Gil Winkelman ND

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Meditation and Anxiety: What You Need to Know About the Benefits of Mindfulness

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For many people anxiety is a daily occurrence. Many don’t even know they are anxious. They feel stressed. Maybe they have a vague sense that something isn’t right. They can’t quite put their finger on what the problem is. Some people feel something in their body. They get a headache. Or their chest feels tight. But other people get angry or explode for no reason. Does this describe you? If so, you may be one of the 40 million Americans that experience anxiety at some point in their lives. What can you do about it? Mindfulness meditation can help relieve anxiety.  How does meditation work? What sort of meditations are helpful for anxiety? Let’s explore some of these questions.

The solution that most Americans reach for is a pill. Many people turn to medication. And for many, drugs can help relieve symptoms. But they don’t remove the underlying cause. As I’ve written elsewhere, testing can reveal the underlying physiological causes. But what if there is nothing measurably wrong with your body. Now what? Meditation may be able to help.

For many people, anxiety is a common occurrence.  They know they are anxious. They know what it feels like and it’s not comfortable. They can’t sit still. Their focus is terrible. They are antsy. They might even feel a little agitated. Focusing on anything is difficult.

Other people don’t know they are anxious. They are agitated. They may get into a fight with friends or loved ones. Or they mindlessly eat. Meditation can help break these patterns.

Meditation for Anxiety

It used to be that when meditation was brought up, one’s thoughts went to crosslegged monks on a mountain top. But meditation has become common in the US. The National Institute of Health estimates that about 18 million adults practice meditation on a regular basis.

So what exactly is meditation? It is the act of calming one’s mind and bringing attention to one thing. It could be counting breaths or watching a candle. Every time your attention drifts off you bring your attention back to that one thing. It is a state of calm alertness but more than concentration.

Concentration may be focus on one object. Reading may be concentration, but it isn’t meditation. There is a calm stillness to meditation. You just watch. You watch your breathing, you watch your thoughts. There is no attachment to anything. Writing could be a form of meditation. As I write at this moment, it is like meditation. I am concentrating and watching my mind. But I have an agenda. I want to be sure to cover certain topics. My attachment precludes me from meditating. Meditation is about letting go of outcomes. You are just still. And if you can’t be still, you notice that.

Meditation brings many health benefits. The most obvious is stress reduction. But some research has shown that meditation helps other health problems too. These include lowering blood pressure, improving IBS symptoms, and relieving depression and anxiety. It doesn’t help everyone, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But it does appear to change brain circuits involved with regulating emotions. This will help reduce inflammatory and stress hormones. In theory, meditation sounds great.

But how do you meditate if you’re anxious? We’ve already figured out that you can’t sit still! Sometimes you can’t calm your thoughts down. And sometimes, the act of meditating can make you feel worse. When I was studying counseling psychology, I had a supervisor, Gail Sher, who is a Buddhist. She was an avid meditator. She advised against prescribing meditation for people with anxiety because it often made things worse. They might become more anxious trying to meditate. So how can one benefit from meditation if one is anxious? There are several options. Let’s run through a quick list.

Breath work: Meditation is about slowing down. When we are anxious, everything tends to speed up. Slow down your breath and see if that helps. Sometimes one minute of steady breathing – an inhale for 6 seconds followed by an exhale for 6 seconds – can help.  Often, when one is anxious, it’s because the brain’s alarm response is on over-drive. Simple breath work can be enough to start sending signals from the heart to the brain to turn off the alarm response.

Take a moment to feel your body: Don’t try to push the sensations away. Just feel the anxiety. Notice how jittery you feel. Or notice the tightness in your chest. Just feel what you are feeling in your body in the moment. Don’t judge it and don’t try to change it. If you have experienced a lot of trauma in your life, this may be difficult to do on your own. Many people who have experienced trauma have difficulty feeling their bodies. If that’s the case, try another method. And get help from a qualified trauma specialist.

Listen to the sounds outside: If you can get into nature and listen to the sound of birds, waves, or running water, that can be healing. Many of my patients report feeling less anxious after walking in the woods.

Be mindful of what you are doing: Focus on one task and do just that task with full attention. It can be almost anything, so long as it has your full attention. But it should be something that doesn’t stress you out. For example, don’t try to balance your checkbook if that makes you stressed, and be mindful of that. Do something you like to do, but do it with your full attention.

If you know why you are anxious, you can talk over the issue with a friend. Maybe you have been ruminating or worrying about something. Getting an outside perspective can help ..

Focus on the Anxiety: For some people experiencing the anxiety can be extremely liberating. Often, it is the avoidance of the discomfort that makes it worse. Feel the anxiety. Feel what your body feels like anxious. Notice how you have difficulty breathing. Don’t try to change it. Just let it be there without judgment.

Avoiding judgment is one of the most important things for anxiety.  It’s OK to feel anxious. It’s OK to experience whatever it is underneath the anxiety. Anxiety isn’t truly an emotion. It’s a state of not feeling an emotion. It’s more rumination on something that isn’t happening in the moment. And that is why getting into the moment through meditation or other means can be so helpful.

If you have trouble with these techniques or meditation it may be that something else is out of balance. It could be something in the brain or the body. Neurofeedback and HeartMath can be extremely useful. LENS neurofeedback can help train your mind to be less reactive to situations. HeartMath is biofeedback that helps people use breath and good feelings to bring body systems into alignment. Both are powerful in gaining some of the benefits of meditation without meditating. Of course, there could be a biochemical imbalance, but I don’t recommend medication. Simple blood and urine tests may uncover the imbalance and help you find balance with a simple supplement regimen.

Anxiety is a big problem in America at the moment. I see many patients with this problem and/or other mental health issues. Fortunately, there is help available without drugs. Meditation may be a good solution for many. But if it makes your anxiety worse, stop. Try one of the techniques above. If those don’t work, get professional help. It may be that you will need it anyway. But mindfulness has helped many people all over. Don’t let anxiety stop you from being your best self.

 

The Astonishing Way that Your Mind Can Heal Your Body

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The yoga studio I go to has different teachers that teach classes for students of all levels. It is unusual, as there is a mix of advanced students and beginning ones in the same class.  Last week, one of the teachers had us do a lot of planks. This is a core building exercise that requires the yogi to hold the pose as if doing a pushup – at the top of the pushup – sometimes for several minutes. After the class, I had a discussion with another student about all of the planks. “It’s not that the pose is physically hard to hold for that long,” she said to me. “It’s that my mind has trouble holding the pose.” It was a curious comment. What is it about doing something painful that is hard? Why do we have trouble pushing through the sensation?

In this post, I want to discuss how one holds emotions in the body.  Emotional healing is an important aspect of physical healing, and an important part of my practice. But how do we release emotions? Why do they come out at times when we don’t expect them to appear? This is an aspect of my medical practice that fascinates me, and the answer isn’t clear.  The simple answer is, when the person is ready.  There are many techniques to release this storehouse of emotions, and we can explore some of them.

I think most people would agree that stress is held in the body. It’s something that one can feel and experience. Many people feel the effects of a long day at work in their neck or shoulders. But there is a deeper issue that can happen where trauma and grief are stored in the body. I have worked with many patients who have discussed this phenomenon as part of their work with me. Many report breaking down in tears while exercising as something shifted within their body. Emotions stored are released as part of the healing process.

How do we access these emotions physically? Candace Pert was a molecular biologist who studied the mind-body connection.  She discovered that the body synthesized tiny molecules in response to difficult emotions. These get deposited into various places in the body.  She and other scientists proposed that the body is a storehouse of unconscious thoughts and feelings. All of the things that have happened to us are stored in our bodies in response, regardless of whether we recall them or not.

Yoga and Emotions

Why is yoga so helpful for clearing negative emotions? Yoga, as an exercise, focuses on three things: movement, breath, and awareness. These three components play out in many of the techniques used to release emotions. When most people think of yoga, they are thinking about the exercise. Yoga is actually a series of practices that include Hatha Yoga, a series of poses. These poses are either done individually or in a sequence called a vinyasa. Each pose, or asana, has a specific breathing rhythm associated with it. The transitions between asanas also have a breathing pattern. There is a synchronization between the breath and the movement. The breath is part of the ritual and allows for a cleansing of the mind, body, and emotions.  The practice requires awareness and focus. One may become aware of the places that are stuck and painful.

Many yoga teachers say that yoga begins when one wants to move out of a pose or quit.  Bringing attention to the discomfort can help release the pain. The awareness requires non-judgement. It is what a Buddhist would call “Mindfulness.” Mindfulness is awareness without struggle. It is pure acceptance of what is.  It is about being with what is true for you in that moment. You accept the feeling, the pain, the experience.  And by doing that, the discomfort magically begins to soften. It is as if we have given our bodies permission to let go.

Emotional Healing Therapy

Yoga is such a wonderful metaphor for the process of letting go. I suspect that many people benefit from yoga because there is a visceral experience. You can feel where you are stuck and release that tension. You feel the struggle in your body. For example, let’s say you’re trying to stretch your hamstrings. There’s a quality of softening you must embrace to do so. Otherwise you are just tearing at the muscle fibers. You learn to let go.

Doing this on a psychological level, though, isn’t always as easy. This is because we have a different type of block called a “defense.” We still have the same struggle. It’s just happening in our minds. Psychologists tell us that we have defenses for a reason. We build defenses as a way to protect ourselves. They may be hiding trauma, abuse, or shame.  We create them because at the time they form, we don’t have the emotional capacity to process what is going on. The defense becomes a part of us and we begin to identify with it. It is analagous to the tight hamstrings. We don’t remember when the last time the legs were loose.

To move around defenses, psychologists have created various methods. Emotional healing techniques allow us to access these parts of ourselves. Talk therapy helps us see our defenses. We gain greater awareness and can change our typical response. Other techniques focus not so much on the spoken word, but some sort of visceral release. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)  is a technique that helps patients process trauma.  Emotional Freedom Technique or EFT uses a self-tapping pattern while recalling a specific event. Both of these techniques appear to allow for the body to reprocess the events on a cellular level.

While we don’t always recall the specifics, release of the event is possible. These methods suggest that there is a connection between our minds and our body. Memories are stored in the body and accessed through the brain. But the use of these techniques allows us to move around our blocks. We don’t always have to recall a specific incident. (Although both the above techniques require one to do so.) A specific event isn’t always recalled while doing yoga. It arises out of the breathing and the movement.

In my medical practice, understanding this is crucial, as so many people come to me with anxiety. Very often, anxiety strikes and is free floating. There is no easily identifiable event or experience that one can identify.  Focus on the past is less important. Focus on the present is key. It is where the defense lives. It is where the body lives.

A method that I use in my office works on a different principle of mind-body connection. HeartMath is a form of biofeedback that uses heart rate to help the user relax. It’s more than relaxation though. It helps the person see on the screen how their body reacts to different types of thoughts. Calming thoughts help bring the body in a state of coherence or where different systems in the body work together. Negative thoughts bring the body out of coherence. Watching this on the screen allows the user to learn to breathe better to gain more coherence. HeartMath works by helping the user stay in the present and notice subtle changes in their body.

Emotional healing during yoga is a great illustration of a mind-body connection. The body remembers even if we don’t. But there really isn’t a distinction. Our body knows, and it keeps track. From the mild aches and pains we feel getting up in the morning to full-blown disease, our bodies remember.

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