What is anxiety?
In this blog I will show you how you can manage anxiety with mindfulness. Anxiety is a feeling of unease, such as worry or fear, that can be mild or severe. Everyone has feelings of anxiety at some point in their life. For example, you may feel stressed and anxious about sitting an exam, or having a medical test ,a job interview or maybe a work review. At the moment many of us are experiencing extra levels of stress and anxiety as we negotiate our way through these strange Covid 19 times.
How anxiety robs us of our own inner peace and calm
Anxiety can mentally exhaust you and will have real impacts on your body. But before you get anxious about being anxious, you might be glad to know that research has shown that you can manage anxiety and stress with mindfulness. Mindfulness is the skill of paying attention to the present without judgement .It is as skill and if you are committed to learning how to manage anxiety with mindfulness you can develop this skill with simple practises.
How to manage Anxiety with Mindfulness
The present moment isn’t always a place of rest. Meditation can put us in touch with our stress and anxiety, and that’s why it can be so helpful. Explore how mindfulness and meditation can help soften feelings of anxiousness, reduce stress, and calm a panic attack by exploring some simple mindfulness practises.
Anxiety is our body’s way of saying, “ I’m experiencing too much stress all at once.” This happens to the best of us. But, when that feeling of being “always on alert” becomes background noise that doesn’t go away, that’s when it’s time to take action. Learning how to manage anxiety with mindfulness is a gift you can give yourself right now as we navigate the choppy waters of continuing to live with Covid19.
Calm Anxiety with a short practice called STOP
Creating space in the day to stop, come down from the worried mind, and get back into the present moment has been shown to be enormously helpful in mitigating the negative effects of our stress response. When we drop into the present, we’re more likely to gain perspective and see that we have the power to regulate our response to pressure.
Here’s a short practice you can weave into your day to step into that space between stimulus and response.
S = Stop
Stop what you’re doing; put things down for a minute.
T = Take
Take a few deep breaths. If you’d like to extend this, you can take a minute to breathe normally and naturally and follow your breath coming in and out of your nose. You can even say to yourself “in” as you’re breathing in and “out” as you’re breathing out if that helps with concentration.
O = Observe
Observe your experience just as it is—including thoughts, feelings, and emotions. You can reflect about what is on your mind and also notice that thoughts are not facts, and they are not permanent. Notice any emotions present and how they’re being expressed in the body. Research shows that just naming your emotions can turn the volume down on the fear circuit in the brain and have a calming effect. Then notice your body. Are you standing or sitting? How is your posture? Any aches or pains?
P = Proceed
Proceed with something that will support you in the moment: talk to a friend, rub your shoulders, have a cup of tea.
Treat this whole exercise as an experiment: Get curious about where there are opportunities in the day for you to just STOP—waking up in the morning, taking a shower, before eating a meal, at a stop light, before sitting down at work and checking email.
What would it be like in the days, weeks, and months ahead if you started ‘stopping’ more often?
Mindfulness is not a magic panacea for anxiety
Although you can learn to manage anxiety with mindfulness it is important to know that mindfulness not a panacea. It’s not the right choice for everyone. We know from research though that when you can create a little space between yourself and what you’re experiencing, your anxiety can soften.
How Mindfulness Calms Anxious Feelings
Here are three key ways in you can manage anxiety with mindfulness
- Mindfulness helps us to be with or to stay stay with difficult feelings without judging or analyzing, instead just noticing and allowing what is here. When you allow yourself to feel and acknowledge your worries, irritations, painful memories, and other difficult thoughts and emotions, this often helps them dissipate.
- With mindfulness we can safely explore the underlying causes of our stress and worry. By surrendering in a way to what is showing up instead of either fighting it or pushing it away you will be able to bring a gentle curiosity to your experience and so learn more about what lies behind the difficult feeling.
- Mindfulness gives you a different place to stand, helps you create space around your anxieties so you are not consumed by them. As you practise, you will grow in understanding of and gentleness towards the underlying causes of your stress, anxiety and fears. This is very empowering and freeing. “”In essence, practicing mindfulness is a process of learning to trust and stay with feelings of discomfort rather than trying to escape from or analyze them,” says Bob Stahl, Ph.D., Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher, founder of multiple MBSR programs, and co-author of multiple books on MBSR. “This often leads to a remarkable shift; time and again your feelings will show you everything you need to know about them—and something you need to know for your own well-being.”
Poetry as a way to manage anxiety with mindfulness.
Below is a poem which for me describes perfectly the way we can manage anxiety and come home to the peace within us through simple mindfulness practises.
Portia Nelson,There’s a Hole in My Sidewalk:The Romance of Self Discovery
“I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost… I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes me a long time to get out.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in. It’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault. I get out immediately.
walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
I walk down another street.”
I also want to share here a me a script for a mountain meditation which you might find particularly helpful as a meditation for managing anxiety. If you would like to listen to me guiding this meditation please click here….
How to manage anxiety with Mindfulness with this meditation to strengthen stability
A Mountain Meditation
Sit with a straight back, your head held erect on your neck and shoulders, allow the shoulders to fully relax. And place your hands on your knees.
Close your eyes and bring your attention to the flow of your breathing. Feeling each in breath and each out breath. Just observing your breathing without trying to change it or regulate it in any way. Allowing the body to be still. And sitting with a sense of dignity, a sense of resolve, a sense of being complete, whole, in this very moment, with your posture reflecting this sense of wholeness.
And as you sit here, picturing in your mind’s eye as best you can the most beautiful mountain that you know or have seen or can imagine. Just holding the image and feeling of this mountain in your mind’s eye, letting it gradually come into greater focus. Observing its overall shape, its lofty peak high in the sky, the large base rooted in the rock of the earth’s crust, its steep or gently sloping sides. Noticing how massive it is, how solid, how unmoving, how beautiful both from afar and up close.
Perhaps your mountain has snow at the top and trees on the lower slopes. Perhaps it has one prominent peak, perhaps a series of peaks or a high plateau. Whatever its shape or appearance, just sitting and breathing with the image of this mountain. Observing it, noticing its qualities and when you feel ready, seeing if you can bring the mountain into your own body so that the body sitting here and the mountain in your mind’s eye become one. So that as you sit here you share in the massiveness and the stillness and majesty of the mountain. You become the mountain rooted in the sitting posture, your head becomes the lofty peak, supported by the rest of the body. Your shoulders and arms the sides of the mountain. Your buttocks and legs the solid base rooted to your chair. Experiencing in your body a sense of uplift from deep within your pelvis and spine, with each breath as you continue sitting, becoming a little more a breathing mountain, unwavering in your stillness, completely what you are, beyond words and thought. A centred, rooted, unmoving presence.
Now as you sit here becoming aware of the fact that as the sun travels across the sky, the light and shadows and colours are changing virtually moment by moment. Night follows day and day follows night. A canopy of stars, the moon, then the sun. Through it all, the mountain just sits, experiencing a change in each moment. Constantly changing, yet always just being itself. It remains still as the seasons flow into one another and as the weather changes, moment by moment, and day by day. Calmness abiding all change.
In summer, there’s no snow on the mountain except perhaps for the very peaks. In fall, the mountain may wear a coat of brilliant fire colours. In winter, a blanket of snow and ice. In any season, it may find itself at times enshrouded in clouds or fog or pelted by freezing rain. People may come to see the mountain and comment on how beautiful it is or on how it’s not a good day to see the mountain. None of this matters to the mountain which remains at all times its essential self. Clouds may come, and clouds may go. The mountain’s magnificence and beauty are not changed one bit by the way people see it or not or by the weather. Seen or unseen, in sun or clouds, broiling or frigid, day or night, it just sits, being itself. At times, visited by violent storms, buffeted by snow and rain and winds of unthinkable magnitude. Through it all, the mountain continues to sit unmoved by the weather, by what happens on the surface, by the world of appearances.
And in the same way, as we sit in meditation, we can learn to experience the mountain. We can embody the same unwavering stillness and rootedness in the face of everything that changes in our own lives over seconds, over hours, over years. In our lives and in our meditation practice, we constantly experience the changing nature of mind and body and of the outer world. We have our own periods of light and darkness, our moments of colour and our moments of drabness. Certainly, we experience storms of varying intensity and violence in the outer world and in our own minds and bodies. We endure periods of darkness and pain, as well as the moments of joy. Even our appearance changes constantly, experiencing a weather of its own.
By becoming the mountain in our meditation practice, we can link up with its strength and stability and adopt it for our own. We can use its energies to support our energy to encounter each moment with mindfulness and equanimity and clarity. It may help us to see that our thoughts and feelings, our preoccupations, our emotional storms and crises, even the things that happen to us, are very much like the weather on the mountain. We tend to take it all personally but its strongest characteristic is impersonal. The weather of our own lives is not to be ignored or denied. It is to be encountered, honoured, felt, known for what it is and held in awareness. And in holding it in this way, we come to know a deeper silence, and stillness, and wisdom. Mountains have this to teach us and much more if we can come to listen.
Step by Step ways to manage anxiety with mindfulness.
- Find a practise you can do, commit to it even if it is a really short practise,
- Do this practise regularly – it is not the length of the practise but the habit of regularity that will help you to manage your anxiety with mindfulness
- Notice your inner critic and begin to soften this voice every time you become aware of it
- Celebrate your small wins – each time you reclaim your peace from a place of anxiety.
Some of our other Posts
Mindfulness Exercises For The Beginner
Start to learn mindfulness with a course to suit you
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