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How to Meditate
Meditation is something everyone can do. Practicing can help improve your health and wellbeing.
Explore MeditationAnxiety's Effects On Our Health
If you’re experiencing anxiety, you’re not alone. Worldwide, anxiety is the most common mental health disorder. Approximately 1 in 13 adults suffers from clinical anxiety disorder, yet only one third of them will ever receive treatment. Anxiety is higher in developed nations, more prevalent in women than men, and more common in those with a higher level of education. 1 in 5 adults in the United States reports symptoms of anxiety in any given year.
While increasingly common, anxiety disorders are also highly treatable. Mindfulness helps reduce anxiety by offering healthy coping skills for difficult situations. Learn more about anxiety, why it’s unhealthy to live with, and how mindfulness and meditation can help.
SOS Support For Anxiety Relief
About Anxiety
A little acute anxiety is actually good for us. It’s what encourages us to prepare for our meetings, or be cautious in new situations. But when anxiety becomes chronic, it becomes a problem. Chronic anxiety can develop when we’re unable to remove ourselves from stressful or worrying situations. It can come about as a response to trauma, or when we indulge for too long in our fears.
Disordered anxiety is what interferes with our lives and prevents us from enjoying people, places or activities. There’s no one cause, and there’s no one threshold that defines anxiety disorder. If anxiety is troubling you at any level, it’s time to seek help.
Types of Anxiety Disorders
When anxiety interferes with your daily life or your enjoyment of the things you love to do, it may qualify as a clinical anxiety disorder.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is the most common type of anxiety disorder. If you’re had frequent bouts of anxiety for 6 months or longer, without much provocation, you may have GAD.Panic Disorder is characterized by repeating panic attacks. If you’ve had a panic attack in the past, you may tend to avoid situations which you fear will cause another.Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is characterized by unwelcome and repetitive sensations, thoughts, or ideas. You may feel a compulsion to control these thoughts through repetitive or obsessive actions.Social Anxiety Disorder is among the most common phobia disorders. Social anxiety disorder may cause you to avoid people or situations due to a disproportionate fear of being judged or rejected.Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) results from the unresolved experience of traumatic events. Symptoms may not appear until months or years after the initial experience of trauma.
How Anxiety Manifests In The Body
The body often knows we’re experiencing anxiety before the cognitive mind does. We feel it in sweaty palms, a rapid heartbeat, short or shallow breathing, or an upset stomach. We may feel tightness in our muscles, or the sense we can’t stop fidgeting. Anxiety can keep us up at night, or it can make us excessively drowsy.
By developing mindfulness of the body, we learn what anxiety feels like for us individually. Once we know the signs, we can be more proactive with prevention or seeking relief. When we develop the ability to sit and be present with our anxiety, we can listen to what it’s trying to teach us, and mindfully respond.
Body Scans For Anxiety Relief
The following meditations are focused on body awareness. Learn the signs and symptoms of anxiety, and get better grounded in the moments when you feel you’ve been carried away.
How Anxiety Manifests In The Mind
Anxiety can manifest emotionally as irritability, worry or nervousness, fear or dread. When we’re anxious, we may have a hard time concentrating. We can’t stop ruminating, or we obsessively attach to certain thoughts. Anxiety is often tied to catastrophic thinking, or the belief in a future that can only go wrong.
The mind is a powerful thing. It carries the potential to lead to our undoing, but it’s also the tool through which we realize our greatest freedom. Working with the mind to ease anxiety begins with becoming aware of anxiety, emotions, and what we’re feeling in the present moment.
Practicing Mindfulness To Protect The Mind From Anxiety
Mindfulness meditations for anxiety teach us to acknowledge what we’re feeling. We learn to create space in which our negative thoughts can dissipate. Remaining present is a learned skill that prevents past or future thinking.
Risk Factors for Anxiety
Understanding common risk factors for anxiety can help shine a light on the sources of our pain, and where we might apply attention to begin the process of healing.
Stress
Science explains anxiety as an inappropriate stress response. It’s the experience of stress, without the presence of a stressor. Chronic stress can lead to anxiety if we cannot remove ourselves from the source of our stress, or if we experienced an acutely stressful incident that took us beyond our coping abilities.
Stress-related sources of anxiety may include our relationships with family, friends, or our significant other, financial stress, work-related stress, lack of sleep and even grief.
Stress relief reduces anxiety by lending us more space in which to cope with the unexpected. We each have a threshold for stress. Meditation can help us drop what we no longer need to carry, and over time, increases our capacity for resiliency.
Genetics And Family History
Each of us carries with us a unique lineage of generational traumas and storied pasts. An event that makes one person anxious may hardly go noticed by another. This is partially due to genetics. Genetic predisposition to anxiety is 30% heritable.
Instances of PTSD and assault-related trauma are also heritable. While less is known about the genes associated with inherited trauma, it’s clear it correlates with anxiety disorder later in life.
Those with inherited risk for anxiety are more likely to develop anxiety disorders when exposed to early childhood stress, childhood trauma, parental substance abuse, or neglect. Anxiety in our adult years is a result of both nature and nurture.
Intrusive Thoughts About The Past & Future
You don’t have to believe everything you think. But when anxiety is high, you do. When we’re anxious, we’re attached to the memory of past stress, or anticipating future stress. We’re stuck on our thoughts and removed from the reality that’s occurring in the present.
Ruminating on the past in search of a source or reason for worry not only fails to ease anxiety, but can exacerbate it. When we’re worried about the future, we’re ruminating on something we can’t possibly predict. Yet the anxious mind quickly loses that perspective.
Meditation teaches us to create more space between ourselves as the thinker, and the thoughts that we’re thinking. In that space, we leave room for perspective and the possibility things might be ok. Meditation also keeps us present. Returning to the present anchors us to reality, which is the only place in which contentment exists.
Overcoming Rumination
Stop Worrying About The Future
With mindfulness, we create space within which we leave room for the possibility that things might be ok. We create space within which we can look around and get some healthy perspective.
Personality Types
Personality traits such as neuroticism, introversion, or personality disorder can predispose you to anxiety. Neuroticism, also referred to as emotional instability, is strongly associated with Type A personality. Type A personalities tend toward perfectionism, competitiveness, and work-centered lifestyles. They are most likely to develop stress related disorders, including anxiety.
Introversion is most often associated with social anxiety disorder, but is a predictor of all types of anxiety. Introverts experience anxiety more often, and also experience more severe anxiety. It’s important for those who are introverted to courageously reach out to others when needed.
Low self-esteem leads to anxiety, and anxiety leads to low self-esteem. This creates a vicious cycle whereby those with low self-esteem become less likely to seek help, believing they’d be unable to overcome their anxiety. It’s important to remember when we feel we’re unloved or unaccepted, we’re generally mistaken.
Race and Gender
Women are nearly twice as likely than men to develop an anxiety disorder in their lifetime. Women also report more severe and longer-lasting symptoms. This suggests women are not merely being diagnosed at a higher rate, but that genetic or hormonal factors may play a role in anxiety.
Studies in the United States find white Americans are far more likely to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder than those who are non-white. The exception is the increased likelihood of PTSD diagnosis among African Americans. Discrepancies in diagnosis among differing races and ethnicities, however, may have little to do with reported symptoms and could instead reflect the biases of health professionals.
Substance Abuse
Drugs or alcohol may offer momentary relief for our anxiety, but in the long run, they make our anxiety worse. Alcohol alters levels of serotonin and other happiness chemicals in the brain, which can worsen anxiety when the buzz wears off. Caffeine also interacts with dopamine receptors in the brain, which can make us anxious. And just as with alcoholism, there are those with a genetic predisposition to caffeine-induced anxiety.
Medications that include steroids, stimulants or hormones can also make anxiety worse. See your doctor if you’re concerned a medication you’ve been prescribed is making you anxious.
Using drugs or alcohol to cope with stress robs us of the ability to teach our mind to cope on its own. And when substances interfere with our lives, we end up creating far more problems than we solve.
Anxiety and Meditation
There’s no reason to live with anxiety. In fact, the more we indulge in our anxiety, the worse it becomes. Neuroplasticity is the ability of our brains to change in response to stimulus or new behaviors. It’s what makes meditation work, and it’s also what strengthens anxiety when we live with it as the norm.Anxiety is a dysfunction of the amygdala, the area of the brain that’s in charge of our reaction to fear. While acute fear can be good for us and dissipates when the threat is gone, anxiety keeps us in a state of arousal even in the absence of danger. By failing to address anxiety, we keep these mistaken neural connections active.
Community's Pick: The Most Popular Guided Meditations For Anxiety Relief
Meditation directly addresses activity in the amygdala, and can help us break from our unhealthy patterns. Self-awareness, self-reflection, self-compassion and gratitude are all correlated with reduced anxiety symptoms. Browse our entire free collection of anxiety meditation in our app!
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