger

Make a point of watching quality documentaries: a study by the BBC and the University of California, Berkeley, found that viewing nature programmes increased feelings of awe, amusement and joy while reducing anxiety, fear and stress.

How to be Content: An inspired guide to happiness White Lion Publishing, 2018, p. 146.

William Wilberforce

The objects of the present life fill the human eye with a false magnification because of their immediacy.

David M. Zach

We are hyperliving, skimming along on the surface of life.

Gabor Mate

Excessive stress occurs when the demands made on an organism exceed that organism’s reasonable capacities to fill them.

When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2003), 29.

WebMD

If stress happens too often or lasts too long, it can have bad effects. It can be linked to headaches, an upset stomach, back pain, and trouble sleeping. It can weaken your immune system, making it harder to fight off disease. If you already have a health problem, stress may make it worse. It can make you moody, tense, or depressed. Your relationships may suffer, and you may not do well at work or school.

www.webmd.com/balance/stress-management/stress-management-topic-overview.

Ashley Hales

When we find worth by our affluence, it promises rest but brings stress, increasing demands, and a greater devotion to a god that will never love us and always forsake us.

Taken from Finding Holy in the Suburbs: Living Faithfully in the Land of Too Much

Robert Frost

We need the interruption of the night

To ease attention off when overtight,

To break out logic in too long a flight,

And ask us if our premises are right.

The Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus

Source Unknown

“Relax, none of us are getting out of here alive.”