Breathe: 21 Days to Stress Less and Transform Chaos to Calm

By Bonnie Gray

Release Your Stress and Refresh Your Spirit

When you feel overwhelmed by life’s pressures, you can pause, restore calm, and choose joy by finding new ways to break free from anxiety. With Breathe, soul care guide Bonnie Gray is here to help you develop new wellness habits that bring you rest and renewal.

Discover scientific and Scripture-based practices for your body, mind, and soul that will help you worry less, take better care of yourself, and face each day focused on God’s love. You’ll learn a simple yet powerful 3-step rhythm:

• Breathe in truth: refresh your spirit with God’s loving words of affirmation
• Breathe out prayer: release your stress with calming, breath-oriented prayers
• Soul care tip: restore peace and joy by taking simple actions to boost your well-being 

Breathe will guide you to start living in the present moment while replenishing your heart with God’s peace. Let these biblically inspired mindfulness techniques create space for you to fully relax in your loving Savior’s embrace as you enjoy your daily rhythms of rest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvest House Publishers
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9780736983457

Bonnie Gray

Bonnie Gray is the author of Sweet Like Jasmine, Whispers of Rest, and Finding Spiritual Whitespace. As soul-care mentor, speaker, and podcast host of Breathe, she has guided thousands to detox stress and experience God’s love through soul care, encouragement, and prayer. Featured in Christian media outlets including Relevant Magazine and Christianity Today, she lives in California with her husband and two sons. For more information, visit TheBonnieGray.com.

Book preview

Introduction

Millions of people struggle with anxiety, depression, and burnout. According to the CDC, a staggering 42 percent of Americans are grappling with mental health issues.¹ You’re probably seeing this in your social circles. So am I.

From the moment we wake up, we are inundated with noise, pressures, and expectations that wear us down. Especially as we move into life post-pandemic, each of us carries residual stress or trauma of some sort. Our emotions and physical limits were pushed past anything we’ve ever had to deal with. We’ve been strong, having survived the tornado of confusion, isolation, and loss. Many of us are dealing with profound grief, while others of us are just flat-out exhausted.

We are heroes when it comes to loving and caring for others. But why is it so hard to give ourselves permission to rest and refresh when we’re stressed and need it most? Perhaps you’ve always been the encourager, always the one responsible for taking care of others, and you never felt the need to take care of your own mental health before now. Perhaps you didn’t feel comfortable sharing your needs, or maybe you just didn’t have time to figure it out, so you did what you had always done: put your heart to the side and carried on.

But here, today, perhaps for the first time ever, you wonder if it’s okay to talk about your diminished wellness. You wonder: What can I do to stop the stress?

You Are Worth Taking Care Of

God understands. Right in the midst of all the division, chaos, and worries swirling around us, Jesus is quietly loving you. You are worth taking care of.

Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28 NASB).

Have you felt Jesus whisper this beautiful invitation to better nurture yourself with rest?

Over the coming days, I’m going to walk you through scientific and Scripture-based methods to help you restore calm to your body and emotions, stress less, take better care of yourself, and create new rhythms of rest. You will take action to signal your body’s natural relaxation response in the very moment you’re experiencing stress in your daily life.

This journey has 21 stops along the way, each chapter exploring a different aspect of your emotional, physical, spiritual, and social wellness. In each chapter, you will receive godly encouragement to move you out of a stress response and into a space of rest and calm. You will also learn simple, practical ways to help you lower stress and anxiety. These are simple habits you’ll enjoy cultivating, and they will equip you to face each day’s challenges with renewed confidence, energy, and gratitude.

Three-Step Breathe Rhythm

As you take this journey to transform moments of chaos to calm, I will guide you to experience a simple, powerful rhythm to breathe and respond to stress:

Breathe in Truth. Refresh your spirit with God’s loving words of affirmation. Encourage your heart with God’s loving promises in Scripture to empower you in your true identity as God’s beloved daughter. Renew your mind with the truth of what God says about you.

Breath Prayer. Release your stress using calming, breath-oriented prayers. Use each short, simple breath prayer to relax, following the rhythm of your breathing, bringing focus and calm. You will feel closer to God and experience his peace and presence.

Soul Care Challenge and Tip. Restore peace and joy to your body and emotions using simple soul care tips based on science. Detoxing from stress and taking better care of yourself is like enjoying a trail with beautiful vista points among the trees. There will be valleys and mountains as you walk, but chocolate and treats along the way to reenergize you for the journey. As a fellow pilgrim on this wellness journey, I’ve tucked some soul care goodies for you into each chapter—simple actions you can take to boost your well-being.

Pull Up a Chair at the end of each chapter. Reflect on the questions designed to help you nurture your inner self. Use them as journaling or conversation prompts to capture your ah-ha moments on paper or share your discoveries with a friend or small group. This is your turn to imagine how everything you’ve taken in could change your everyday.

This book is a biblically minded approach to lowering stress and anxiety, based on scientific research and inspired by God’s Word. I can’t wait to share with you the profound, but practical insights that will restore calm whenever you experience stress. These practices will help you to slow down, to breathe, so you can reoxygenate your body and soul with God’s peace and joy.

Whatever Is True

Be anxious for nothing, the apostle Paul wrote to the believers in Philippi, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God (Philippians 4:6 BSB). Although well-meaning, this verse is often given out as a shortcut to instant peace. A fly-by reading of this verse, however, places guilt and discouragement on believers, as if anxiety can be waved away with a magic wand. It’s like telling ourselves, If you’re anxious, just stop!

A deeper look at this powerful promise, however, shows that Paul isn’t suggesting believers should ignore anxiety but rather respond to it. We can go to God for help, thanking our Savior and Creator even amid our troubles, trusting that he will answer us. But the advice doesn’t end there! In the following verses, Paul encourages believers to practice peace as we wait for God’s provision:

The peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you (Philippians 4:7-9).

Think on these things. Put this into practice.

Experiencing God’s peace isn’t about sitting around, passively receiving. You can pray and petition, as we’ll do in the daily Breath Prayer sections to engage your heart. You can think on whatever is true, which we’ll do together in each Be Mindful section, reflecting on God’s truth from Scripture to engage your mind. And we’ll put it into practice with each Soul Care Challenge and Tip to engage your body and soul. Activating God’s peace in your life is a practice to restore wholeness—by engaging your whole heart, mind, body, and soul.

When we encounter stress and wait for the anxious situation, problem, or answers to unfold, God wants us to create and develop new rhythms to experience the peace that will calm our anxious thoughts and emotions. I hope that sharing this scriptural basis will equip you with confidence to put the principles in this book into practice, whether you are on your own or learning together with a friend or small group in community, just like the early believers enjoyed doing in Philippi.

Most importantly, my hope is that you’ll feel excited to see that the ideas and principles on mindfulness, meditation, and self-care our culture offers originate from God. As people of faith, we practice stress relief to be more fully mindful of God’s loving presence, because he is our loving Creator who gives, renews, and sustains the breath of life in you and me.

From One Friend to Another

I’m so very passionate about this new book because having overcome and healed from anxiety, depression, and panic attacks, I am now living a totally different life filled with more peace and joy as God’s beloved daughter. I want to give you the tools and resources that helped me take better care of my mental health. I know they will help you too!

The soul care tips I share in this book with you are proven, practical ones that I have used in raising my boys to nurture good mental health habits and in creating a loving family of faith with my husband. We live in Silicon Valley in California—a stressful, fast-paced, competitive culture focused on achievement—so the rhythms I’m guiding you to create have been proven in the laboratory of real life! The wellness practices will also work where you live because the effects of stress are universal. We are all human beings, with nervous systems and emotional needs designed by God to help us flourish and heal when we take certain healthy actions.

The activities and tools I share with you have been enjoyed by thousands of listeners of my podcast, Breathe: The Stress-Less Podcast. They’ve been practiced by people from many walks of life—from US Army officers to teenagers to everyday moms and dads. Wherever I speak, teach, minister, or mentor, my goal is to help believers detox stress through soul care, prayer, and Bible study.

In other words, I have written this book as one friend to another, refining these practices through conversations and relationships with real people. This is not just a book about ideas, but encouragement written out of a motivation to inject your heart with inspiration and hope, so you can put it to practical use.

Let’s begin.

PART ONE

Emotional Wellness

1

Loosen Your Grip

How to Relax When You Feel Anxious

How do you relax when you feel anxiety? This is the most common question I get when I speak with women and men about wellness and detoxing from stress.

When I first started experiencing my body tightening with tension, my heart pounding with rapid palpitations, I had no idea what to do. I just told myself what I always did: I’m fine. But this time, it wasn’t true. I wasn’t fine. I read my Bible and journaled my prayers every night before bed, but I started having trouble falling asleep. Please, God, you know how tired I am. Help me! I whispered as the hours ticked away. I was exhausted, afraid, and alone. Why isn’t God answering my prayer? I wondered.

Have you ever felt your body tell you that you aren’t okay… no matter how often you tell yourself you’re fine? You’re not alone, friend. We are all under a tremendous amount of stress, and it comes at us from all different directions. We expect ourselves to continuously pour out with little or no downtime to catch our breath. Instead of being gentle with ourselves when we’re stressed, we push ourselves harder. Don’t complain. Just keep going. We are afraid that if we stop for a moment, if we are honest about how we are feeling, we’ll rock the proverbial boat and send waves sloshing over the sides. We find it easier to frazzle ourselves rather than prioritize our well-being and risk being called selfish, needy, or lazy.

So we courageously soldier on, numbed by stress, because we’ve learned to live with it for so long. We don’t want to fall behind, fall short, or disappoint anyone.

Sometimes we are such strong thinkers, pushing through taking care of others and constantly in hypervigilant mode getting work done and juggling our responsibilities, we can get stuck in a state of heightened alertness. We don’t even realize that we are actually very stressed.

Even though we might say we’re fine, God understands the toll stress takes on you. God doesn’t turn away when we’re feeling paralyzed by worries and discouraged. God turns toward us in times of emotional turmoil. He sees you when you wake up feeling stuck behind a wall of worries and stress. He feels the anxiety that grips your chest so badly you can hardly catch a breath. In those moments, God draws you close.

You are not forgotten. God is here. And God loves you.

The Stress Response: Fight, Flight, or Freeze

God designed our bodies, like diagnostic lights on a car’s dashboard, to tell us when we need to slow down and seek care, nourishment, and attention. When we experience overwhelming stress—and each person’s threshold for stress is unique—the body’s natural and God-designed reaction is to prepare to fight, flee to safety, or freeze. This stress response is called fight-flight-freeze.

When the fight-flight-freeze response is activated, cortisol and adrenaline releases into your system. Your blood pressure soars, your breathing speeds up, your muscles tighten, jaw clenches, hands sweat, and your stomach tenses. Your body is ready to spring into action and get you to safety! But did you notice that these are also classic symptoms of anxiety?

The human nervous system is not only activated by life-threatening events but also by daily stressors, such as work or parenting demands, family dysfunctions, bad traffic, or memories of past traumas. The cortisol and adrenaline flooding our systems to help us overcome adversity? Those same naturally released chemicals also keep us from relaxing and sleeping. They put our bodies in constant hyperalert mode. Then our concentration frazzles because the razor-sharp focus that helps us problem-solve under stress starts holding us hostage to obsessing over every detail. As a result, we can’t turn our brains off. Our bodies get stuck in stress-out mode.

The impact of emotional or verbal stress or trauma has the same effect to our nervous system as physical stress and trauma! What an empowering truth that frees us from shame. We can stop being critical of ourselves when we struggle with anxiety. We can stop beating ourselves up for worrying. This is the body’s natural stress response. Instead, when stress or anxiety grips us, we can recognize it for what they are: signals for us to take action to restore calm, to let our bodies know we’re safe.

For too long, I pushed through my stress without addressing the underlying problems it was signaling. It was time to replace survival mode with new rhythms that would help me to flourish. God was inviting me on a new journey of faith—one that would detox my body, mind, and soul from the lingering effects of worry and anxiety.

Are you ready for that journey too? I’d love to show you the way.

The Rest and Relaxation Response

God designed a powerful counterbalancing force to combat the effects of the fight-flight-freeze response. We can activate our body’s natural way of slowing down to create a sense of calm and safety called the nervous system’s parasympathetic response. It’s also referred to as the rest and relaxation response.¹ Once a situation is resolved, your body starts to relax. Your muscles unclench, and your breathing and heart rate slow down.

This is how your body naturally transitions from anxiety to calm after a temporary moment of stress, threat, or danger. Unfortunately, when we live under stress too long, our bodies stay stuck in the fight-flight-freeze response.

So how do you relax when you feel stressed and anxious? It isn’t accomplished by pushing through, ignoring the stress, or telling yourself to stop stressing by sheer willpower. The key to de-stressing your emotions