Fear is often in your head. Although this need not be obvious to you. By using mindfulness, you can suffer less from anxiety and also suffer less from the ill effects of anxiety. Fear can cause you to not want to take advantage of certain opportunities, making it more difficult to move forward with certain life goals. This is a real shame because anxiety is often unreal, although it can feel life-altering to you.
To make sure you suffer less from anxiety, in this article I go into how mindfulness can reduce anxiety.
Fear and tension in your body
Anxiety is an emotion that triggers all kinds of physical reactions. Your blood pressure rises, your muscles tighten, your heart rate speeds up, you become nauseous or even dizzy.
These physical reactions can make you even more anxious.
Mindfulness often seems to have to do with your thoughts, but that is not always true. Mindfulness is all about paying attention to your thoughts as well as your body.
Mindfulness can be used to recognize reactions in your body for what they are, a reaction to the fear and not the fear itself. By recognizing that your muscles are tensing, you can relax your muscles, directly reducing the psychological effect of anxiety.
If you have anxiety about a presentation and find that this keeps your body tense, you can use mindfulness to banish fear thoughts and figure out where in your body the tension strikes so you can relax it.
This can be done, for example, by performing a body scan very quickly (depending on how much time you have).
Mindfulness meditation can also reduce your fears and tensions associated with them.
Thoughts that cause anxiety
Fear of pain is one of the most well-known fears out there, especially if you suffer from chronic pain, the fear can amplify the pain. For example, you may then get all kinds of negative thoughts about the pain or about a situation where you expect pain, causing you to get into a kind of negative thought spiral about your fear of pain.
Research (1) shows that mindfulness can prevent you from mentally reinforcing that pain by thinking about it all the time. This is because with mindfulness, you also dwell on your thoughts, without forming immediate judgments about them.
If you have a thought that normally causes you anxiety it is often because you are making a judgment about that thought. The thought is scary and so you get anxious. You don't want to think about that at all, you may even get angry at yourself for thinking about what you are afraid of.
With mindfulness, you learn to distance yourself a bit more from those thoughts and also be less judgmental about your own thoughts and yourself. Moreover, with mindfulness you also learn what thoughts do to you and therefore you can recognize and break patterns.
If you can't yet identify for yourself what thoughts are causing you anxiety right now, you can set off an alarm, or mindfulness bell, for several moments during the day . When that bell goes off you check what you are doing, what you are thinking about and what emotion you are having. Over time, a pattern can be discovered in the thoughts that cause you anxiety.
Then, with mindfulness, you learn how to let go of those thoughts so you also have less anxiety.
Fear of a Thing
Sometimes fear is less psychological and you simply fear an animal or something else tangible. If this fear is actually unreal, like spiders, it can be very unpleasant.
Applying mindfulness to a confrontation with the animal or object you fear can help you experience the fear in less intense forms and look at the problem more rationally.
If mindfulness is too difficult for you to get over your fear of an animal or thing, hypnosis can be a good solution for that, too.
Fear for a moment
Fear of heights is a great fear for a mindful moment. Unless you suddenly have to walk a tightrope at high altitude when you've never done it before, there's really nothing wrong with it at all.
Indeed, mindfulness is then a good way to realize what is actually happening. After all, you are not afraid of heights, you are afraid of falling. If you are not near the edge of the precipice, that fear is completely unjustified. If there is a big fence in front of it, that fear is even more misplaced than without a fence.
By using mindfulness at such a time, you enable yourself to unwind.
As a character played by Will Smith in a science fiction movie once said (approximately): Fear is actually your train of thought dreaming up all kinds of scary scenarios, but not often based on what is actually happening in the here and now.
Mindfulness lets you experience the here and now so those scary scenarios don't have a chance or at least you can look at them with distance and without fear.
Mindfulness against anxiety disorders
Anxiety disorders are very annoying because you are confronted with your fears on a daily basis, which can cause you to avoid certain activities. In addition, if you suffer from an anxiety disorder, you may experience panic attacks which are also very annoying.
Research(2) has shown that learning mindfulness and continuing to apply mindfulness in the short and long term and has good effect in reducing symptoms of anxiety disorders.
In this study where additional monitoring was conducted after three years for long-term results, it was found that continuing to apply mindfulness makes people with anxiety disorders less likely to experience panic attacks, depressive symptoms and have lower anxiety scores overall.
Daily application of mindfulness meditation and other mindfulness techniques is therefore recommended by the researchers.
Mindfulness against fear of illness
If you have had a serious illness that can come back, it can cause a lot of anxiety. In women who have had breast cancer, the effect of mindfulness on fear of recurrence and improvement in physical functioning has been studied.
This study(3) found that mindfulness reduced stress and fear of return and also enabled women to function better physically. That said, regular check-ups are very important for your peace of mind.
Mindfulness exercise against anxiety
To get a head start against anxiety with mindfulness, I've come up with an exercise you can use to prevent a panic attack or reduce its severity.
If you notice you are becoming anxious, you can perform the following exercise to reduce anxiety. Then perform the following steps:
- Notice the physical response you have to anxiety.
Notice, that your heart rate speeds up, your chest feels tight, your muscles tense up (this is especially noticeable in the back) and a variety of different alarm bells (thoughts) go off in your head.
- Take as many breaths as necessary to normalize your body.
Whether you need to breathe in and out deeply 5 times, 10 times or 20 times doesn't matter, just make sure your heart rate returns to normal and you can relax your muscles again. If necessary, place your hand on your heart if that helps.
- Name your fear. (This is also a hypnosis technique)
Acknowledging your fear is an important step in reducing your anxiety. Say to yourself what you are afraid of, "I am afraid of... (the spider walking across the room/the presentation I am about to give and the reactions of the audience.). This automatically creates more distance between your source of fear and the emotion associated with it.
- Repeat a few phrases that are positive for yourself (and others) (This is also a hypnosis technique).
Examples of these phrases are:
"I can find the source of my anxiety. I can reduce my anxiety. I can be happy."
For others, you can say:
"Let others recognize their fears, let fears be reduced in others, so that others can be happy."
If this exercise works well, you can try confronting your fear to overcome it once and for all. This is where hypnosis can help you.
Join the free Halloween Break Free Challenge to make fear disappear. Overcome your mental ghosts. Click here and sign up.
Want to learn more about how mindfulness and hypnosis can improve your life? Then come to the free online master class on hypnosis.
Or enroll in one of our training courses.
Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:
Sources:
http://www.mindful.org/a-mindfulness-practice-for-facing-your-fears/
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016383439500025M
