Episode Description: Meditation and Mindfulness for Anxiety Relief
Discover the powerful combination of mindfulness and meditation for combating anxiety and stress. In this episode, we delve into the science behind these practices and explore how they can effectively reduce symptoms of anxiety.
Key Points:
The Rise of Anxiety: Understand the prevalence of anxiety and stress in today's world and the growing interest in effective coping mechanisms.
Mindfulness vs. Meditation: Learn the key differences between these two practices and how they can work together to alleviate anxiety.
The Science Behind Mindfulness: Explore the research supporting the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation in reducing anxiety symptoms.
Benefits of Mindfulness and Meditation: Discover how these practices can help you:
Reduce anxiety and stress
Improve focus and concentration
Increase self-awareness
Build resilience
Cultivate a sense of calm and well-being
Incorporating Mindfulness and Meditation into Your Life: Get practical tips on how to start or deepen your mindfulness and meditation practice.
Join us to explore the transformative power of mindfulness and meditation for anxiety relief.
*I am not a doctor and you should not stop your anxiety medication without consulting your doctor.
Podcast Transcript:
Welcome to The More Than Anxiety Podcast. I'm Megan Devito, and I am the Life Coach for women and teenagers living with anxiety, who want more out of life. I'm here to help you create a life you love to live, where anxiety isn't holding you back. Get ready for a light hearted approach to managing anxiety through actionable steps, a lot of truth talk and inspiration to take action, so you walk away feeling confident in your ability to live a life that sets your heart on fire. Let's do This.
Hey there. I'm Megan Devito an you're listening to Episode 16 Of The More Than Anxiety Podcast. This episode is being recorded in early December of 2022, so right in the heart of the holiday season, and all of that hustle and bustle that comes with food and presents and parties and, you know, on top of your normal, everyday routines. So even though This podcast is often about anxiety, I wanted to add that this episode in particular is helpful for stress management and that managing underlying stress and what is really high functioning anxiety also helps to lower your anxiety levels. So one of the things that I work on so often with people whom I coach is really stress managemen and it's really a way to keep anxiety from taking over. So let's go ahead and get started talking about meditation and mindfulness as a benefit for stress, anxiety, and really your overall health.
If you're listening to this podcast when it first airs and you are completely wrapped up in holiday stress, or if you're not in the holidays, just regular life stress, or if you're catching it, you know, like sometime in the future, I'm still guessing that there's a pretty solid chance you're feeling stressed or anxious. And that's probably why you're here. Unfortunately, for a lot of people stress and anxiousness, overwhelm, and frustration, obviously, they're not tied to a season. They're the gift that keeps on giving, like all year long. And unfortunately, when you're constantly stressed out or anxious, all of that tension and that negative energy gets stored in your body to create more of exactly what you don't want. Stress creates more stress, which lends itself to more anxiety, which creates more anxiousness. And it's just this wicked, suck hole or whirlpool that's constantly pulling you under. As This continues, you might start to feel exhausted, or notice that you're not sleeping well. So you might start to get really, like grouchy and short with your family, or your concentration goes down the tubes, and then so does, your productivity, and your ability to think clearly, and your blood pressure goes up and your immune system goes down. And when you're in this cycle, it can feel really frustrating and impossible to break out and solve for what might be causing you to feel so uptight and tense in the first place.
So outside of a pandemic, that, you know, we're kind of on the other side of now, and some really rotten news cycles. There's some common stressors that tend to plague people, things that happen to everybody, regardless of whether or not you binge the news, situations like feeling overwhelmed by your responsibilities at work or at home, dealing with big changes, like maybe a move, or a new job or a baby. But then also on the flip side, if feeling that you don't have enough work, or you're between jobs... these are all common situations that people get really stressed out about. You can also add situations that are stressful, that can lead to more anxious thinking, like feeling as though you're under a lot of pressure, feeling like you're out of control over your life, and just the instability and uncertainty that comes with being a human being. We don't know what happens next, we can plan for it, but we can't guarantee it and if you have an anxious brain that's trying to control things, and you're stressing out, those things all coming together into this perfect storm. If you look at what the past two years of life on This planet have brought us, it is no wonder that stress and anxiety levels are through the roof. This is true whether you are a kid or an adult. I work with a lot of teenagers right now, and I know from my past in teaching, the anxiety has just gone up exponentially with kids and adults. Since we've been living in anxiety petri dish, there have been plenty of chances for researchers to explore how to help relieve some of the anxiety and one of the most exciting things I've read about are the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and managing anxiety and stress.
So there's been several articles that have been published in the past couple of months that have discussed the effectiveness of meditation as being equal to the effectiveness of antidepressants, and specifically, what I was reading was Lexapro, which is what I used to take. So I was really into this article thinking, you're kidding me like, this is really crazy. And I was not the least bit surprised by it. What the articles or what the research is saying is that it is helping to reduce the symptoms of anxiety, in addition to the benefits for increasing relaxation, which also helps with stress. Again, we're talking about meditation or mindfulness here. So here's how this works. When you practice meditation, or mindfulness, you are allowing yourself to sit with uncomfortable feelings or thoughts, without attaching meaning to them. If you've listened to any episodes, before this, I've talked about this a lot.
So I want you to just to picture this as watching your thoughts and observing yourself, like you would watch a movie. You're not trying to solve for anything, and you're not trying to push the thoughts away. So picture yourself at a movie theater, watching the movie, then imagining yourself trying to change the movie; it's impossible! You can't change the movie, it's just the film and you're just watching it. If you're just watching your thoughts, and not trying to change them, they lose their meaning. You're not trying to solve for anything, you're not trying to stop them, you're not wrestling, you're not attaching a diagnosis, or a meaning to whatever thought you've had, you're just simply breathing and allowing them to float through your head. And This is a really big deal and an incredibly powerful point that I work on with people when I'm coaching them, because anxiety isn't dangerou and there's nothing to solve for. You're trying to solve for a problem that doesn't exist. So when you stop trying to fix something, and you stop believing all the symptoms that you might feel in your body, only sitting there to observe and allow you stop the anxiousness, it's like letting the air out of a balloon. It's this idea that if you're anxious, and you don't think about it, are you actually anxious? Think about that for a second. It kind of messes with your brain.
If you're anxious, and you don't give it any thought, are you actually anxious?
And if you look at that, you can tell that those thoughts.... that is the problem. So what meditation and mindfulness does is it allows you to detach your thoughts from all the other things; you can just watch them just like a movie. So like I said, it's kind of if you just let the air out of a balloon or out of a tire and at the same time, when you detach from the problems and you allow your body to relax, you are at the same time lowering your stress level. Lowering those stress hormones, and practicing just watching thoughts go through allows your brain to open up for more positive and productive thoughts instead of dwelling on the ones that are scaring the crap out of you or stressing you out.
Remember, an anxious and stressed out brain doesn't think clearly. And when you're not thinking clearly, and you start to feel overwhelmed, or stressed out or anxious, it feeds itself. "It's stressing me out!" "I can't think clearly."... And now I'm being stressed out because I think I can't think clearly so then I stress out some more. Can you see how that cycle builds? What mindfulness based meditation does, it's kind of like an off switch, or like a light switch that you can just turn off. It says we're not, we're not going to think about these things for a minute. Or we're just going to look at them like a movie scene.
If you've never meditated before, you are not the last one to the show. This was not something that I hadn't really tried until I started working on my coaching certification because it all seemed a little too out there and weird to me and I had enough of my own pre programming, just like we all do, o things that I thought were right and okay, and worked, and weird, and normal. And meditation was not on my list at that point. But I tried it an, oh my gd. Like seriously, I love it. So if the word meditation feels uncomfortable to you, if it's something that you're like, "I'm not sure about the whole meditation business", just change what you call it. You can call it zoning out, or you can call it prayer because prayer and meditation are actually the same thing. Zoning out and meditation, kind of the same thing.
But there is a difference between meditation and mindfulness, and how you practice each of these methods for relaxing, and re centering on yourself and how you feel. So let's start with mindfulness. Mindfulness is just this daily, moment to moment intention, which just means you can do it anytime during the day without stopping what you're doing. Mindfulness is just saying right here in this exact moment, this is where I am, this is what I see, this is what is going on around me. I am being mindful. All you do is stop your thoughts to focus on where you are, what's going on, dive into your senses. You remember the five senses from elementary school, see, hear, taste, touch, smell? Use those. That's mindfulness. It's all about being observant without judging how you feel, or what you think. "Oh, look, I can look over there and I can see my phone on the desk. I can see a bird outside. I can see there's clouds. It feels chilly in here." That's mindfulness. Your brain will give you so many sticky thoughts during the day though, that can stress you out or make you anxious in this hot second, but just because a thought causes your body to become anxious doesn't mean something is actually wrong. It only means that the thought created an emotion that created a feeling in your nervous system that set off a false alarm. So when you can step back and say, "Oh, I feel really tense. I feel really anxious, I just need to get back into where I am right now. My body feels This way, but when I pause, and I look around." Another one I really like is choose your favorite color, then look around and find everything you can see that is whatever that color is. "I see green. I see the trees. I see a sticky note. I see my Christmas tree." Whatever it is that you see for whatever color it is you choose. That's mindfulness. These are grounding techniques, they help bring you back to your center.
Mindfulness helps you learn to stay with really negative and uncomfortable feelings without pushing them away because all you're doing is shifting your attention to what is true, and what is around you and when you allow yourself to feel and acknowledge your fears, or the things that really annoy you, or the things that are stressing you out, or maybe the memories that are making you feel sad or anxious or regretful, then you can allow them to dissolve without having to force them away. That's powerful. Here's why. When you have to force and fight, your brain thinks that it is doing something productive to keep you safe, but when the thoughts go away on their own, it has a different effect. Your brain and your body didn't have to fight, it just disappeared, and it didn't matter. So what happens is, the thought floats past, and again, we go back to viewing them like a movie, and it just goes on to the next scene. This also lets you gain insight into why you're stressed out and anxious. And when your brain is open, you're able to notice if there's an actual problem to solve, and if there is, then you have the brain capacity to solve for it, but if there's only a feeling, and a scary thought, you can see that as well and you can say, "Oh, well, that's not even true" and let it go. You're essentially creating a buffer zone, or a bubble around your anxiety, or your stress to keep it from taking over and you're just watching. Another way to view This would be as if you were maybe an alien floating over the house and looking in and being like, "I wonder what's wrong with them. I wonder what they're thinking." This is what I see as the alien, or this is what I see if I was looking from the outside.
So meditation is a little different. That was mindfulness, remember? Meditation though is a more scheduled or, like a time constricted practice. Like I'm going to practice this for 10 minutes or 20 minutes or however long. Sometimes this happens in a place where you would sit and be quiet, and maybe stay home and sit on a pillow, but not always. The point is that you need to go someplace where you're not being distracted, or someplace where you can just focus on something repetitive. I like to meditate in this chair that I'm actually sitting in right now because to sit on the ground and sitmaybe cross legged on the ground, makes my legs fall asleep. And I don't like that it's not comfortable for me. I'm much more comfortable in a chair, so I meditate on a chair. I also like to meditate though when I'm taking a walk. So the sound of my feet hitting the pavement at a rhythm is very meditative. Another thing that's meditative for me is chopping vegetables. It's repetitive, I can get totally into the motion and chop vegetables. So meditation doesn't have to be close your eyes and use little fingers, finger cymbals and say, Om. It can, that can be really super powerful meditation, but it doesn't necessarily have to. The idea in meditation is just focusing on your breath coming into your body and out of your body. So while mindfulness is focusing on the things going on around you, meditation is focusing on breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, which is why you can do it. If you walk. You can notice your breath while you're walking. You can notice your breath while you're chopping vegetables. And you can notice your breath while you are sitting on a cushion or in a chair and breathing with your eyes. closed when you're meditating. One of the things that was really frustrating and is still frustrating for me is that your mind is going to wander. So just to reiterate, from jeez, probably episode two, your brain offers you about 60,000 thoughts a day. And the only ones that have a real impact are the ones that either produce an emotion, or it is something you're going to act on right away. So if you get a negative emotion and it gets stuck in there, it's going to pull you into feeling really happy, really sad, really scared, whatever that emotion is. And the rest of them just kind of float through. But all day long, your mind is wandering, that doesn't just shut off right away when you meditate. So when your mind wanders, and it will definitely wander, what you want to do is just refocus back on your breath. Don't allow yourself to be discouraged though, because if you have squirrel brain, so do I and a lot of people do. So there are days where I can't hardly focus and other days where it feels like there is light shooting out of the top of my head, I'm so in the zone. It's hit or miss for me and the more you practice, the easier you can get into that routine of sitting and only noticing your breath. And that's when you get like this really Zen awesome feeling. It doesn't happen every time for me. Maybe there's somebody else that does like Gabby Bernstein. She's like the champ of this. It probably happens for her. It doesn't happen for me. And I'm sure that she probably has days where it doesn't happen like that for her either. And a Gabby Bernstein, if you're listening to this, I would love to talk to you. If y'all are listening to this and you know, Gabby Bernstein could you just tag her in this podcast episode, because I want to know more about meditating, because I'm certainly new and certainly sharing this from a my perspective and experience thing and how much it did help me with my anxiety.
So the key here really is when you're meditating, forgive yourself and just come back to the breath. When your brain wanders, just do it over and over again. So you might notice how your body feels when you're meditating or a sound in the room. For me, This just as a tell tale of exactly where I live, I can hear the neighbor's corn dryer. Do y'all know what a corn dryer is? I live in Indiana, so I'm surrounded by farms and after they harvest corn, and maybe wheat and everything else, I don't know, I just assume it's corn, they turn on this big fan, this motor to dry it out while it's in the silos and I can hear it. And so I hear that when I meditate. But it's a very consistent sound. So it's, it's kind of a good sound to meditate to because there's nothing to it; it's just background noise. Another thing that can be great to meditate to be the sound of your furnace running, or maybe the sound of a fan because they're consistent and they don't change, they're not drawing attention. There are other things you might notice as well that you've never experienced before, so if those feelings, and particularly your body, trip your trigger, moving your focus back to your breath and breathing in, and breathing out, allows you to let the thought attached to the feeling just float away.
"Oh my God, my my leg is twitching!" Okay, well, I'm gonna go back to my breath, and then it just disappears. Again, if you don't think about it, it's not there. Being able to identify that the feelings in your body don't mean anything and also to be able to call anxiety out as just anxiety, even when your brain wants to argue, and you can feel the hormones start to flow in is exactly what anxiety recovery is made up. So at this point, when you recognize the alarm, and you know how to calm your nervous system, so you can catch your brain offering you all these anxious thoughts, you have actually broken the cycle! You can choose new responses to when you feel this way instead of the same reactions that you're programmed to use. Now, this is the fun stuff. This is where my clients start getting really excited, even when they feel anxious because they know they're not trapped. This is what you can have right along with a stronger immune system, like this incredible new confidence in your ability to not get sucked under every time you get triggered. And I'd even offer that you can lose triggers altogether because one day you kind of wake up and notice that you're doing things that would have scared the crap out of you in the past without batting an eye. I say this from personal experience. You get to love yourself powerfully, and challenge yourself in all of these new ways that let you do all the things that feel really super big and scary, maybe right now while you're listening to this podcast. I want you to ask yourself, why would you not want to feel less stressed and anxious if you didn't have to? Think about this. If you had a choice to stay stressed and anxious, would you choose that? Why would you keep spinning in that exhausting and, like, horrifying cycle of being overwhelmed and stressed out when there are so many ways out there, including mindfulness, and meditation, and coaching, that will help you recover. Anxiety is not a life sentence, My friends: at all! Being stressed out and anxious might be part of your programming right now and it is definitely a habit that has dug its way into your brain, but to feel better, and to make anxiety, a giant "whatever" in your life is really a flashpoint decision. I am not making light of how heavy it feels. I am telling you, this is truly a decision that you make in a moment, then follow up with new thoughts and behaviors over and over until your brain decides to just let go already. That's it. That is how it's done.
This is the exact time for you to take a step forward, and to decide to put in the work of creating these new thoughts and these new behaviors, because when you are not thinking about anxiety as anxiety, and when you are not repeating the same reactions, you can create new responses. The longer that you continue to react to anxiety and stress, the deeper these habits dig into your brain, and the more of life that you miss out on. You deserve that! Let's be clear. You deserve to live life with fun, and to not be stressed out all the time! Yeah, you're gonna be stressed out sometimes, but not all the time. You don't need to do that anymore. You are totally ready to feel like a new person. So let's freakin go! Let's go! You can schedule a consultation with me using the link in the show notes and I am cheering for you. I cannot wait to hear what is waiting for you on the other side of the stress and anxiety. It is amazing. I promise I'm there and you can be too and I will talk to you again next week.
I hope you've enjoyed this episode of The More Than Anxiety Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And of course when you're ready to explore coaching with me, jump to the show notes, click the link and schedule time for us to talk. See you soon.
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