How to overcome anxiety with mindfulness: a practical exercise
by Maggie Richards (Subscribe to Maggie Richards’s posts)
Aug 27th 2010

AOL Categories: Heart and soul

Anxiety can be transformed and healed with a simple mindfulness practice.

According to anxiety disorders charity Anxiety UK, one in six adults in the UK have experienced a ‘neurotic health problem’, the most common being anxiety and depressive disorders like seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

We all know what it’s like to worry intensely about the future, money, work and all sorts of situations that seem out of our control and cause a lot of emotional suffering.

What not all of us are aware of is that we can directly reduce our anxiety directly ourselves - with the conscious mind.

Anxiety is not random
“It is important to understand that anxiety, like most emotional reactions, has a structure” explains Dr Peter Strong, a specialist in mindfulness-based psychotherapy who offers online therapy at www.mindfulnessmeditationtherapy.com.

“It is not a random process but produced by the combination of two components: thought structures and associated emotions and physical feelings.

Clearly, the path to controlling anxiety must involve changing these internal negative thought loops and beliefs. However, most people find this very hard to do.

Why worry is so hard to stop
“They know at a conceptual level that the worry is irrational and not helpful, but no amount of self-talk seems to change the anxiety. This is because there is another component that’s actually much more important than the content of the negative thoughts and beliefs, what I call Emotional Feeling Energy” says Peter.

This is what gives meaning and power to our thoughts, and in anxiety formations, large concentrations of emotional energy become attached to the words or beliefs.

The healing power of freeing emotion
“With this understanding, we see that if we can find a way to release this trapped energy, then the thoughts and beliefs will lose their power and compulsive domination of our thinking and will tend to be replaced by more appropriate thoughts. The negative thought may still arise out of habit, but without the emotional investment, it has nowhere to go and in time will fade away” says Peter.

Focusing on releasing the trapped emotional energy that has become attached to habitual thinking is one of the primary focuses of mindfulness-based therapies.

Awareness is the key
The first step is to become aware of our patterns. First we train ourselves to identify these negative thought reactions. This is most important, because we can’t change what we can’t see.

So, we must make our reactions visible by paying very close attention to catch them as and when they arise.

“But after mastering this, we shift our attention away from the content or story that forms the cognitive structure of the anxiety reaction to the emotional feeling quality that gives it power. This is called ‘sitting with the emotion’” explains Peter.

“We learn to sit with our anxiety, without getting caught up in further reactivity and thinking, or in trying to attack the negative thoughts. We are, in fact, learning to turn our attention towards the reaction, and this changes everything.“How to control your anxiety: a mindfulness exercise

1. Sit down and get comfortable. Close your eyes. Allow yourself to relax and practice basic mindfulness of breathing to help steady the mind.

2. Open the field of your awareness until it feels like a large space.

3. Introduce an anxiety emotion into this space and experiment with just sitting with it as you would with a friend: looking and listening very carefully with interest and an open mind, without trying to push it away or change anything.

4. Find the colour that best fits the feeling. If this seems difficult, give yourself time and trust what comes up.

5. Experiment with surrounding that colour with another colour. Try the exact opposite colour first and notice the shift in feeling the intensity of the anxiety.

6. Develop this imagery and try other modifications in size, position and movement.

7. Continue monitoring the change in intensity on a one to ten scale. When the anxiety has reduced by at least 50%, open your eyes and take a break before returning for another round.

8. Repeat the whole process five to ten times for three to four days. Notice how your perceptions change each day.

Of course, it’s easier to do this with a mindfulness expert but you will probably be surprised at how quickly things change once you get down to the detailed sensory level, made possible through focused mindfulness.

Ask a friend to help
You can also try this with a friend, if you can find someone willing to listen and provide that mindful presence so essential for this transformational process.

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