By mindful.org

Mindfulness and meditation can help soften feelings of anxiousness, reduce stress, and calm a panic attack.

Anxiety is our body’s way of saying, “Hey, I’m experiencing too much stress all at once.” This happens to the best of us. But when that feeling of being “always on alert” becomes background noise that doesn’t go away, that’s when it’s time to seek help. Mindfulness and meditation for anxiety is a growing field that can help you navigate the many ways that anxiety can affect your life. This guide is not meant to serve as a diagnosing tool or a treatment path—it’s simply a collection of research and practices you can turn to as you begin to help right your ship.

Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.

Leading expert Jon Kabat-Zinn describes it as “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally,” adding: “in the service of self-understanding and wisdom.”

When you become aware of the present moment, you gain access to resources you may not have realized were with you all along—a stillness at your core. An awareness of what you need and don’t need in your life that’s with you all the time. You may not be able to change your situation, but mindfulness practice offers the space to change your response to your situation.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), founded by Kabat-Zinn, the gold-standard for research-backed mindfulness. Developed over 40 years ago, MBSR is an 8-week program, including supported teachings, mindfulness practices, and movement practices that help people work with the stresses of everyday life. MBSR practices allow you to bring kind awareness and acknowledgment to any stressed or anxious feelings in your body and mind and simply allow them to be. A 1992 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that MBSR can effectively reduce symptoms of anxiety and panic even in those with generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, or panic disorder with agoraphobia. 

According to other research, when you can create space between yourself and what you’re experiencing, your anxiety can soften. But if you get too used to that low rumble of stress always being there, it can gradually grow, creating a stress “habit” that is detrimental to your health and well-being. Consequently, when we get caught up in patterns of reactivity, we create more distress in our lives. This is why it’s so important to discern clearly the difference between reacting with unawareness and responding with mindfulness.

Mindfulness Works, But Not for Everyone

Meditation does seem to improve mental health—but it’s not necessarily more effective than other steps you can take. Early research suggested that mindfulness meditation had a dramatic impact on our mental health. But as the number of studies has grown, so has scientific skepticism about these initial claims.

For example, a 2014 meta-analysis published in JAMA Internal Medicine examined 47 randomized controlled trials of mindfulness meditation programs, which included a total of 3,515 participants. They found that meditation programs resulted only in small to moderate reductions in anxiety and depression.

“In essence, practicing mindfulness is a process of learning to trust and stay with feelings of discomfort rather than trying to escape from or analyze them,” says Bob Stahl, Ph.D., MBSR teacher, founder of multiple MBSR programs, and co-author of multiple books on MBSR. “This often leads to a remarkable shift; time and again your feelings will show you everything you need to know about them—and something you need to know for your own well-being.”

Pause: Connect with your breath

How Mindfulness Calms Anxious Feelings

  1. Mindfulness helps you learn to stay with difficult feelings without analyzing, suppressing, or encouraging them. When you allow yourself to feel and acknowledge your worries, irritations, painful memories, and other difficult thoughts and emotions, this often helps them dissipate.
  2. Mindfulness allows you to safely explore the underlying causes of your stress and worry. By going with what’s happening rather than expending energy fighting or turning away from it, you create the opportunity to gain insight into what’s driving your concerns.
  3. Mindfulness helps you create space around your worries so they don’t consume you. When you begin to understand the underlying causes of your apprehension, freedom and a sense of spaciousness naturally emerge.

Calm Anxiety in Three Steps:

  1. Open your attention to the present moment. The invitation is to bring attention to our experience in a wider and more open manner that isn’t really involved with selecting or choosing or evaluating, but simply holding—becoming a container for thoughts, feelings or sensations in the body that are present and seeing if we can watch them from one moment to the next.
  2. Focus on the breath. Let go of that widescreen and bring a focus that’s much more concentrated and centered on breathing in one region of your body—the breath of the belly, or the chest, or the nostrils, or anywhere that the breath makes itself known, and keep that more concentrated focus.
  3. Bring your attention to your body. Become aware of sensations in the body as a whole, sitting with the whole body, the whole breath, once again we move back to a wider and spacious container of attention for our experience.

The Science of Mindfulness Meditation for Anxiety

In 1992, Zindel Segal, John Teasdale, and Mark Williams collaborated to create an 8-week program modeled on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Jon Kabat-Zinn—who developed MBSR—had some initial misgivings about the program, fearing the curriculum might insufficiently emphasize how important it is for instructors to have a deep personal relationship with mindfulness practice. Once he got to know the founders better, he became a champion for the program. In 2002, the three published Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression: A New Approach to Preventing Relapse, now a landmark book.

MBCT’s credibility rests firmly on ongoing research. Two randomized clinical trials (published in 2000 and 2008 in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology) laid the foundation, indicating MBCT reduces rates of depression relapse by 50% among patients who suffer from recurrent depression. Recent findings published in The Lancet in 2015 revealed that combining a tapering off of medication with MBCT is as effective as an ongoing maintenance dosage of medication. Further studies have found that MBCT is a potentially effective intervention for mood and anxiety disorders.

Should I Choose MBSR or MBCT?

According to the Centre for Mindfulness Studies, mindful awareness is the foundation of MBSR and MBCT. In both 8-week programs, participants are guided through a series of practices that encourage paying attention to experiences, thoughts, emotions, and sensations in the body. Explore the differences between MBSR and MBCT before you decide which program to follow.

The Key Differences Between MBSR and MBCT

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction:

  • Designed for everyone (particularly people who deal with chronic stress)
  • Explores how mindfulness can help with stress, and the stress of living with a chronic illness
  • Uses mindfulness practices to highlight different ways to respond to suffering
  • Works to change your relationship to suffering by encouraging you to turn toward pain
  • Emphasizes being present with what is 
  • Recommended for general psychological health and stress management and as an intervention for symptoms of anxiety

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy: 

  • Designed to prevent depressive relapse
  • Explores how mindfulness can help you stay well while dealing with depression or anxiety
  • Uses mindfulness practices to offer insight on negative mind states associated with depression and anxiety
  • Works to change your relationship to suffering by recognizing patterns in thought and emotion
  • Emphasizes your choice in how to respond to negative mind states
  • Recommended as an adjunctive treatment for unipolar depression and an intervention for symptoms of anxiety

How Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Helps with Anxiety

A skills-based approach, MBCT asks patients to inquire into, familiarize themselves with, and redirect the thought processes that are getting them into trouble (cognitive distortions, or what some people call “negative self-talk,” or “stinkin’ thinkin’”). It takes close attention and stick-to-itiveness to shift these ingrained thought processes. MBCT isn’t about changing or fixing the content of our challenging thoughts, it’s about becoming more intimately and consistently aware of these thoughts and patterns. The awareness itself reduces the grip of persistent and pernicious thought loops and storylines.

Like MBSR, MBCT is an eight-week program consisting of weekly two-hour classes with a mid-course day-long session. It combines guided meditations with group discussions, various kinds of inquiry and reflection, and take-home exercises. “Repetition and reinforcement, coming back to the same places, again and again, are key to the program,” says Zindel Segal, “and hopefully people continue that into daily life beyond the initial MBCT program, in both good times and bad.”

Can Mindfulness Really Help Reduce Anxiety?

A small study conducted at the University of Waterloo suggests that just 10 minutes of mindfulness helps with ruminative thought patterns. In the study, 82 participants who experience anxiety were given a computer task to complete, but were regularly disrupted. They were then split into two groups: one group listened to a guided meditation for 10 minutes, while the other group listened to an audio book for 10 minutes. Participants were then sent back to the computer while the disruptions continued.

The meditators had greater success in staying focused, and, as a result, they performed better on the task. “That was surprising to me,” says lead researcher and psychology PhD candidate Mengran Xu. “Mindfulness meditation promoted a switch of attention from their internal thoughts to the external environment. It helped them focus on what’s happening right now, in the moment, and not to get trapped in their worries.”

This study adds to the growing body of evidence that mindfulness could be a powerful ally for people who struggle with ruminating thoughts and internal focus common with anxiety and depression. But, Xu adds, just why it helps is still unknown. “If we know how, we can make it more effective.”

He wants to find out. Xu and colleagues have already finished one forthcoming study where participants were instructed in mindfulness meditation, muscle relaxation, or listened to an audio book. Xu says his team wants to see “how each intervention would affect people’s scope of attention, cognition, and problem solving in a hypothetical stressful situation. The aim is to examine if mindfulness practice expands people’s perspective.

“Sometimes [stress] is inevitable, but it depends on how broad your perspective is. Both mindfulness meditation, and relaxation can help broaden how people think about things.”

Keywords;  anxiety, meditation, breathing, mindfulness