Calming Your Anxious Mind

by Jeffrey Brantley

  With this foundation of mindfulness in your life, whenever fear, anxiety, or panic arises, you will have the tools to manage it. Only through your own experience of using mindfulness to work with these powerful forces will you discover what works best for you .

  Working Mindfully with Fear

  Your father is in the intensive care unit on a ventilator, somewhere between life and death. You visit him and feel overwhelmed. You are facing fear.

  You have just learned that the test results from your colonoscopy show that you have cancer. You are stunned. You are facing fear.

  You have just come from a meeting with your supervisor. Your job is being eliminated by the company for “budgetary reasons.” You are angry and confused. You are facing fear.

  You dread flying, yet you are about to board an airplane. You are flying because of a family emergency. You are facing fear.

  The list of examples is endless. When you really pay attention, the experience of fear seems to be everywhere in modern life. In most cases, you know exactly why you feel afraid, yet you must still deal with the fear.

  How can you use mindfulness and compassion to approach the fear in your life? In the remainder of this chapter, we will reflect on practicing specifically with fear, anxiety, and panic. There are no easy answers. Much of meditation practice involves patience and the willingness to be with distress and discomfort. Practice is about learning to find the place inside where there is ease and calm in the midst of upset. The following reflections come from the experiences of many people who have practiced mindfulness this way.

  Remind yourself that mindfulness accurately reflects what is here. To say to yourself “This is fear” is a start. “Fear is like this.” “It is like this now.” Acknowledging what is here establishes presence and names what is here. Notice and name any fight you have with the fear, any dislike or hatred. This acknowledgment interrupts the habit of unconscious reaction to the fearful situation. By continuing to notice in this way, you will also notice when fear changes or is absent. Fear is not permanent. Fear is not you. These truths will also become obvious as you note what is here .

  Establish and maintain a calm and focused attention. There are many ways to establish attention in the present moment. In this book I have emphasized using breathing. Focus attention on your breathing, as in the meditation practice for awareness of breathing you learned in chapter 9. This means breathing with the unfolding experience, not trying to run back to the breath or to hide there. Practice consciously breathing in and out with the fear experience. The body scan meditation also involves breathing with experience, and the breath is the anchor for the choiceless awareness practice.

  The other core principles of meditation—awareness, understanding, and compassion—can flourish once calm and focused attention is established and maintained. Indeed, in working with fear and fearful situations, maintaining connection is usually the most difficult task.

  If you are afraid of snakes, rats, or spiders and you encounter one, try breathing consciously and staying with what is happening (even as you make sure you distance yourself safely).

  If you fear crowds, or open spaces, or closed spaces and find yourself there anyway, recognize what is happening. Establish connection with the breath or the body. Breathe consciously as you have practiced, into and out of the situation, establishing and reestablishing your calm and focused attention on what is unfolding.

  Try mindful movement. Walking meditation, mindful yoga, tai chi, qi gong, and mindful exercise are all examples. You will need to experiment to discover what works best to help you stay present. The more solid and confident you are in your movement practice, the more it will help you. This is why grounding yourself in a daily practice as a way of living is the most effective way for practice to help you in times of urgent need.

  Be willing to persevere. You may have to do your conscious breathing or mindful movement for quite a while when dealing with the fear response. Staying with the situation this way strengthens concentration and mindfulness.

  Remember to make room, and to rest in your natural spaciousness and silence .

  Recognize impatience and the desire for things to be otherwise. Name “doubt.” Acknowledge any despair you feel. You will find that it pays off to work in these different ways with fear or any upset.

  This approach calls for patience and endurance. Just stay with it anyway. There is a place for simply enduring. It will strengthen your meditation practice. Over time, you will recognize your increased power to be present.

  Cultivate allowing and nonjudging awareness. With attention established, allowing and nonjudging awareness can rest on and include all elements present in the fear situation. Mindfulness includes all that is here. The unfolding experience of the body, the thoughts and stories in the mind: these are of particular importance. No matter how intense or disturbing, these should be treated simply as conditions present in this moment. Here again, it is easy to become lost or absorbed in the fear experiences. Breathing into them and holding them in the cradle of the breath helps you maintain the focus and connection, and realize the truth that these experiences are not you and are not permanent.

  Remember that mindfulness is spacious and light. Mindfulness does not attach to anything. It is easy to allow yourself to be absorbed by a fearful reaction. It is easy to identify with and react to fear. If you are feeling stuck in the fear, try opening the awareness to the space around the feeling. Try opening attention to include sounds or other sensations. This is similar to practicing the body scan and opening awareness to the entire body beyond a particular region.

  Alternatively, try focusing more sharply on the elements of the experience: the exact location of the sensation in the body, the very beginning of the fearful thought or negative commentary, or the precise ending of each sensation, thought, or other element.

  Thus, by opening awareness to include the fear experience, you dissolve your identification with it. Similarly, you can break the identification with the fear experience by narrowing attention to a smaller part of the experience.

  Welcome the understanding and wisdom that grow from seeing clearly. No matter what causes your fear, the most effective response comes from a clear understanding of the situation and of all your choices. As you stay present and manage the tendencies to fight or to flee from your fear, you will open to more choices for action. This will lead to more effective action and a greater confidence that you can handle difficult, fearful situations.

  Have kindness and compassion for yourself and your fear. If you have practiced loving-kindness meditation enough that you have some confidence in doing it, this meditation can be a great support in times of fear.

  May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be filled with peace and ease. May I be safe. Kindling the feelings of kindness and compassion using these phrases or others, you support presence and awareness. When you feel overwhelmed and distressed, gently caring for yourself with feelings of friendliness and compassion is very grounding and soothing. You can feel something inside relax and soften as you practice kindness. It becomes easier to relax and to stay present. It becomes easier to observe and listen mindfully to the unfolding experience.

  Working Mindfully with Anxiety & Worry

  You have a job and a good circle of friends, yet you are bothered frequently by vague feelings of fear and dread. These feelings leave you upset and afraid you will lose control of yourself in public places. You have begun to decline invitations and dates because of this fear of losing control. You are now filled with anxiety about what might happen and what you fear you cannot do.

  You are afraid of groups, and terrified of speaking in front of groups. You fear you will embarrass or humiliate yourself. You recognize that you have no reason to feel so anxious, but you do anyway. You are avoiding situations—including job opportunities—that would require you to speak in front of lots of people. You are becoming angry with yourself and feeling more anxious .

  You have been anxious
and worried most of the time for over six months. You worry most of the day about the stressful parts of your life. In the last six months, this has included your health, your marriage, your job, and the care of your elderly mother. You are often restless, tire easily, and have not slept well in weeks. You have anxiety about what might happen, and cannot stop worrying about things that have not happened and probably won’t happen.

  The experience of anxiety and worry is very common and very disturbing. However it is expressed in your life, it requires attention. How can you approach anxiety and worry skillfully with mindfulness and compassion?

  Laying the Groundwork

  You will do best if you build your mindfulness practice on a solid foundation. Especially when anxiety and worry are your focus, a careful assessment of causes, treatment possibilities, and the role of your own lifestyle choices is critical.

  Treatments

  There are many effective treatments for anxiety. Be sure to have a good medical and psychological assessment if anxiety is excessive or disturbing in your life. Meditation is a strong ally but is not a substitute for good treatment.

  Life Circumstances

  Bring mindful attention to every corner of your own life circumstances. Is anything about your personal life, relationships, or work life adding to your anxiety? Can you change it? How? Consider talking this over with your spouse or a trusted friend, and invite their input .

  Habits

  Don’t forget personal habits. This includes what you eat, drink, or take in through any other form. It definitely includes the use of alcohol, drugs, or medications. Include also what you take in from mass media and entertainment sources. Without judging anything, simply begin to pay attention to what you do and absorb, and how that makes you feel. When you have identified sources of anxiety, you are ready to make changes for the better.

  Daily Mindfulness Practice

  After laying this groundwork, you are in the best position for your daily meditation practice to help. And as you do your daily mindfulness practice, formally or informally, it will support you in relaxing, seeing clearly, and making effective changes.

  Mindfulness is not a method but a way of living. What this means is that mindfulness helps you the most when you make a daily meditation practice the foundation for developing mindfulness in your life.

  The goal of your practice is simply to open to what is present with increasing sensitivity and clarity. Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein (1993) puts this succinctly:

  Our progress in meditation does not depend on the measure of pleasure or pain in our experience. Rather, the quality of our practice has to do with how open we are to whatever is there. . . . What we have experienced in the past is gone. Be watchful that you are not holding on to some past experience that you are trying to re-create. That is not correct practice; it is a sure setup for suffering. Simply be open, be soft, be mindful with whatever is presenting itself. (47)

  The methods of mindfulness you use in daily practice will change, and so will the emphasis. The core activity does not change. With mindfulness you are embarking on a path of awakening and transformation. You are coming off of automatic pilot and embracing life consciously.

  Learning from Anxiety & Worry

  Fear, anxiety, and panic contain information about you and how you meet your life. What is to be learned? Be curious. Curiosity and investigation empower you to discover the lessons of what Joan Halifax (1993) calls the “fruitful darkness.” These are the lessons that fear, anxiety, and panic can teach you about living.

  In meditation practice, you approach worry and anxiety—fear without a clearly identifiable cause—the same way you approach fear that does have an obvious source. As you practice, make the worry and anxiety the direct object of attention. Maintain contact lightly without becoming absorbed by the story or feeling. Use mindful breathing, in and out with the experience, to stay connected.

  As with fear, establishing and maintaining conscious contact with the experience of anxiety or worry is often the most difficult part. It is easy to get swept into reaction and identification, or dissociation from the experience, because of its unpleasant and disturbing nature.

  Meditation can be thought of as an “art” as much as a skill. There is an art to how you cultivate and sustain attention with affection and sensitivity. An art to how you relate to the awareness and understandings that arise from attention. And, an art to keeping the heart open in the face of difficulty.

  The learning you gain from approaching fear, anxiety, and panic is the fruit of your meditation practice. For example, experimenting with inner space and silence, “breathing with” difficulty, doing the “yes” meditation, or putting all of your attention and energy behind a single loving-kindness phrase—all can be done with skill, grace, dignity, and artfully. Let curiosity and love of learning support you in the art of meditation .

  Choosing the Foundation for Your Practice

  People often ask which kinds of practices are best matched with which types of anxiety. For example, does a person who experiences anxiety “in the head” (as worrying and obsessive thinking) need a different type of relaxation exercise or meditation practice than the person who experiences anxiety mostly “in the body” (as feelings of restlessness or other discomfort)?

  Although some research has addressed this question, the findings are not conclusive and in some cases are even contradictory. Of value to mindfulness practitioners, however, is a report published by Kabat-Zinn and colleagues (1997) in the journal Mind/Body Medicine.

  In a study of seventy-four patients with elevated levels of anxiety, those with “high cognitive/low somatic” scores (those who experienced anxiety mostly “in the head”) preferred somatic (body-focused) mindfulness practice. The “high somatic/low cognitive” anxiety group (those who experienced anxiety mostly “in the body”) showed the inverse response: they preferred the sitting meditation. Both groups preferred the body scan, which includes both cognitive and somatic qualities, to an intermediate degree. It would be unwise to form rigid ideas based on this study; however, the results do have an interesting implication.

  Mindfulness practice is most effective when it includes the mental and the physical experience. Therefore, you should have meditation practices that emphasize both in your daily practice. What the methods are is not so important as the quality of attention paid to mind and body in a systematic and consistent manner.

  If you experience anxiety mostly in your head (that is, if you are a “worrier”), then you might want to experiment with movement practices as a foundation for mindfulness. Alternatively, you might want to begin each formal session of meditation with some movement before sitting meditation. The movement practices could be whatever appeals or is available to you: walking meditation, mindful exercise, yoga, tai chi, qi gong, or something else.

  Also, developing the skill of connecting with your body by using the body scan practice is likely to be a great help for you. In general, restoring attentional balance by moving out of the head and into the body more often is worth exploring.

  If you are bothered more by the physical expression of anxiety, then you may benefit by emphasizing sitting practice. Breath awareness meditation and choiceless awareness meditation are good places to start. In addition, your sitting meditation should always include the bodily experience. You apply mindfulness to your body in doing the body scan, and also in the choiceless awareness practice as you include bodily sensations.

  Whether you experience anxiety primarily in your head or in your body, you will probably benefit also by doing the loving-kindness and compassion meditation. This calms and relaxes your mind and body through concentration of attention on phrase repetition, and it can awaken you to a larger context of relatedness to life. This larger-vessel perspective is a good balance to the self-involvement and absorption that follows so much of anxiety and worry.

  Applying Mindfulness to Panic Attacks & Intense Fear

  The intensity that accompan
ies panic attacks is almost indescribable. If you are subject to these attacks, please apply the basic approach first. This means seeking good treatment, analyzing your own life situation, developing a daily meditation practice, and making the panic experience itself the object of mindfulness.

  Then, you might experiment with the following.

  Remember that in intense situations, establishing and maintaining conscious contact with the unfolding experience is usually the most difficult task. The tendency is to be overwhelmed in the experience and swept away in reactivity to the unpleasantness. This can happen in your bodily sensations, in your thoughts, and in your behavior.

  Your practice is to make the actual experience of the panic attack the object of mindful attention. Hold it in view, establishing and maintaining contact without becoming identified with it or absorbed into it .

  Steady and ground yourself by acknowledging what is happening. Name the panic.

  Center attention using mindful breathing, and concentrate your attention as you allow the body experience to unfold, breathing with it and into it.

  Listen to fearful thoughts mindfully. Recognize them as merely more thoughts. Breathe with them. Allow them without believing them or arguing with them. If they are too intense and loud, try to breathe with them with sharper concentration on the breath. Or try moving attention to the body or to sounds in the environment.

  Use kindness and compassion for yourself and for the panic elements themselves, whether they are in your body or mind. Remember: “May I be filled with peace and ease. May I be safe.”