Does Mindfulness Meditation Help With Anxiety?
Anxious thoughts are something WE ALL deal with, and so it should come as no surprise that one of the most common entry points into mindfulness meditation is to help with anxiety (myself included). The things that make us anxious, the things we worry about, are countless. If we check, we are almost always worried about something. Anxiety makes us feel helpless because we often don’t fully understand where our anxiety comes from. We understand the effect but not the cause. Mindfulness meditation can help us identify the true nature of anxiety so that we can start to be more aware of when we’re becoming anxious and why.
To combat anxiety with mindfulness meditation we are going to use a method known as Recognize, Reduce, Remedy. We need to become adept at each of these three steps and use them often, in this order, to increase our familiarity with the root causes of our anxious thoughts. Here’s a breakdown of each step, how to do it, and why it helps.
Recognize
In order to alleviate our anxious thoughts with mindfulness we first need to recognize that we are having them. Mindfulness is all about active awareness of your own mind. You may be saying, “Trust me, I am VERY aware of when I’m anxious.” We do become aware of the effects of anxious thoughts, but usually way too late. Anxiety is like a fire — it starts as something manageable but becomes seemingly impossible to stop if left unchecked. As such, we need to become more actively aware of our anxious thoughts the moment they begin happening. This requires us to train in a staple of mindfulness meditation — watching our own mind throughout the day.
Normally, we are at the mercy of our own mind. Various thoughts pop into our minds all day long, pushing and pulling us in different directions. For example, say we are working on a project when suddenly we remember something upsetting our boss said to us. Instantaneously, the worries start pouring in:
“What if I upset my boss again?”
“What if they fire me?”
“How will I pay my rent?
“I’ll never be able to afford a house. I don’t make enough money.”
“What am I doing, I don’t even like this job?”
“Did I pick the wrong career path?”
This train of worried thoughts happens in mere seconds. Most of the time we are completely unaware that our mind is ruminating in this way, and if we are aware, it's usually toward the end rather than the onset. We need to watch our mind so that as soon as “we remember something upsetting our boss said to us” happens, we recognize that our mind is primed to begin a sequence of anxious thoughts. We need to stop the fire when it’s small, not when it spreads throughout the forest. We need mindfulness.
How can we start watching our own mind? At first, we need to force ourselves because it is not natural for us to do so normally. We need to actively check in with ourselves to see how our mind is doing at a given moment. A good tip is to set a mindfulness alarm on your phone for once every hour or so. When the alarm goes off, stop what you are doing and evaluate the state of your own mind. Think about the following:
Have you been focused on what you were doing?
What anxious thoughts popped up for you in the last hour?
How do you feel?
The more familiar you become with checking in on yourself, the more natural this will seem. Soon you will find yourself doing quick check-ins without the need of an alarm. You will become an expert at watching your mind. It will become effortless, and you will be able to spot the fire of anxiety as it sparks.
Reduce
Once we recognize that anxious thoughts are popping up in our mind, the next step is to reduce the power of these thoughts. Meditation is extremely helpful here. Reducing the power of anxiety through mindfulness meditation is dependent on two things: acceptance and space.
We must first accept that we are having anxious thoughts. Acceptance means not trying to change the fact that the anxious thoughts are happening. It means being OK with the fact that you are having anxious thoughts and not wishing they would just go away. This is very difficult at first because anxiety is extremely uncomfortable and as soon as it crops up, we immediately want it to stop. But wishing anxious thoughts away only feeds into the power anxiety has over us. We label something as the worst possible outcome and panic about it coming to fruition. We need to accept that we are being anxious with as little judgment as possible. We need to be patient with ourselves.
If we can patiently accept that we are having anxious thoughts, we’ve set ourselves up to combat them. To do this we need to create space between ourselves and the anxiety through meditation. Not physical space, though in some cases that can help too. The space we are talking about is mental space.
Anxiety makes our mind fixate negatively on object, feeling, or situation, so we need to focus our mind on something else instead. This is where our meditation practice comes in. Instead of fixating on the anxious thoughts, we are going to intentionally focus on our breath:
Stop what you are doing, and focus exclusively on your breath: in and out.
Follow the sensations of your breathing. Notice the cool air coming through our nostrils on inhalation, and the warm air coming out of our nostrils on exhalation.
When your mind drifts back to the anxious thoughts, gently guide it back to focusing on your breathing.
Repeat this process for 5 minutes or so.
Don’t expect this breathing meditation exercise to be easy at first. Your mind will very much want to return to fixating on the anxious thoughts rather than focusing on your breath. As such, it is really important to start training in breathing meditation when you're not having anxious thoughts. It will be easier to become familiar with the process of breathing meditation when your mind is not in “panic mode.” You can then use this meditation technique to greater success when actual anxiety is present.
Remedy
When we are anxious, we immediately go into panic mode — we seem unable to think about anything other than the anxious thoughts. When we are panicked, we do not make good decisions. Everything seems clouded and we cannot think clearly. The goal of breathing meditation is not to erase anxiety, but to distance our mind from panic mode enough that we can begin to objectively evaluate the anxiety itself. Breathing meditation grants us the mental space necessary to realize that our anxiety is ultimately derived from our mind, which means we have complete control over it. Familiarizing yourself with this realization is the remedy.
After we have calmed our mind with a breathing meditation, we use this calm mind to investigate what anxiety is and where it comes from. Anxiety is ultimately an exaggerated fear of a future outcome.
Let’s say you have dinner plans with your partner and find out that you’ll be meeting their parents for the first time. Anxiety sets in.
“What if I say something stupid?”
“I ALWAYS say something stupid.”
“What is wrong with me?”
“I really don't want to go to this. It’s going to be awful.”
This is an exaggeration of a future outcome. You are taking an event that hasn’t happen yet (meeting your partner’s parents), imparting a negative outcome to it, (What if I say something stupid?), and then exaggerating that negative outcome (I ALWAYS say something stupid, what is wrong with me?). When you are worrying about an upcoming event, you are worrying about something that hasn't happened, something that doesn't actually exist in reality yet. Anxiety is all about dwelling in the outcomes of the future.
Recognizing this is immensely helpful for managing anxiety because we begin to see that we have control over our own future. We begin to realize that our anxiety is not a fixed outcome, it is flexible, and thus can be changed.
Our anxiety comes directly from our own mind, not the object or situation we are anxious about. This does not mean that our anxiety is not real, but instead that we have options. If our anxiety was not derived from our mind, we would have no control over it. We would be helpless. But we CAN control our own minds. In fact, it’s the only thing we truly have control over. Realizing this can be extremely empowering.
Using the example of meeting our partner’s parents, let’s walk through a full Recognize, Reduce, Remedy practice.
Scenario
You have dinner plans with your partner and find out that you’ll be meeting their parents for the first time. Anxiety sets in.
Recognize
We stop whatever we are doing and evaluate our mind. “How am I feeling?” We can see we’re becoming anxious about meeting our partner’s parents. We are worried that meeting them will not go well. Good, we have recognized our anxiety early on.
Reduce
We’ve identified anxious thoughts popping up in our mind. We do not need to fight them, we need to accept that they are happening. We can say to ourselves “I am having anxious thoughts about meeting my partner’s parents.” It is OK to have these anxious thoughts; we can work with them.
We take a moment to ourselves and focus our attention on our breath instead of the anxious thoughts. We close our eyes and breath in and out, very normally and naturally. We focus on how breathing feels. The cool air coming through our nostrils on the inhalation, the warm air coming out of our nostrils on the exhalation. When our mind drifts back to thoughts about the dinner with our partner’s parents, we gently guide it back to our breath. We do this for 5 minutes or as long as we are able.
Remedy
With our mind feeling a bit more relaxed, we intentionally evaluate where our anxiety comes from. We think about how the dinner with our partner’s parents has not even happened yet. The idea that it will go poorly is mere assumption. It is only thoughts. The fear of it going poorly must be derived from our mind because the event has not happened. How wonderful that this is true. This means we have control over the situation because we have control over our own mind. We sit with this realization for as long as we can, let it sink in.