Mindfulness and anxiety: make anxiety thoughts disappear
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.
One way to do this is 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 common fears there is; especially if you suffer from chronic pain, that fear can intensify the pain. For example, you might start having all kinds of negative thoughts about the pain or about a situation in which you expect to feel pain, causing you to get caught in a kind of negative thought spiral regarding 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 immediately making judgments about them.
If you have a thought that normally makes you anxious, it’s often because you’re judging that thought. The thought is scary, and so you become afraid. You don’t want to think about it at all; you might even get angry at yourself for thinking about what you’re 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’re not yet able to identify which thoughts are causing your anxiety, you can set an alarm—or a mindfulness bell—to go off at various times throughout the day . When the bell rings, take a moment to check in with what you’re doing, what you’re thinking about, and what emotions you’re feeling. Over time, you’ll be able to identify a pattern in the thoughts that trigger your 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’re simply afraid of an animal or something else tangible. If this fear is actually irrational—as with spiders—it can be very distressing.
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 overcome your fear of an animal or object, hypnosis can also be a good solution.
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 distressing because you’re confronted with your fears on a daily basis, which can lead you to avoid certain activities. In addition, if you suffer from an anxiety disorder, you may experience panic attacks, which are also very distressing.
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, which included an additional follow-up after three years to assess long-term results, it was found that continuing to practice mindfulness leads people with anxiety disorders to experience panic attacks and depressive symptoms less frequently and to have lower overall anxiety scores.
Researchers therefore recommend practicing mindfulness meditation and other mindfulness techniques daily.
Mindfulness against fear of illness
If you’ve had a serious illness that could recur, this can cause a great deal of anxiety. A study was conducted among women who have had breast cancer to examine the effect of mindfulness on their fear of recurrence and on improvements in physical functioning.
This study ( 3) showed that mindfulness reduced stress and anxiety about recurrence and also enabled women to function better physically. Nevertheless, regular checkups are very important for your peace of mind.
Mindfulness exercise against anxiety
To get a head start on combating anxiety with mindfulness, I’ve devised 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 let your fears fade away. Conquer your mental demons. Click here to sign up.
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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
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10865-012-9473-6