How Meditation Helps Anxiety

You’ve probably heard or read that meditation is helpful for anxiety. It is — but not in the way you might think.

“Many people have the misconception that meditation is like a magic elixir that will quickly and effortlessly reduce their stress and anxiety,” said Tom Corboy, MFT, co-author of The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD.

But the primary purpose of meditation isn’t to melt your anxiety. Instead, it’s to help you become more present right now, in this very moment, he said. “[T]he anxiety reduction is just a pleasant side effect.”

We often experience anxiety because we fixate on the past or on the future, Corboy said. However, when you’re meditating, you’re intentionally focused on the here and now.

Meditation also helps with anxiety because it quiets an overactive brain. “For someone with anxiety, it sometimes feels like their mind is like a hamster on a wheel — constantly running, but not really getting anywhere,” said Corboy, also founder and executive director of the OCD Center of Los Angeles.

We get anxious because we buy into our thoughts and feelings, he said. We take them at face value and get overwhelmed. Yet our thoughts don’t warrant this undivided attention. Again, it’s just our minds spinning a slew of worries and what-ifs.

Meditating helps us stop overattending to our thoughts and feelings and “allows us to get off the wheel, catch our breath, and get some perspective.”

It also cultivates an attitude of nonjudgmental acceptance, he said. “The goal is not to get to a place where your life is free of problems — that’s not possible — but rather to develop the skill of accepting the existence of those problems without overvaluing them.”

Corboy shared Shakespeare’s quote from Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Read more: How can i learn transcendental meditation

According to Corboy, a basic meditation practice readers can try is to focus on your breath. Simply pay attention to the sensation and experience of breathing, he said. When your mind naturally wanders, redirect your attention back to your breath.

Again, using your breath as a focal point means that you’re paying attention to the present instead of paying attention to the chatter and noise in your mind, he said.

“[Your breath] is life at its most basic — what is happening right now … I am sitting here breathing … there is air moving in and out of my lungs.”

Over time, meditating helps to strengthen our attention muscles, he said. As a result, “you become better and better at paying attention to now, rather than running on the mental hamster wheel.”

The key is to be patient and committed. Meditation requires patience, because as Corboy said, you probably won’t have much of a response in the beginning. “It’s not like you sit down, meditate, and voila, you suddenly attain enlightenment.”

It requires commitment because it’s easy to quit when so many responsibilities compete for your attention, he said.

While meditation isn’t a panacea for anxiety, it’s still incredibly helpful.

“Ultimately, meditation helps us slow down, get perspective, and think more objectively and with less knee-jerk reactivity. And that helps us be less anxious,” Corboy said.

Additional Resources

Corboy regularly recommends these Pema Chödrön books to his clients: The Wisdom of No Escape, Start Where You Are, and When Things Fall Apart.

Chödrön is an American Buddhist nun who “translates the principles of mindfulness into language that can be easily understood and implemented by westerners,” Corboy said.

Learn more: The Unexplainable Store

The Toll it Takes

Because of the mind-body connection, you should also consider the physical side of anxiety. Even if you have accepted worry as a tolerable trait, it exacts a price in the form of insomnia, easy startle response, fatigue, irritability, muscle tension, headaches, inability to relax, trembling, twitching, feeling out of breath, and various stomach and digestive problems. If these persist for more than six months after something bad has happened to you, a diagnosis of GAD may be appropriate. Even if your symptoms are manageable, you shouldn’t have to live this way.  Anticipating the worst, which has become a habit even when no threat is in sight, distorts how you approach work, family, and the world in general.

There are many theories about what causes chronic anxiety, but they are as diverse as explanations for depression. It’s more useful to consider how to retrain your mind so that your worry subsides and is replaced by a normal undisturbed mood. The standard medical advice is to take medication (usually some form of tranquilizer), augmented by talking to a therapist. However, self-care has other tools, such as meditation, diet, sleep, massage, and exercise that you can pursue on your own.

Meditation

One aspect of anxiety is racing thoughts that won’t go away. Meditation helps with this part of the problem by quieting the overactive mind. Instead of buying into your fearful thoughts, you can start identifying with the silence that exists between every mental action. Through regular practice, you experience that you’re not simply your thoughts and feelings. You can detach yourself from these to rest in your own being. This involves remaining centered, and if a thought or outside trigger pulls you out of your center, your meditation practice allows you to return there again.

Being able to center yourself is a skill that anyone can learn, once they have the intention and the experience of what it feels like. Anxious people often shy away from meditation for various reasons. “I can’t meditate” is code for feeling too restless to sit still or having too many thoughts while trying to meditate. With a patient teacher, these objections can be overcome. Anyone can meditate, even if the first sessions are short and need to be guided. Being on tranquilizers, which for some anxious people is the only way they can cope, isn’t a block to meditation.

Numerous scientific studies have found meditation to be effective for treating anxiety.  One study, published in the Psychological Bulletin, combined the findings of 163 different studies. The overall conclusion was that practicing mindfulness or meditation produced beneficial results, with a substantial improvement in areas like negative personality traits, anxiety, and stress. Another study focused on a wide range of anxiety, from cancer patients to those with social anxiety disorder, and found mindfulness to be an effective management tool.

The researchers analyzed 39 studies totaling 1,140 participants and discovered that the anxiety-reducing benefits from mindfulness might be enjoyed across such a wide range of conditions because when someone learns mindfulness, they learn how to work with difficult and stressful situations.

All mental activity has to have a physical correlation in the brain, and this aspect has been studied in relation to anxiety. Chronic worriers often display increased reactivity in the amygdala, the area of the brain associated with regulating emotions, including fear. Neuroscientists at Stanford University found that people who practiced mindfulness meditation for eight weeks were more able to turn down the reactivity of this area. Other researchers from Harvard found that mindfulness can physically reduce the number of neurons in this fear-triggering part of the brain.

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Here are three simple, practical ways to take advantage of all this knowledge: 

Regular meditation allows your brain to develop new pathways besides the old worry grooves. The mind begins to experience itself without being overshadowed by anxious thoughts.
Exercise puts the body in an active state. High-intensity aerobic exercise is more effective than anaerobic, and a 12- to 15-week program is better than a short routine.
A diet of natural organic foods without additives, along with avoidance of refined sugar, evens out the metabolism. Meals should be regular and satisfying.