How does meditation help anxiety?

Meditate!

One aspect of anxiety is racing thoughts that won’t go away. Meditation helps with this part of the problem by quieting the overactive mind. Instead of getting dragged along by your fearful thoughts, you can start identifying with the silence that exists between every mental action.

It puts a crack in the whole anxiety loop. Through regular practice, you experience that you ARE not simply your thoughts or your feelings. You can detach yourself from these to rest in your own being.

There are numerous studies showing meditation to be a very effective tool for anxiety. Some people will be able to feel relief right away while others have to implement it and start doing it on a regular basis. So if you start doing it and you stick to it, it will for sure be beneficial.

If you want to SUPERCHARGE meditation and learn to literally become a master at controlling thoughts, emotions and crushing anxiety then you can go to the website "Natural Health Evolution" and read about a cool device. It's called "The Muse Headband" and it teaches you, with instant feedback, exactly how to meditate in order to put you into that relaxed "zen state". Once you have gone through the training a few times you will be able to do it on your own, without the muse headband.

Click here to go read about that device

Bonus Anxiety Tip:

Limit your caffeine intake!

Try not to drink more than one cup of coffee a day.

Why?

Caffeine affects the body much like anxiety and stress as in increasing heart rate, blood pressure, and levels of stress hormones. It often raises your levels of the stress hormones in the blood by over 200%

Caffeine also inhibits the calming neurotransmitter GABA. GABA puts the brakes on brain activity when needed and has been called the “nature’s Valium.” It’s important for feeling happy and relaxed, so there's no surprise that a low levels of GABA is associated with anxiety and panic attacks. In addition to all this Caffeine may also cause reactive hypoglycemia. Hypoglycemia occurs when blood sugar drops too low. A low blood sugar attack can leave you feeling jittery, sweating, irritable and confused, with your heart pounding — does those symptoms sound familiar? ...yup...just like an anxiety attack.

Bonus Anxiety Tip

Stop eating!

Well not all together. We are talking periodically here or what is know as intermittent fasting.

How?

There are many different ways to do fasting and you need to find something that works for you and can be made into a habit. While some only drink water during fasting, other choose to drink coffee and tea others just restrict their calorie intake to e.g. 20% of the normal energy intake.

One of the easier ways to start fasting is the 16:8 method. This means that during 8 hours of the day you are allowed to eat as normal, 16 hours of the day you don’t eat anything. This could e.g. mean that you’re “eating window” is between 11 AM and 7 PM. Which will allow you to have lunch and dinner as normal and will therefore not affect your daily life too much. Another more hardcore method is to do 24 hour fasting twice a week. Try what works for you and listen to your body.

Why?

Besides avoiding the blood sugar crashes I mentioned previously fasting can benefit us in many other ways. Fasting regularly can improve your insulin sensitivity, reduce your blood pressure, help you lose weight and reduce inflammation in your body. All though fasting has historically been mainly connected to religion, the health benefits has been studied, e.g. for Muslims celebrating Ramadan. Where they could see that fasting had a positive effect on the inflammatory status of the body and a lower risk of cardiovascular diseases.

The main thing why we want to do it for however is because it upregulates the dopamine receptors in our brains. Studies have shown that people that are more assertive and are “go getters” have a higher amount of dopamine receptors (or d2 receptors) in the brain. In animal studies the same is noted as it is the leaders of the group, or the alpha monkeys that has the highest density of d2 receptors. Badass? Yup!

Bonus anxiety tip:

Put your hands in warm water!

Go to the bathroom. Turn on the tap water and put your hand in the WARM water. Keep them there for five minutes!

Why?

Immersing your hands in warm water engages the calming part of the nervous system, the parasympathetic part. When it goes to work it slows down it's wild twin brother: the sympathetic part of the nervous system which is responsible for having you stay on guard. They are like shift workers: when one is up the other one is resting. This is perhaps the most simplest and easy tip in the book so try it out the next time you feel anxiety.