Mindfullness and Meditation Treatment for Anxiety

Marsha Linehan (93) describes the "what" skills of mindfullness as observing, describing, and participating. These skills involve experiencing emotions and thoughts without trying to hold onto them or push them away. They involve accurately describing your thoughts and emotional experiences again without trying to control or avoid them. Mindfullness allows us to particpate in each moment without loving it or hating it. It allows us to live in each moment and only in that moment. It helps us to particpate and focus on performance and not on anxiety, low self esteem, or past experiences or thought distortions.

Mindfullness does not come intuitively to those of us who grew up in the western world. Here the focus is on control and mastery of self and environment and on multitasking to improve performance. The speed and complexity of modern life often mean that attempting mastery and control of everything leads to emotional distress and less effective living.

As Marsha Linehan describes(93), the "how to" portion of effectively integrating mindfullness into your life involves first noticing and then reducing judgements. By eliminating right or wrong, good or bad from your observations of life, it becomes easier to see what is actually there, not what your anxious or depressed, or tired mind interprets is there.

Next comes a focus on operating one mindfully or doing one thing at a time. How many of us have driven a long way home, drove up the driveway only to realize that you had little or no memory of how you got there? This is because you were listening to the radio, worrying about tomorrow and obessing over the fight with a co-worker. How hard is living like this on your nervous system? Does it lead to better performance?

Reducing judgements and focusing on activities, thoughts and feelings one mindfully can lead to more effective behavior. More effective means behavior based on reality in the moment and not on yesterday or tomorrow and not on perceptions, judgements and distortions.

Ultimately, more skill with mindfullness allows us to act independently of our emotional state. We can be angry or anxious without acting out of anger or fear.

Excercise is another activity that we all think of as good for us but so few of us find the time and will to incorporate into our lives. One way that professionals know to bypass our own resistance to an activity is to combine it with something else. Somehow, adding an activity to something we resist doing tends to break down our resistance to both and it saves time also. In this way we can take advantage of the tendency to multi task we modern folks have evolved into and cut through the tendency to avoid and procrastinate.

Medication and excercise can be combined to help excercise our bodies and give our minds a rest from the often negative and ceaseless chatter we all are victims of. Assiging the mind a focus point quiets this activity. If, instead of sitting still while you meditate, you combined it with a repetitive activity like walking on treadmill, pedalling on a stationary bike, or rowing on a rowing machine, the mind has something it knows it must do to keep it occupied. with your mind thus occupied, it has less energy to throw random troubling thoughts at us and your meditation can go even deeper and be easier to enter into and maintain.

Not only is the mediation improved, but so is the excercise. Athletes call this being in the zone. With the remaining part of your mind being occupied with your meditation, you tend not to dwell on every little twinge and physical sensation and you can go farther and harder. You have less tendency to psych yourself out.