Prayers for anxiety and fear
When your chest is tight and your thoughts will not slow down, a long prayer is the last thing you can manage. These are short. Pray one, or press play and let someone else say it for you.
Anxiety does not wait for a good moment. It turns up in the car park before you go in, at the kitchen table at half past two, in the gap between the email arriving and you opening it.
We are not going to tell you why it is happening. Anxiety can come from a real threat, from an illness, from exhaustion, from something that happened years ago, or from nothing you can name. What we can say is that people have prayed in this exact state for thousands of years, and the Bible does not tidy them up first. The psalms are full of people whose hearts are pounding.
So pray whichever of these fits, or pray half of one. Nobody is marking it.
18 prayers on this page, and 9 Bible passages with notes on what they mean.
When the panic comes suddenly
For the ten minutes when your heart is going and you cannot get a full breath. These are meant to be said badly, in pieces, between breaths. You will not remember them and that is fine.
When you cannot get a breath
I cannot breathe properly and I am frightened. I do not know what set this off. Stay with me until it passes, God. I am not asking you to explain it to me. Just do not go anywhere.
Three words, that is all
God. Help. Please.
When your body will not listen
Lord, my hands are shaking and my chest is tight and none of it stops because I have told it to. You made this body. You are not alarmed by it. Hold on to me while it settles.
Saying the fear out loud
Here is the thing I am afraid of, said plainly, because you already know it. I am afraid it will happen and that I will not cope. I am handing you the sentence I keep repeating.
In the middle of the night
It is dark, the house is quiet, and the same thought has gone round forty times. Nothing can be sorted out at this hour, and some part of you already knows that.
When sleep will not come
It is late and I am still awake. I have solved nothing by lying here. Keep watch over the things I can do nothing about until morning, God, and let me put them down for a few hours.
Staying here, without asking
I have nothing to ask for. I am just here.
The same thought, again and again
Lord, my mind will not stop turning this over. I am tired of my own thinking. Sit with me in the middle of all these thoughts. If I cannot be calm, let me at least not be alone in it.
Before the alarm goes off
It will be light soon and I will have to be a person again. Give me enough for the morning, God. Not the whole week. Just the morning.
While you wait for news
The scan, the results, the decision, the call that has not come. Waiting is its own kind of hard. It can go on for weeks, and there is nothing to do with your hands.
Before the results come
The appointment is on Thursday and I have already lived through every version of it. I do not know what they will say. You have not promised me the answer I want. Be with me on Thursday either way.
When you keep checking your phone
Lord, I have picked it up again. Nothing has changed. Steady my hands, and keep me from making this worse in my head before anyone has said a word.
The waiting is the worst part
I think I could face the news. It is the not knowing that is wearing me down. Hold the days between now and then, God, because I cannot hurry them and I am not bearing them well.
Asking now, before you know
God, if it is bad news, I will still need you, so I am asking in advance. Do not let go of me on the day I find out, whichever way it goes.
When it has lasted months
For anxiety that has not lifted in months, whether or not you can name a reason for it. You are tired of it, and tired of praying about the same thing.
Praying the same prayer again
God, this is the same prayer I brought you last month and the month before that. I have run out of new ways to say it. Here it is again. I am still asking, and I am still here.
On the way to the appointment
I am going to see the doctor about this, and I do not believe that is a failure of faith. Be in that room, God. Give them wisdom, and give me the honesty to say how bad it has actually been.
For an hour of not being afraid
Thank you for the hours today when I forgot to be afraid.
For someone you are worried about
For a child who will not go into school, a partner who is not sleeping, someone you love who has gone quiet. You cannot do this for them, and that is its own ache.
For a child who is frightened
God, my child is afraid and I cannot take it off them. Be nearer to them than I can get. Give me the patience not to rush them, and the sense to ask for help if this keeps growing.
For someone who has gone quiet
They have not answered and I am worried. Watch over them tonight, wherever they are. Give me the nerve to ring them tomorrow even if it is awkward, and the sense to keep trying if I do not hear back. If something is badly wrong, do not let me talk myself out of telling someone who can actually help them.
When you cannot fix it for them
I keep trying to fix this and it is not mine to fix. Teach me how to stay close without pushing. Carry the part I have to put down.
Bible verses about anxiety and fear
What each passage meant where it was written, and what it does and does not offer you now.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
Psalm 23:1–4
David is not describing a pleasant walk. The valley is the worst stretch of the road, and the psalm never says he avoids it. It says he goes through it with someone beside him. A shepherd's rod was a weapon, carried because the danger was real. This is company in the danger, not a promise of an easier route.
Fearfulness and trembling have come on me. Horror has overwhelmed me.
Psalm 55:1–8
This is what anxiety feels like from the inside, written down and put in a hymn book to be sung in public. A few lines later he says he wishes he had wings so he could fly away and hide. If a prayer that raw sits in the middle of Scripture, yours is not too much for God.
When I am afraid, I will put my trust in you.
Psalm 56:3–4
Notice the order. Afraid first, then trust. It does not say the fear left and trust took its place, and it does not treat being afraid as something to sort out before prayer is allowed to start. Trusting God while still frightened is the ordinary Christian position, not a lesser version of it.
You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flies by day
Psalm 91:1–6
This is poetry written by a people under threat, and its comfort is genuine. It is also the passage most often turned into a guarantee that harm cannot reach a believer. It was never a contract. Faithful people are ill, bereaved and afraid all the way through the Bible. Shelter in it. Do not use it to predict the future.
Where these verses get misused
Two of these passages get used as weapons. Matthew 6 and Philippians 4 both say do not be anxious, and if you are anxious you have probably had those words handed to you as an instruction you had already failed. Neither is a rebuke to someone whose body will not settle, and neither is a reason to skip the appointment, the medication, the benefits form or the hard conversation. Psalm 91 gets misused from the other direction, as a guarantee that nothing bad reaches a faithful person. It has never worked that way, and if you were taught it did, you were left with a second wound.
Questions people ask
- Is anxiety a sin?
- No. Anxiety is a state of a body and a mind, and Scripture is full of people in it, including some of its most admired figures. When the Bible says do not be anxious, it is offering somewhere to put the fear rather than adding a rule you have already broken. The verse about perfect love casting out fear is about fear of judgement, not about panic attacks. If someone has used it to make you feel faithless, they have misread it.
- Can I pray about this and still take medication or see a therapist?
- Yes, and please do. Prayer is not a substitute for treatment, and treating it as one has hurt a lot of people. Medication, therapy, a doctor's appointment, sleep and food are not evidence of weak faith. Plenty of Christians pray on the way to the appointment and pray again on the way home. If anxiety is affecting your sleep, your work or the people around you, tell a doctor. And if breathlessness or chest pain is new to you, or does not fit the pattern you already know, get it looked at rather than assuming it is anxiety. We are a prayer app and not a clinician, and we would rather say so plainly.
- Why has God not taken it away? I have asked.
- We do not know. That is the honest answer, and anyone offering you a tidier one is guessing. Some people find anxiety lifts. Some find it becomes something they can manage. Some carry it for years and pray anyway. None of those outcomes tells you how much God loves you, and none of them is a score for how well you prayed. Keep asking. Asking the same thing repeatedly is not nagging, and half the psalms do it.
- What if I cannot pray at all?
- Then do not. Sit down, breathe out for longer than you breathe in, and let simply being in the room count. Press play on one of these and let the words be said over you instead of by you. Prayer is not a performance you can fail at. Some of the people in Scripture managed nothing more than a shout, and it was heard.
Pick one prayer, the shortest one if that is all you have in you, and say it out loud once. Then stop. You do not have to feel different afterwards, and you do not have to say it well. If you are still awake in an hour, say it again.