Mindfulness for anxiety is one of the most common reasons to learn mindfulness.
Most people experience anxiety at some time or other. It is a normal sensation – and not always a bad thing. It is part of your response to sensing danger, and it helps you prepare to meet challenges.
However, anxiety can become disabling when the symptoms, such as insomnia, sweating, breathlessness, agitation, difficulty concentrating – become prolonged, or out of proportion with triggering events.
For midlife women in particular, anxiety can show up very strongly through peri- and menopause, sometimes with nothing obvious to provoke it. This is because oestrogen is involved in how your brain regulates mood and emotion.
Mindfulness for anxiety: how it helps
Mindfulness helps you learn to watch yourself thinking, and to develop an awareness into your own mind, that helps you be a better friend to yourself. There are three main ways you can benefit from mindfulness when you are anxious:
- With mindfulness you learn to stay with difficult feelings, without suppressing or unwittingly inflating them. See the practice Present Moment without Goals to help with this.
- Mindfulness allows you to get curious about causes of anxiety, and when you stop fighting the feelings, you can gain insight into what you need to help yourself.
- By learning to turn towards the anxiety, and create space around it, the feelings will often soften, and become less overwhelming, on their own.
10 ways to find calm
Here are some ideas for how you can bring mindfulness for anxiety into your daily life.
- Go for a walk – get outside, take time to appreciate the nature all around you. Time in nature has been shown to benefit our physical and mental health.
- Look up – our physical posture often reflects our mood. Just changing our position can also change the signalling from brain to body to brain.
- Move – whatever works for you. Run, yoga, Pilates, weights, walking, dancing, swimming. Choose something you like doing and you are more likely to stick at it. Movement raises endorphins (feel good chemicals), which help reduce stress.
- Get writing – a regular habit of journaling can help get the thoughts out of your head and onto paper. On its own this can be helpful in reducing anxiety. It also helps you understand what you are thinking and gives you an option to change the self-talk.
- Practice meditation – often regarded as synonymous with mindfulness, meditation is a practice on its own. Use an app, or a guided practice from a teacher, or join a group. The act of meditating help you connect with your breath, a useful anchor to have with you any time. On this page you will find a meditation specifically for stress and anxiety.
- Be creative – it could be doodling, stitching, knitting, painting, colouring, sculpting. Something you love and find absorbing will help bring calm to mind and body.
- Log out of social media – give yourself a break from the regular updates and notifications.
- Connect with your present moment – ask yourself to identify 5 things you can see, 4 you can touch, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell, 1 you can taste.
- Turn household tasks – whether it is washing dishes, ironing clothes, cleaning floors. You are doing it anyway, so give it your full attention.
- One step at a time – when in doubt, just focus on the next step.
There is no one size fits all. Be patient with yourself. Mindfulness for anxiety is not a magic wand, but small steps taken consistently over time can yield big outcomes. Take care of yourself and always seek medical or professional advice if you are unsure what is right for you.
