A prayer for anxiety
The prayer
Lord, my chest is tight and my head will not stop. I do not know what tomorrow brings. You do.
Take from me what I do not have to carry today. Give back the breath I lost running ahead into fear.
Let me do only the next thing: the next breath, the next hour, the next day.
Stay with me while it passes. Amen.
In short
This is a short prayer to say when anxiety tightens its grip. It asks for breath, not for certainty about tomorrow. It was written for this site and carries the name of the person who wrote it. Praying does not replace treatment, and this page says so before anything else.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 4 min read
When to pray it
In the hour anxiety tightens, and again afterwards. It is short on purpose: an anxious mind cannot hold attention on a long text, and a prayer that demands concentration becomes one more task to complete.
The prayer above asks for breath, not for certainty about the future. The difference is not stylistic. Asking for certainty is asking for what nobody has, and a prayer that asks the impossible leaves the one praying feeling unheard; asking for breath is asking for what fits inside an hour, and you can tell when it arrives.
The limit to today is the same limit as in the Lord’s Prayer, and that is no accident: the bread asked for there is today’s, not the month’s. Anxiety is, almost by definition, the attempt to carry in advance the weight of days that have not arrived — and the answer Scripture offers most often is not a guarantee about those days, it is a shorter horizon.
If anxiety is interfering with your sleep, your work or your relationships, see a professional. Praying and getting treatment fit in the same day, and neither is a sign that the other is missing. This page is not a substitute for assessment or treatment, and no prayer on this site is.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared Written for Faith Flame in 2026
There is no fixed traditional prayer for anxiety, and that is not a gap so much as a sign. Anxiety as a named condition is recent vocabulary; the older formulas speak of affliction, of anguish, of dread — words describing the same experience under another name, but which do not answer someone typing “prayer for anxiety” and expecting the text of a finished prayer.
This one was written to fill exactly that, and that is why it is signed. It leans on two things Scripture repeats: Paul’s instruction to the Philippians, which turns worry into petition, and the fact that much of the Bible’s own prayer book is made of anxious people speaking to God without disguising it.
It deliberately avoids promising what cannot be promised. It does not say the anxiety will pass today, does not say praying fixes it, and does not suggest that anyone still anxious prayed too little. It asks for breath and for presence, which is what there is to ask for.
Little-known details
The most-quoted line about anxiety is an instruction, not a consolation
The Bible’s prayer book is full of anxious people
What the passages say
6Be anxious about nothing. But in all things, with prayer and supplication, with acts of thanksgiving, let your petitions be made known to God.
7And so shall the peace of God, which exceeds all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
The most-quoted passage on the subject, and it is a practical instruction before it is a comfort: worry becomes petition, and the peace follows that, not the other way round. Note that the text promises no change of circumstance — it promises a guard over heart and mind inside it.
25And so I say to you, do not be anxious about your life, as to what you will eat, nor about your body, as to what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?
26Consider the birds of the air, how they neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of much greater value than they are?
27And which of you, by thinking, is able to add one cubit to his stature?
Jesus argues from futility, not from guilt: he asks which of you, by thinking, is “able to add one cubit to his stature”. The line does not order anyone to stop feeling; it shows that the effort does not produce the result it promises.
7Cast all your cares upon him, for he takes care of you.
The image is one of transferred weight, not of denial. The verb assumes the worry exists and is heavy; what changes is who is holding it.
27Peace I leave for you; my Peace I give to you. Not in the way that the world gives, do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, and let it not fear.
Said on the eve of the arrest, to people about to have a real reason for terror. The context is what keeps the line from becoming optimism: it was said to people who had cause to be afraid.