Anxiety is an emotional state that Technalink understands can affect everyone. While it’s not the most pleasant of experiences, it is also an absolutely normal, everyday part of life. We all experience anxiety at some point; it only becomes a problem when it can no longer be managed. This is one of the ways that meditation can help, but how?
Distance From Your Thoughts
Mindfulness is a central characteristic of meditation, and it can help reduce anxiety by fostering detachment. Anxiety tends to express itself as a worry over certain situations and outcomes, such as fear of failing an exam or uncertainty about the outcome of an important meeting. Typically, people allow themselves to dwell in and get lost in these thoughts, endlessly circling through them.
Meditation, however, is about focusing on the present and treating everything—including incoming thoughts—as things to be observed. If you have ever asked a person to describe all the things they are seeing while taking a walk, or driving a car, without judgment, simply noting what they are observing and experiencing, that is a form of mindfulness.
This does not attempt to control thoughts, but puts some distance between yourself and the experience. In the same way that something is not as intense to you when you see it happen to someone else, mindfulness puts that same observational distance between you and your personal experience.
Focusing on immediate sensations, such as your breath, or doing a “body scan” to increase awareness of how your limbs and other body parts feel, are among the techniques used in mindfulness. Regular repetition of this as a meditation exercise can go a long way toward helping people reduce anxiety as they put their focus on something other than stewing in anxious thoughts.
Some may also find it helpful to use accessories like agate prayer stones to focus and achieve a state of mindfulness as they learn to meditate.
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