Meditate, or try mindfulness to calm your anxiety
As you may have noticed in this post about how meditation helps you sleep, meditation is good for pretty much everything that ails you. That includes anxiety.
Image by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash
Meditation and mindfulness overlap, but meditation requires you to set aside a time and practice for yourself, whereas mindfulness is something you can practice throughout your day. Mindfulness requires you to be fully present in the moment, which is something you can do while eating (by paying attention to each bite of food, what it tastes like, how it feels in your mouth, etc.) or even while washing dishes (if you are focused on the task itself, the dish and the water, as opposed to letting your mind wander).
Meditation is in some ways a subset of mindfulness, though there are some people who believe they enter an altered state while meditating that is actually not mindful at all.
For our purposes, whether you focus on your breath or you focus on a mantra, meditation allows you to take a break from the rest of your life. While meditating, you direct your attention to a particular thing (breath or mantra) and then when your mind begins to wander—and it will—you pull the focus back to the thing you’re paying attention to.
Please don’t fret when your mind wanders: your brain is designed to think, and expecting it to stop is unrealistic. When your mind wanders, simply redirect your focus to whatever you are paying attention to (breath, mantra, a voice in a guided meditation). Bring your attention back to your focal point as often and as many times as you need to during your meditation period.
As little as five minutes of meditation a day has been shown to help decrease anxiety levels. I personally aim for 15-20 minutes of meditation, as I find that it’s long enough to constitute a real break for me, but not so long that it feels taxing. Most of the time, I sit comfortably in a chair with my feet flat on the floor as a way to feel grounded. You can meditate while standing, while sitting upright, while relaxing in a recliner, or even while lying down. There is no requirement that you sit cross-legged on the floor for meditation to work.
Each of the meditation postures (sitting, standing, lying down) serves different functions, but you should feel free to do what is comfortable for you. If you are new to meditation, start with a shorter period of time and build toward your goal. When you are just getting started, even three minutes of sitting quietly and focusing on your breath or on a mantra can feel quite long.
If you are interested in a guided meditation, where you listen to an audio of someone who guides you through the process, I offer one here on my site. It’s a “Future You” visualization, which guides you through a forest and into a space where you see what your home will look like five years from now and how it will be furnished.
In this “Future You” visualization, you also meet your future self: it’s the “you” that you envision five years from now, and she might seem just like you are now, or be a bit different. The visualization includes journaling pages to help you capture your thoughts and ideas once you’re done. If you haven’t already gotten it, I hope you will get it for yourself today using the button below.
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