Free Book

In their their bestselling book, The Worry Free Life, Dr. Sandbek and Pat Philbrick show you the steps for making permanent and positive changes in your life. The "abundant life" Jesus promises in John 10:10 is so often kept from our view by worry that is both obvious and buried.

In this ground-breaking book, they show you the tools needed to change the worries that generate such destructive emotions as guilt, resentment, irrational fear, helplessness, depression, and unhealthy anxiety.

The complete text from The Worry Free Life is available free for download (but is copyrighted and may not be used for commercial purposes). Just click on the highlighted links below. Amazon will also allow you to browse through the book, or you can do it right here. Happy reading!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
As a cognitive psychologist, I (Dr. Terry Sandbek) have spent about thirty years helping people change their negative, worrisome thoughts. This concentration on thought-changing is crucial for life changes because our emotions are driven by our thoughts...

Introduction
This book is the product of two profound periods of growth in my life. Before I became a practicing Christian, I was very involved in the sport of Soaring. I had learned to fly sailplanes at the age of 12 and soloed at 14...

Chapter One: Your Garden
Imagine that you are living your life in a garden, much like the Garden of Eden. Imagine the serenity that surrounds you. Everything is healthy and flourishing. Growth and abundance are evident everywhere...

Chapter Two: The Big "H"
Shipwrecked three times, flogged five times, three times beaten with rods, stoned once, imprisoned twice. Such was the experience of Paul, the author of the words that began this chapter...

Chapter Three: Emotions
What if you never had to feel depressed or guilty again? What if you could say goodbye to corrosive feelings like bitterness, helplessness, severe anxiety, or irrational fear forever? It’s possible for those "what ifs" to become reality?...

Chapter Four: Pests Get in the Garden
This chapter is a good place to pause briefly and see how well you have learned the approach thus far. We began by using a metaphor of a garden, reminding us of the story in the second chapter of Genesis...

Chapter Five: Routing out the Vermin
In chapter 4, we identified the "mind pests" or little bugs — erroneous ways of thinking that cause us trouble. But as bad as all these annoying little pests are for your garden, it's the vermin that cause the major devastation...

Chapter Six: Putting It All Together
By now we hope that you have become proficient at spotting the Voice's keywords that we called the "vermin" in our metaphor of the garden. These keywords are important to recognize because they provide the key to defeating the Voice...

Chapter Seven: Five Steps to Grace
Now it's time to use all your skills to defeat the Voice for good. In this chapter we show how to directly attack the Voice and its Big Lies. We boil it down to five simple steps...

Chapter Eight: Christian Affirmations
Now that you have the tools to chase the Voice out of your garden, it's time to rebuild the landscape. Rebuilding your garden landscape produces new self-confidence and increases your personal power...

Chapter Nine: Re-Planting Your Garden
As you begin to throw out all the mental obstacles that keep you from living fully, you want to begin replacing them as completely as you can...

Chapter Ten: The Behavior Domino
We have concentrated, up to this point, on the first three dominoes: life events, thoughts, and feelings. You have learned that the interaction between these three dominoes is automatic. Life events trigger destructive thoughts before we are even aware of them...

Chapter Eleven: Accepting God's Grace
Jesus never promised that salvation would automatically bring us peace and joy. We can see this in our churches today, where many pious, God-centered people are experiencing emotional pain. The Christian life is a journey that may start with our new relationship to Christ, but, like any journey, it must keep progressing...

Appendices

Glossary

References

The Worry Free Life ministry is a grass roots effort best sustained by word of mouth. Please share your enthusiasm by referring this site to anyone you know who would be interested in exploring the possibility of a new, worry-free life.

Behaviors and thoughts are easy to distinguish, but the difference between emotions and sensations is often confusing. People name both experiences by the same word: feelings. Emotions and sensations are different though they may occur simultaneously. Examples of emotions include happiness sadness, anxiety and fear. Sensations are physical feelings: urges, appetites, pains, muscular tensions, fatigue. These all come from our bodies and that is what identifies them as sensations. Recognizing the difference between the two is critically important.

Believing that things cannot go wrong is foolish. Life will never be completely easy or pain-free. When we anticipate and plan for problems that are likely to occur, we are showing concern about how life treats us. And such concern is good. Concern leads us to do things that improve us rather than wasting time worrying about things that we can’t do anything about.

When we are concerned, we are problem-solving. We are looking for constructive solutions to problems.

When we worry, we are not solving problems but are spinning our wheels and using our imaginations in unconstructive ways.

The main difference between concern and worry boils down to control. Worry focuses on things outside ourselves, which we cannot control, and often leads us to take the wrong kind of action.

Concern, on the other hand, comes from recognizing our limitations and doing what we can to make ourselves and the world better. By making a habit of setting aside some quiet time each day and writing about those things that are on our minds, we can distinguish between what we can control (concern) and what we cannot control (worry).