3 Ways To Overcome Anxiety During A Marriage Crisis

When your marriage feels like it’s falling apart, anxiety can take over your mind—and your marriage. In this video, Kimberly Beam Holmes shares 3 powerful ways to overcome anxiety during a marriage crisis so you can think clearly, stay grounded, and begin the process of saving your relationship.

Drawing from her personal experience with lifelong anxiety and her decades of helping people in crisis through Marriage Helper, Kimberly explains how fear, control, and uncertainty can keep you trapped—and how to break free from that cycle.

You’ll learn:
 ✅ How to take every thought captive and stop the endless “what if” spiral
✅ Why you must find the helpers who bring peace, not panic
✅ The science-backed way to reset your body through 4x4 breathing

Anxiety doesn’t have to rule your mind—or ruin your marriage. These tools will help you calm your thoughts, regulate your emotions, and start rebuilding the connection with your spouse.

If your marriage feels stuck in chaos, remember: there is always hope.

If you're struggling in your marriage, don’t wait. Get our FREE resource: The 7 Steps to Rescue Your Marriage 👉 https://marriagehelper.com/free

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Chapters

• 0:00 First Memory Of Fear
• 1:03 Body Memory And Early Anxiety
• 3:41 How Anxiety Rewires The Brain
• 6:35 Control What You Can
• 8:12 Three Tools To Break The Cycle
• 12:06 Take Every Thought Captive

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

I remember the very first time I was scared. I remember looking all around me, and all I could see were people, people that I loved, people I was related to who were older than me, all freaking out, running around and looking at me like something was very, very wrong. That's all I remember of the event. But years later, what I ended up finding out was I was actually two years old and I was choking and I was turning blue. I was at my grandmother's house, at my mom's mother's house. We called her mama, and we were at one of those family gatherings. It was around Thanksgiving or Christmas, and everyone was there. And for whatever reason, I was eating this biscuit and I put too much of it in my mouth, tried to swallow too much of it at a time, and I started choking. I wasn't breathing anymore. And by the time anyone noticed, I was losing the color in my face and turning blue. So everyone was freaking out. But then my grandmother, in the midst of all the chaos, came straight to me. She put her hand down my throat and she pulled out the biscuit, allowing me to breathe again, allowing the color to come back to my face and allowing me maybe even to live. The crazy thing is our bodies remember these experiences, these experiences that we have in life from when we were scared, from when we were looking around. I was two years old at that time. When you're two years old, the person you are looking for to know if the world is safe around you are the adults. It's your mom, it's your dad. But when I was looking around, all I saw was fear. And I think there's a reason that that is the youngest memory I can remember. And unfortunately, it's a memory of anxiety. Thankfully, my grandmother did what needed to be done in order for me to breathe again. But there is likely a tie to that between the fact that I started having anxiety from six years old. I became extremely scared of losing my parents, of them dying. Like when I was at school, I had a phobia of tornadoes. If there was any big storm coming in, I had such fear of this thing being the thing that was going to separate me from the people that I loved. And I didn't know how to process that fear because I was young. And here's the thing: there's this book called The Body Keeps the Score. And the basic premise of this book is that all of us have endured things like that in our lives, in our childhood, in different times of our lives. And our body holds those memories, those memories of depression, those memories of fear, those memories of anxiety, times where we felt overwhelmed and powerless to do anything about it, which is the basic definition of trauma. Now, I'm not gonna dive into trauma in this video, but I do want to dive into anxiety because, as I said, it's something that I have struggled with since I was at least six years old. And there have been times of my life that I have really struggled to process what I was feeling, why I was feeling that way, and how to not let anxiety control my mind and fill my emotions. And it is a process. If you are someone who has struggled with anxiety, you know how this feels. You know the debilitating fear that can come when you allow anxiety to rule your mind. And here's the thing: as I said, the body keeps the score. There's a book about that, but the phrase in general is something that can guide this discussion. When we feel that there is danger, when we fear that that might be, that there may be danger, that is the mode that our brain goes into. We begin to only see the fear, only see the bad, and only see the negative. The more that we think that way, unfortunately, the more those neural pathways in our brains continue to wire and fire or fire and wire. The ones that fire together end up wiring together. And if you think of it like a path through the forest, the path that's walked on the most becomes the one that is the easiest to go down. Our brains are the same way. And so when we continually think about anxious thoughts and allow ourselves to entertain those thoughts, then the easier it becomes to think anxious thoughts and the cycle continues. We call it a limbic system takeover, where everything in our bodies begins to anticipate something that's out to get us. There are physiological components that happen when this happens, such as our heartbeat goes up, our breathing shallows, our thoughts are racing. All of that is just a bodily sign that you feel that there is a threat out there to you. And the longer you stay in this place of feeling like there's a threat, the more you are going to think is a threat. Everything's going to start to become a threat in some way. And the more you think about these things, the worse the cycle gets and the harder it can be to calm down. But it all really needs to start with understanding one key thing. Your brain and body are trying to protect you, but they are doing it in the wrong way. So what we have to do, we have to take ownership and control of what we can. I can only control me. I can't control anything else. I can't control the situation. I can't control external circumstances. I can't control other people. I can't control the outcome of a test result. There are a lot of things I can't control, but what I can learn to control is myself. So what you're gonna hear is 30 years of trial and error experience of what I have found to be the most helpful ways to manage my anxiety. I even hate saying manage my anxiety. There's a part of me that wants to say, get rid of it. But I know realistically, anxiety is gonna be something that I always struggle with. And that's okay because when I'm aware of that and I don't let it define me, when I realize I don't have to be an anxious person, I can be someone who struggles with this. Then it allows me to keep my guard up and to know when anxiety is starting to rear its ugly head and the things that I need to do to keep it at bay. So there's three things that I want to share with you. The first one is take every thought captive. If you're a religious person, you have heard this before. And even if you're not, the principle is the same. When we are in a state of fear, I already said our brain is looking for every single possible scenario, and it can be exhausting. And when your marriage is in crisis, you're doing this too. We had a call to our live call-in show that we do yesterday, and this gentleman was asking so many questions. He was saying, but what if this happens? My wife is in an affair, but then she started a second affair. What if she decides to go back to the first one? What if she doesn't go back to the first one? What if, what if, what if? That is anxiety talking. And the more that we entertain those anxious thoughts, you know exactly what happens. We keep going down these rabbit holes, and there is no end to them. My anxiety a lot of the time tends to circle around health and health issues that I get really anxious about. And y'all, I can't tell you how many times I've gone to WebMD or Chat GPT and just started getting really specific about like tiny little things that I might be experiencing with my health health, just wondering, is this something that could be a big issue? Am I gonna miss it? And I think that's a lot of the fear, right? That I'm gonna be the one who misses something that ends up being terrible, that I'm gonna do something wrong, that I'm not gonna see the signs when my wife is having an affair, that I could have stopped it, that I am going to mess up and it's all gonna be my fault. Anxiety is about control. We want to have control of the future, but we can't, which is why it's so important to take these thoughts captive and not go down the rabbit holes. There have also been times where I have begun to have that first anxious thought. Hmm, what if? What if that thing I just felt, that pain in my back, what if that's what if that's something terrible that's actually about to happen? What if I have pinched a nerve or slipped a disc or XYZ? Like keep going down. I could entertain those thoughts and keep going down the rabbit hole. And I will come up three hours later after worrying and being more worried than ever before and to know better off. And more than likely, completely wrong about what I think is happening. When things are happening in your marriage, if you go down those rabbit holes, what if my wife does this? What if my husband does this? You're gonna entertain every angle you can think of, you're gonna change the slightest little detail and then think about it all over again. And how do you feel at the end of it? Oh my gosh, you're drained, your body is drained, your mind is drained, and you are on edge. How does that lead you to show up with your kids the next interaction or the next interaction with your spouse? You're frazzled. And when people are in a frazzled state, they make a lot of wrong decisions. Wrong decisions in how they reply and respond to other people, in how they even think about things, because you can't think about things logically. So, what you have to do is take that thought captive and decide I'm not going down that rabbit trail. I'm not entertaining this one. Instead, I am going to think about what is good. Think about three good things. Something you can celebrate, something positive, something praiseworthy. That's what you need to think about. My son tends to think about the negative a lot and really focus on that. And so we started a practice a couple of months ago. Every night before bed, he has to say three good things. And there has been a change. He is now primed and ready. As soon as he gets into bed, he knows I'm going to ask him what three good things happened today, which means that he has learned to start focusing on those good things throughout the day. But when we started, he couldn't think of anything. And we really had to dig deep to think of any good thing that happened. But since this is now a practice, it's something that he's thinking about, he's noticing good things throughout the day, he's rewiring the way his brain is interpreting situations for the better. So take those thoughts captive and start thinking about the good. The second thing that you need to do is find the helpers. Find the people in your life who are going to help calm you down when you are going in these spirals. That doesn't mean that you depend on them, but it means that these are people who can bring you back to reality and help you stay grounded when your brain is going crazy. I have the helpers in my life. I know who they are. My husband, my mom, my dad. They are the people who I turn to when I just need someone to bring some sense into my life. Don't go to the places or to the people who are going to make your anxiety worse. We had another caller on yesterday's Colin show. And she was talking about how terrible she felt and how anxious she felt. But she also said in that, but I've been checking Facebook. And when I get on Facebook, I see the things that my husband is doing and it makes me even angrier and more hurt and more anxious. You're going to the place that is leading you to feel this way. So stop it. Stop going to the people or places that make things worse and find the helpers. Find the environment, the person, the place that is going to lead you to have a better mindset. That means you have to have the willpower. You have to have the willpower to stop doing the things that are making things worse. When that woman was saying that, the chat happening on YouTube during that, during that conversation of were people saying, I got off social media and it was the best thing that happened. I stopped watching the news and it was amazing. They didn't say that, but my mom has said that because she stopped watching the news and it's helped her anxiety. So maybe you need to figure out what it is you need to stop doing and instead the positive person that you can turn to. And you might be saying, I don't have anyone to turn to. I don't know who I can talk to who will be encouraging and supportive of me, especially when it comes to standing for my marriage. Well, there is two people at least, there are two people at least that you can always turn to. Now listen, I've been a Christian basically my whole life. And I can't say that it has cured my anxiety. It's a daily, daily decision for me to cast that on him, to not think about those things in order for me to receive a piece. And sometimes a piece, oftentimes, the more I submit, the more I do, or the more I do experience it, that passes understanding. And the more you practice this, the better it gets. The second person that you can turn to who's going to support you and have your back is me. It's our whole team at Marriage Helper. We do this day in and day out. We hold hope for you when no one in your life will. Find the helpers. Maybe that helper is Marriage Helper. And the third thing that I want you to do is breathe. Y'all, I know this sounds crazy. I know this sounds like maybe woo-woo, and you're like, oh, I don't want to get into all that. No, this is actual science and psychology. When you begin to focus on your breathing and even doing something as simple as what's called a four by four box breathing, you will actually reset your amygdala, which is that center in the brain that actually is kind of like the gatekeeper for your anxiety response. And so when you are able to reset your amygdala, it can help you become more resilient. And it's so easy of how to do this. You breathe in for four seconds, just turn the timer on on your phone, turn on the stopwatch, and then just breathe in for four seconds. Hold it for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, and then hold it at the bottom for four seconds, and you do it again. It's called box breathing because you can think of breathe in, or you can think breathe in, hold, breathe out, hold. It's like you're doing a box. Now, if you do that correctly, each breath should take 16 seconds. 16 seconds, you want to do it about 12 times for it to be three minutes, is what you're looking at. When you can do that for three minutes, we know from research that it helps to reset your amygdala, decrease your anxiety, increase your ability to be resilient. Something as simple as that. So take your thoughts captive, find the helpers, and breathe, especially with four by four box breathing. Overall, anxiety doesn't have to run your mind, and it also doesn't have to ruin your marriage. You can do these things in order to help you calm down, which is the first step in saving your marriage. If you want to learn more about how to calm down, which as I said is that first step in saving your marriage, then watch this video next. Until next time, remember there is always hope.