Posted on August 5, 2015
From what I understand about anxiety, it can be a state where you feel like a prisoner to your own worry, stuck, stressed and unable to change. Like anything in mental health, every state we feel is somewhere on a spectrum. We all feel stress and anxiety sometimes! It’s just that some get it more often than others and some get it more severely. If you have a severe case of anxiety, then maybe taking medication or obtaining clinical psychological interventions will be useful, but what about the rest of us who are not ‘mentally ill’, but still want to improve our mental health and don’t like the idea of taking pharmaceuticals or seeing a shrink? Are you supposed to suffer in silence, accepting anxiety as something you will just have to put up with, ignore, and try to force away, only to have it do its damage and detract from the fullness of your life?
The closest thing I have seen to an accessible and effective way of treating anxiety for people who are ok, but still deal with anxiety, is meditation. The practice of meditation is not as mysterious as it may seem, if you are a beginner. I like to describe meditation as any activity which increases your level of focus or awareness with what is going on in the present moment. This is effective in reducing stress because most of the ‘sharks’ in our lives which seem dangerous and scary, are just in our minds! simply projections or ruminations about what might be in the future, or in some way how what has happened in the past is not ok. If you take a step back and look at your current situation, in 99% of circumstances you will realize that there is no serious threat. You might be in an office chair, or even in your soft warm bed, yet your mind puts your into a state where your sympathetic nervous system is activated in the same way as if a real shark was there! And now your body has released fight or flight chemicals which have nowhere to go and nothing to do except float around your body as you lay in bed.
Anxiety involves not being ok with the current moment. It may seem contradictory, but if you can be ok with the feeling of not being ok, then your feelings of anxiety have less resistance and a chance to process. Meditation helps you though raising your awareness of the present moment allows us to attend to what is going on in your body and mind and draws you into the reality that everything is actually ok! Even if a feeling comes up that seems unpleasant, acknowledging and accepting the feeling without trying to push it away, will help to reduce it’s power over you a little more with each practice.
It’s not your fault! Our bodies are not really adapted to our hectic lifestyles today either physically or mentally. The result of this discrepancy between what our bodies have evolved for, and the typical lifestyle in 2015, is obesity, anxiety,…….. etc. Many people take health into their own hands by being conscious of eating the right types of foods and spending countless hours in the gym, but forget about their mental health. The human body is an integrated and dynamic organism, so trying to obtain optimum physical health without considering the mind, is like trying to bake a cake with only half the ingredients. Lets use all the ingredients that mother nature gave us, so we have the fullest lives and better tasting cakes!!