Every once in a while, life sends me into a mild panic.

Not a full-blown panic attack. Not a bout of high anxiety. Just enough of a disturbance to my thoughts and emotions that I find myself holding my breath.

I don’t remember the dream that sparked it last night, but I woke up shortly before midnight with the urge to hold my breath and start the flight part of the fight or flight process.

Breath by breath, counting to ten, I had to talk myself down until I could go back to sleep. I had to remember, as Isaiah says, You will keep him in perfect peace [breathe in, hold], Whose mind is stayed on You. [breathe out] (26:3) That verse is a perfect one to focus on when stress makes the breathing go too fast or not often enough.

There’s a scene in Ever After that keeps replaying in my mind. Drew Barrymore’s character is heading to the ball. She is incredibly nervous and with good reason. She is a commoner heading to a function that only nobles are allowed at. Will the prince’s affection for her carry past that obstacle? Will he forgive her for not telling him who she really is? As she walks up the stairs, she repeats, “Breathe, just breathe.”

That line often becomes my mantra. I hold my breath when I think about too many things or try to seize the past, present and future into my little mind and make them work for me. I can’t do it. I know I can’t. Yet my mind keeps going into this loop, then I catch myself holding my breath, then I tell myself to breathe, confess my sin to God of trying to be Him, take a bunch of calming breaths and live successfully for about five minutes before I catch myself at it again.

I am convinced that this very unproductive and unhealthy cycle is what has historically caused my blood pressure to go up occasionally. It’s not an all the time thing. I’ve been on high blood pressure medications a couple of times, but once I get the emotions under control, my blood pressure drops back into the normal range or even slightly low. Not only do I need to figure out how to stop this panic breath thing for my spiritual health, but for my physical health as well.

Why do I act like this? Often, I feel like I’m pretending. While I can look at a resume and know I’m more skilled than I was twenty years ago, I don’t feel it. I feel smaller somehow and like the world will catch me acting as a princess when I’m really a pauper.

But that’s so untrue spiritually. I really am a princess, a child of the King of Kings. As princess, though, I need to let him rule. It is only when I’m acting like I can do his job that I can damage myself. Through Jesus, I can do all things, but without him, I can do nothing.

Maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to convince my lungs of that fact sometime soon.

Still, I manage to stress myself out at the end of each day by thinking about what I haven’t done. I know that my frame of mind isn’t God-honoring. He promises to keep me in perfect peace if I keep my mind on him. Or as it says in Psalm 127, “In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat— for he grants sleep to those he loves.” He knows I can only do so much in one 24-hour period and he doesn’t ask for more—as long as I keep him first.

Breathing is supposed to be natural, automatic. It’s part of the systems of our human bodies that run on autopilot supposedly. But in that description lies the key: our human bodies. Whenever I take on mentally and spiritually, more than the human body was designed by God to cope with, or try to cope with things without Him, breathing becomes more of a chore, something to remember.

Until I lean into my Lord and hear Him say, “Rest in Me, my daughter. And breathe. Just breathe.”