Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, n... — C.S. Lewis

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.

Author: C.S. Lewis

Insight: Anxiety gets a weird reputation in self-help culture—like it's something you should willpower away or pray hard enough to eliminate. Lewis pushes back on this quietly. He's saying that feeling anxious doesn't mean you're spiritually broken or that your faith isn't strong enough. You're not failing at belief; you're experiencing something that genuinely afflicts you, the way illness or pain does. That shift matters, because guilt about your anxiety just layers another problem on top of the original one. What's less obvious is the second part of what he's saying. He connects anxiety to something sacred—suffering as part of something meaningful rather than just something to escape. That doesn't make anxiety fun or easy, but it reframes it from "I'm defective" to "I'm experiencing something real and human." You're not isolated in your worry; you're joining something ancient and difficult that people have endured across time. This feels relevant now because we live in an age where we're supposed to optimize everything, including our mental states. The permission Lewis gives—to treat anxiety as an affliction rather than a failure—is actually liberating. You can stop fighting yourself and start just living with the thing while you work through it.

Source: Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, p. 22, 1964