Article
What Scripture actually says about worry
It is not what it is usually quoted as saying, and the difference matters.
Do not be anxious about anything is one of the most quoted sentences in the New Testament, and one of the most misused. Read on its own it sounds like an instruction to stop feeling something, which nobody has ever managed on request.
Philippians 4:6–7KJV
Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
The sentence does not stop where the quotation usually does. It has a but in the middle of it. The instruction is not stop being anxious; it is take the thing you are anxious about and say it, specifically, to God. Anxiety is not being forbidden. It is being redirected.
The order matters too. The peace arrives in the sentence after the asking, not before it, and it is described as guarding rather than removing. Paul does not promise that the circumstances change. He promises something stationed between you and them.
What this does not mean
It does not mean anxious people are failing at faith. Paul wrote this from a prison cell to a church he was worried about, and the letter says so. It does not mean a prayer replaces treatment; a person with a broken arm prays and also sees a doctor, and the mind is not a lesser organ.
What is the specific thing? Not the general weight of it. The one you would name if someone asked.
That question is most of the work. Anxiety tends to arrive as a fog, and prayer of this kind requires naming, which begins to make it a thing with edges rather than everything at once.
A prayer
God, this is what I am afraid of. I am telling you rather than carrying it. I do not know how this resolves, and I am asking you to keep me while it does not.