Are you wondering if mindfulness and meditation really help with anxiety? The short answer is, yes. There’s now a solid body of research demonstrating the effectiveness of mindfulness and meditation techniques for anxiety.
There are many very specific techniques from mindfulness and meditation that can help calm anxiety and can help you cope even when anxiety is high. Some are referred to as “informal” while others are “formal.” Meditation is a formal technique for practicing mindfulness while focusing on feeling the water on your hands as you wash the dishes is an informal technique. You might be wondering how and why these techniques work for anxiety.
Think of it this way- your brain is a problem-solving machine wired for survival. All day long, your brain is scanning for solutions to problems and trying to help you avoid danger. This is sometimes referred to as the “caveman” aspect of your brain, the part that historically had to be concerned with hunting for food and escaping dangers like hungry tigers. Although this part of our brain is not as useful to us in modern times (we have grocery stores and no tigers in sight), our minds don’t know that. So the survival and problem-solving part of the brain stays active and lit up anyway. When you’re late for work, and you have anxiety, your mind and body react as if this is a more threatening event than it actually is. That’s your caveman brain at work.
You’ve probably had times when you wake up in the night or can’t go to sleep in the first place because your mind won’t shut off. There’s a constant stream of thoughts cycling through, often the same thoughts over and over. Maybe this even happens to you during the day. Mindfulness teaches strategies for what to do with these thoughts so that you don’t feel so controlled by them. It also helps with learning how to calm your breath and body by teaching you how to bring your focus on the sensations of breathing and feeling instead of staying stuck on the thoughts in your mind.
Because your brain automatically goes into survival and problem solving mode, you have to consciously practice a new way of being in your mind and body. If you’re like most people, you’ve been wearing the same ruts in the dirt road of your mind for a long time so it can take a while to wear new pathways, But it is possible with practice. Many of the techniques from meditation and mindfulness are aimed at calming and retraining the survival and problem solving mechanisms that kick in when we feel threatened in some way.
Are you struggling with anxiety and looking for an anxiety therapist in Des Moines to learn how to cope better using mindfulness? Visit the home page and click “book online” to make an appointment.
