Does Mindfulness Meditation for Anxiety Work?

Do you experience a lot of anxiety in your daily life? If so, you’re not alone.

Anxiety is one of the universal mental health issues in the modern world. There’s a ton of pressure involved in living life, which results in stress that leads to anxiety and depression.

One of the most profound and practical tools for reducing anxiety is mindfulness meditation. If you’ve wanted to learn more about the benefits of meditation, you’ve come to the right place for answers.

This article looks at how mindfulness works and the purpose of meditation in everyday life. Keep reading to discover insight into this fascinating and valuable topic.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the mental awareness of thoughts passing through your mind in the most basic terms.

For example, have you ever noticed that you talk to yourself? Well, it’s true. Every person on earth experiences a constant internal monologue. Pay close attention, and you’ll realize that you have a voice inside that narrates every moment of your life. If you are awake, that voice will be chattering away almost non-stop.

This constant narration is the source of a tremendous amount of anxiety. If you’re experiencing stress due to something happening at work or home, the voice in your head will escalate this stressful detail, thus making it seem bigger and bigger.

So imagine for a moment what it would be like if this internal narrator stopped talking. What would that be, for example? What if the voice stopped telling you stories about how bad life is and negative things you believe people say about you? What would that feel like in particular? Sounds somewhat pleasant.

That’s where meditation comes in.

What is Meditation?

In recent years meditation has become a term discussed more and more in popular culture. But what exactly is it?

Meditation is a discipline used to quiet the chattering mind. You don’t need to buy anything. You don’t need to attend conferences. You don’t need to join a religious organization. Therefore, it’s imperative to understand that meditation has nothing to do with religion or any organized belief system.

Meditation is simply a disciplined exercise of paying attention to your thoughts not to dominate your life and cause unnecessary anxiety. And it’s straightforward, can be done anywhere at any time, and doesn’t require help from anyone else.

How Does Meditation Work?

But you’re probably still wondering, how does meditation work? 

Find a place to sit. You can sit in a chair, on the floor, on a sofa, or anywhere you like. The key is to be as comfortable as possible and sit with your back straight and your hands in your lap.

Now close your eyes. Relax and take a deep breath. One of the essential aspects of meditation is to pay close attention to each breath. Most people are so busy and distracted that they never fully experience the process of breathing. Focusing on inhaling and exhaling is ideal for detaching from your thoughts and thus redirecting your awareness to the whole experience of being alive.

The point of meditation is to understand that you are not your thoughts, and your views are not you. The narrator in your head is not who you are. Thinking isn’t something you do; it happens to you. One might sound confusing and complicated at first, but it’s pretty simple.

Meditation allows you to take a step back from the voice in your head so that you can observe the thought patterns in your mind rather than becoming emotionally involved in them.

Your Inner World

Most of us don’t pay attention to our inner world. And yet it can be a very chaotic place inside.

Life is jam-packed with millions of tiny moments that come and go. Some moments are joyful, while others are scary, stressful, or get under your skin in ways you might not fully understand.

This accumulation of moments creates your identity the way you think of yourself and those around you. By the time you’ve reached a very young age, you will have developed a perspective of who you are and how you fit into the world when the narrator inside your head becomes active and fills your mind with all kinds of nonsense.

Mindfulness meditation is a helpful way to reduce the noise generated by the narrator of your inner world. Moreover, it provides a path to peace simply by enabling you to slow down and see reality a bit more clearly.

Your Thoughts and Emotions

It’s important to understand that emotions are the physical manifestations of your thought patterns. In other words, stressful thoughts create a physical reaction in your body, such as tension in the neck or a rapid heart rate. 

When you begin to meditate, you’ll be able to observe how ignoring stressful thoughts in-person impacts reducing anxiety. This is a very close connection that can produce powerful and profound results.

Learning to Create Space Around Your Worries

As you notice the negative chatter in your mind ramping up, you have the power to shift the focus of your attention. 

The Power of Detaching From Your Thoughts

The key to meditation for anxiety is acknowledging that thoughts are happening inside your mind, yet they have nothing to do with you. They are simply happening, just like the beating of your heart and the air moving in and out of your lungs. Thus you can detach from them and let them go on their way.

Achieving Inner Peace

The goal of achieving inner peace is a process. It’s a lifelong journey. And it’s important to understand that you will experience a certain amount of anxiety throughout your life. Fortunately, mindfulness meditation for anxiety can help. 

A Guide to the Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation for Anxiety

Life isn’t always easy. That’s why you should explore the possibilities of mindfulness meditation for reducing anxiety.

Please feel free to contact us for more information on how mindfulness meditation can improve your quality of life.