Mindfulness for the Anxious Mind
A colleague of mine kindly asked me for some mindfulness resources for the anxious mind and I thought this was a great topic for this month’s post. Mindfulness meditation is a wonderful tool to ease overthinking and to ground oneself into the present moment.
Two resources I personally love are;
San Diego University which has great resources for mindfulness meditation with some guided sits;
https://cih.ucsd.edu/mindfulness/guided-audio-video
Alternatively, if you’re looking for a practice rooted in mindfulness’s origins (Buddhism) this is a wonderful resource as well
https://www.spiritrock.org/practice-guides/the-four-foundations-of-mindfulness
The best advice I have is to just sit, close your eyes, notice your body and breath and when your mind naturally wanders return to your inhale and exhale over and over. Consistency is valuable as the benefits are dose-dependent meaning the more you practice the longer the effect lasts.
While you can read many different ways to start, I recommend simply sitting with yourself without judgment, with open-hearted curiosity, compassion, and sensing your physical body and mind. In doing so, your thoughts will naturally arise and then naturally shift.
This shift is due to the impermanence of everything (i.e. the only constant in life is change).
The goal is to use that perspective to translate it to your everyday life. If you’re anxious and overthink, just like in the sit, notice the thought, examine the thought, and return to the breath and physical body over and over.
Rather than clinging or fixating on the thought, which only amounts to added suffering, practice grounding yourself in the present moment and returning to the fluctuation of your inhale and exhale. The mind naturally wanders, and your thoughts are not permeant, by acknowledging this truth you allow yourself to let go.
Amazingly, by fully accepting the pain from the worry or thought spiral, the thought loses power and shifts. This is not saying the worry is true, it’s acknowledging the worry thought exists and there is more to the experience. In other words, by stepping back from the worry, the worry becomes smaller, and because life is constantly moving, your attention can move to something else.
In meditation that something else is often the breath.
Breathing is something you do without conscious thought but is also something you can do with consciousness. By just noticing your inhale and exhale, exploring all of the details of the experience your mind is no longer clinging to the worry. It may return to the worry thought or feeling but you can gently guide it back to your breath or the physical sensations in your body.
Start small, with setting a timer for this practice for 1 minute a day for a week then increasing it to 5 minutes a day for a week etc. See if this practice helps ease your anxious mind. I personally like to use Insight Timer as an app to help with my sits but using the timer on your phone works as well. Some people enjoy the Calm app or Headspace app.
As always, if you’re looking for additional support on mindfulness meditation or ways to ease your anxiety talk to your therapist about it.
Kindly,
Chima