Soothe anxiety with these 4 meditation techniques

You’ve likely heard the benefits of mindfulness & meditation, from reducing ruminative thoughts & symptoms of depression & anxiety to offsetting age-related effects on cognition & even creating better resilience on a nervous system level.

Yet despite knowing this, many of us struggle to fit meditation into our daily schedule or if we do, once that bout of anxiety hits, our practice goes out the window & before you know it, you’ve been pulled into a tornado of thoughts with little indication of slowing down.

First, let’s start with the big question: what exactly is meditation?

Now there are a few different routes you could take with this, from looking at it on the level of brain & brain waves to an esoteric, metaphysical level.

Today, we’ll keep it simple.

In it’s simplest form, meditation is about grounding yourself in the present moment & observing your experiences without judgement. There’s often a misconception that to meditate, you must be able to sit in stillness & remove all thoughts from your mind.

Not necessarily so. During a meditation practice, thoughts will ilkely pass through your mind & the practice here is to observe them without judgement.

How does meditation help anxiety?

One of the main ways meditation helps ease anxiety is by reducing ruminative thoughts. When we get stuck in a cycle of rumination, we are usually operating on the pain of the past or the fear of the future. Meditation helps us to land right back into the present moment & can open us up to resources we didn’t know we had within us. 

Through regular practice, we can connect with an internal sense of stillness & grounding that we can carry with us for the rest of our lives.

A regular practice also begins to create space within our own minds, over time we are able to slow down & create space where we once felt caged. Situations where we would once have automatically reacted, we can become able to choose conscious action.

Meditation can also help us rewire our brains, so over time, beginning to move away from a state of hypervigilance so we become less prone to anxiety.

Four ways to bring meditation into your day

1. Ground yourself in your body

Your body is the container for all your experiences on this earth.

Your body & it’s sensations live in the present moment. 

Yet many of us begin to tune out our bodys sensations & retreat into spending most of the time in our minds.

When you take the time to connect with sensations, you bring your awareness into the present & give yourself the time to connect with a more meditative state. This can be as simple as you’d like it to be. 

As an example, you could fit this in while walking to the train station. Rather than allowing your walk to be one of repetitive thinking you could choose to bring to attention to the sensations of the weight change between your feet as you move, feeling how each step reverberates through your body.

You might wonder, “how can this help me when anxiety is creating uncomfortable sensations in my body?” This is where you find a resource. In this context, a resource is something that feels good, grounding, solid, supportive & neutral. 

When uncomfortable sensations begin to come up, you could choose to connect with the sensation of your back being supported by the chair you’re sitting on or your feet pressing into the ground & connect with this as a source of grounding so you’re able to be with these uncomfortable sensations while still holding your ground.

2. Focus on your breath

To be with the breath is to be with the divine, to connect with exactly that which animates your body.

Whether you’re sitting on the train or going for a run, you always have access to your breath. At first, just focus on watching your natural breath, its depth & rhythm. Just the practice of watching it might slightly alter it. That’s ok. 

There’s four main points you can feel the breath moving, you can choose to focus on all four or just one. These four points are the nostrils, inside your throat, your chest & your belly. You can choose any of these four points to focus on, then you simply watch the sensation of the breath within your body.

To help you build your concentration, you might choose to count your breaths. For example, you could choose to count 10 breaths, while watching the sensation of your belly moving - whenever your minds wanders & you forget to count, you go back to zero & start again.

You could do this at any point, whether you’re going for a run or just sitting on the train.

3. Getting curious about your thoughts

Ok, so this one may be a little trickier. There’s often a misconception that meditation means stopping all your thoughts, this isn’t necessarily true. Part of meditation is learning to, in a sense, take a step back from your thoughts. Rather than following your thoughts into a whirlwind, just take some time to watch your thoughts as they pass through your mind. Initially this might feel difficult, with time it will get easier. 

If you find this particularly difficult, you can combine this with feeling into a grounding sensation such as feeling where your body meets the surface supporting it.

Try to watch your with a sense of curiosity, as if you were watching an interesting movie. You’ll likely notice through practicing this that thoughts occur spontaneously without you controlling or creating them. 

This can have a liberating effect on you & allow you to create some space between you & your thoughts.

4. Feeling your emotions in your body

Often, when we feel an emotion, we create a story & thoughts around it. In many cases, this can take us out of the present moment & away from the felt experience of the emotion.

Many of us also fall into a pattern of trying to suppress our emotions, this cuts us off from a vital part of our humanity.

Next time you begin to experience an emotion, practice feeling into the physical sensations of it. Do you feel it in your gut? Your thoat? Your chest? Maybe it gives you a feeling of lightness or heaviness?

Each emotion will have its own physical imprint & it can be an interesting exercise to feel into this. Practicing this can help bring us into the present experience of the emotion & prevent us from being swept into a whirlwind of thoughts. 

When more difficult emotions come up, you could combine this with feeling into a sensation that gives you a sense of grounding. 

For example, you might notice you feel a knot like sensation in your tummy & your heart beating faster - you could combine this with feeling into the sensation of your back pressing into the chair. Combining these can help you connect with a sense of grounding while allowing you to still feel into the emotion.

Often when we feel into our emotions in this way, they may start to dissipate.