Mindfulness for Anxiety

You can master your anxiety with Mindfulness

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Anxiety often comes from focusing too much on the future

Living in the past and the future is normal for most people, For most it works just fine. But for those with anxiety living in the past and the future serves to feed the anxiety.

Mindfulness is the medicine that has worked for many people

One way mindful therapy works is to stabilize attention in the present. After some practice people learn to see the anxious thoughts as events in the brain rather than solid reality. With that perspective new choices become clear and people can be less reactive and more responsive.

Jon Kabat-Zinn paved the way with Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

Many years ago Jon Kabat-Zinn realized that mindfulness meditation and awareness if physical sensations can reduce stress and anxiety. Simply paying attention to the breath was fundamentally grounding. Practicing mindfulness with deep breathing, body scans, awareness of the present moment could dramatically reduce stress.

Later, he helped Zindel Segal, Ph.D, and his team create Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for depression relapse. In clinical practice it was found to help with anxiety. MBCT added a mental health perspective to MBSR.

Now MBCT has been adapted for use outside a mental health framework. Its principles have been modified for use with the general public, so long as the teachers are properly trained.

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Understanding Anxiety, Mindfulness and Cognitive Therapy

Mindful Therapy is most helpful for generalized anxiety. The criteria for Generalized Anxiety Disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) include excessive worry, for at least 6 months, that negatively effects personal relationships or work/school. It also requires that the person has at least 3 specific symptoms. These include feeling keyed up, being easily fatigued, difficulty concentraging, irritability, muscle tension and sleep disturbance.

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Intuitive approaches to dealing with Anxiety can be disappointing

Mindfulness combined with Cognitive Therapy has a new and different approach, one many have found is very helpful.

Anxiety can be crippling or a major annoyance. Either way Mindful Therapy can help.

People with anxiety often want the answer to the question: How can I control the future. When the future is the way we want it to be, when that is certain, then we imagine we will be free of anxiety.

But efforts to control the future are notoriously difficult to achieve. There are so many variables, and so much that is going on, that predicting the future is like trying to predict the winner of a race.

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Anxiety and Depression in Mindful Therapy are closely related

Some features of Anxiety are similar to those of Depression, from the viewpoint of Mindful Therapy. For example, both feature avoidance of not-wanted thoughts and emotions. This avoidance concept was developed by Steven C. Hayes, PhD. Early in his adult life he suffered anxiety and panic attacks, and from that personal history he learned that avoidance was a major factor. Later he avoidance is also found depression. In Donald’s book on Mindful Therapy this is equivalent to the Allowing stage of treatment.

Zindel Segal, Ph.D, creator of MBCT, has a website, Mindful Noggin, where he writes, “Preventing Depression and Anxiety starts with a single breath.” Dr. Segal’s compilation of studies on mindfulness in psychotherapy is at his other website, MBCT.com.