Overcoming Anxiety with Mindfulness Therapy
By Sarah Hensley
BA, Grad Dip Psychology, Grad Dip Counselling, Psychotherapy & Diploma of Clinical Hypnotherapy
General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is a very common condition that affects many of us at some time in our lives. At any one time it is estimated that nearly 15 per cent of the Australian population (around two million people) has been diagnosed with GAD and are actively seeking treatment through medication or some form of cognitive therapy.
In essence recurrent anxiety is a form of intense worrying about health, work, fear of the future or a wide range of situations that may occur in the future that creates an immense amount of emotional suffering. So what can we do to control our anxiety levels?
It is important to understand that anxiety, like most emotional reactions, has a structure.
We are all familiar with the patterns of recurring negative thinking: the thought loops that maintain and amplify worry and anxiety. This internal dialogue can be relentless and often hits us in the early hours of the morning, if we can sleep at all! This negative thinking tends to solidify into generalized beliefs about the future, about ourselves and other people that takes on a life of their own. We become consumed by worry about things that may never happen. But, most importantly, the worry thinking does not in any way help us deal with the objective reality of things that need our attention. In fact the reactive thinking makes us less able to cope, leaves us feeling drained and confused.
Clearly, the path to controlling anxiety must involve changing these internal negative thought loops and beliefs. However, most people find this extremely hard to do.
Mindfulness is a therapeutic technique that emerged from Eastern philosophy and encourages us to live fully in the present moment. Western psychology has borrowed many of the concepts and using aspects of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) works to make a distinction between who we are and what we think. So often what we think is going to happen, what we think other people are thinking and our own inner judgements and criticisms make life seem more stressful than it really is.
Focusing on releasing the trapped, frozen emotional energy that has become attached to habitual thinking is one of the primary focuses of Mindfulness Therapy. First we train ourselves to identify these negative thought reactions. This is most important, because we cannot change what we cannot see.
Therefore, we must make our reactions visible by paying very close attention to catch them as and when they arise. But after mastering this, we shift our attention away from the content or story that forms the cognitive structure of the anxiety reaction to the emotional feeling quality that gives it power. This is called “sitting with the emotion.” We learn to sit with our anxiety, without getting caught up in further reactivity and thinking, or in trying to attack the negative thoughts. We are, in fact, learning to turn our attention towards the reaction, and this changes everything.
Mindfulness Therapy is well researched and evidence-based. A recent study* took a sample of anxious subjects and treated one group with Progressive Muscle Relaxation and thought suppression and a second with Mindfulness Therapy. Both groups showed equal post-treatment improvement in the clinical and daily self-report measures. However, mindfulness participants reported better emotional meta-cognition (emotional comprehension) and showed improved indices of somatic and autonomic regulation (reduced breathing pattern and increased vagal reactivity during evocation of cardiac defense). These findings suggest that mindfulness reduces chronic worry by promoting emotional and physiological regulatory mechanisms contrary to those maintaining chronic worry.
EXERCISE
1. Sit down and get comfortable. Close your eyes. Allow yourself to relax and practice basic mindfulness of breathing to steady the mind.
2. Open the field of your awareness until it feels like a large space.
3. Introduce an anxiety emotion into this space and experiment with just sitting with it as you would with a friend: looking and listening very carefully with interest and an open mind.
4. Find the colour that best fits the feeling.
5. Experiment with surrounding that colour with another colour. Try the exact opposite colour first and notice the shift in feeling intensity of the anxiety.
6. Develop this imagery and try other modifications in size, position and movement.
7. Continue monitoring the change in intensity on a 1-10 scale. When the anxiety has reduced by at least 50% open your eyes and take a break before returning for another round.
8. Repeat the whole process 5 to 10 times for 3 to 4 days. Notice how your perceptions change each day.
Now, of course it is easier to do this with a skilled mindfulness therapist, but you will probably be quite surprised at how quickly things change once you get down to the detailed sensory level, made possible through focused mindfulness.
*‘Treating chronic worry: Psychological and physiological effects of a training programme based on mindfulness’ (Delgado, L. C., Guerra, P., Perakakis, P.,Vera, M. N., et al. (2010). Behaviour Research and Therapy, 1-10.)
