Meditation: Release Your Anxiety
“The busy life we lead today generates a lot of stress. We are overloaded with information and overcommitted to so many tasks in our homes, jobs, causes … I think meditation is a wonderful tool to deal with stress.”
~Jennifer Aniston
Anxiety is an emotion that people often find challenging to manage. Are you suffering from anxiety? Are you in need of a solution to your problem? Keep reading, and you will learn how to use meditation to tackle and reduce worrisome thoughts that are sometimes associated with anxiety disorders. You will learn how to perform meditation step-by-step while releasing anxiety. For better understanding, we will first explain what mediation and anxiety are.
What is Meditation?
Mediation is a combination of certain moves and techniques used for mental or conscious changing and, to some extent, physical strengthening. This is achieved by increasing or motivating your focused attention and awareness state simultaneously. Many people believe that meditation is related to becoming a changed and transitioning into a new type of person, emphasizing becoming better. Also, regarding problems facing one’s mental health, it has been studied and observed that mediation effectively reduces anxiety, depression, and stress.
What is Anxiety?
Anxiety, on the other hand, is a normal state of being everyone encounters. Anxiety is a form of mental illness that involves fear, nervousness, and worry. Even at an early stage, excess anxiety can affect and disrupt your everyday activates and. In other words, according to the American Physiological Association (APA), understanding the difference between normal feelings of anxiety and anxiety disorders can require the help of a professional medical expert.
“Quiet the mind, and the soul will speak.” Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati
How You Can Release Your Anxiety with Meditation
If you are suffering from anxiety, mediation can be one of the most effective measures to tackle or reduce it. If you have not been through this and wonder how to go about it, you are first advised to understand your anxiety. This is because no problem can be solved without understanding its root or what it is all about. Anxiety can be related to an inability to control thoughts. This is where mediation comes in because it can help your brain regulate thoughts and underlying emotions better.
By applying the mediation process and releasing the anxiety in your mind, you can effectively pin down thoughts and storylines that induce anxiety in your head. If you want help to conduct your meditation, you can check for mediation spots around the town or city you live in, but if you wish to do everything yourself, below is a breakdown of steps to conduct anxiety-releasing mediation.
- Identify a good spot: Before you can engage in mediation, the first and most important thing is to find a good place where you would like to meditate. An ideal spot is quiet and has good spacing. If you do not have any good areas around, you can create one as it does not require much.
- Sitting upright: After finding an acceptable position, the first thing to do when starting the mediation process is sitting straight up. The entire process of mediating involves staying focused, and researchers have proved that the best way of doing so is by sitting up straight. Another essential thing to note is that while sitting upright, you should make sure your feet are touching the floor.
- Paying Attention (Focus Process): At this stage, you should closely pay attention to all the happenings in your body. The best way to start this is by paying attention to your breath in and out. It would be best if you also tried to make it as natural as possible. This is when you identify the thoughts that trigger your anxiety, hence helping identify the origin of your anxiety’s source.
- Exhibiting Discipline: This is where you start to face your most significant test. You will undoubtedly begin to feel the urge to shift what you are focusing on to something else, which in turn means distraction. With the proper discipline, you will be able to fight that urge and any form of distraction as you continue focusing on your breath while diving deep into what triggers your anxiety.
- Acknowledging and Analyzing your Fear: This can be very tricky, but you can work through this stage if you put your mind to it. The tricky thing here is that while identifying your anxiety origins, you still must stay focused on your breathing flow. Now, you have been able to identify the storyline that brings about your anxiety. Acknowledging and letting go is the next big move. You still should not lose focus on your body and, most importantly, your breath flow.
- Timing: A time of about 10 to 15 minutes is a good meditation target duration in this phase. At the end of all these, you will realize at a point, you have lost track of all the happenings around you and ventured into the mental universe. These might have just happened for minutes, but while you were still meditating, it might seem like forever.
In conclusion, although anxiety can be a big problem, you should try seeing if you can solve the problem logically before it becomes a bigger worry in your mind. When your fears or thoughts about anxiety are beyond your realistic control, you can soften using mediation to release overwhelming feelings. If your anxiety has escalated to a point where these methods cannot control it, the next best step to take is to visit a doctor, counselor, or health expert for further help.
