How Meditation Helped Overcome A Generalized State Of Uneasiness And Anxiety

When I was younger, from my tweens until my late 20s, I had this general sense of low-level anxiety that pervaded my every waking thought. I couldn't get over it. There was always something I was missing, and that made me constantly anxious. Meditation has to be one of the primary ways I was able to become more conscious of this anxiety and alleviate it. Immensely.

Transcript

Hey guys,

I hope that you guys are doing amazing wherever you are in the world.

My name is Boomshakha and I welcome you to my channel.

As always I'm so grateful that you guys are listening,

Subscribing and commenting.

And of course in this video I'm going to speak to you guys a little bit more about meditation.

One of the main reasons why I love meditation so much is because of one particular benefit that I received from it that I didn't even know was a supposed benefit.

Perhaps it is and I'm sure scientists and researchers have done a lot of studies on this.

But for me it was the benefit of the year.

It was the benefit of the decade,

Of the century.

It's the reason why I would espouse or suggest meditation to every person on this planet,

Especially those who are suffering from anxiety.

Now I used to be an extremely anxious creature when I was younger.

I would say that perhaps I had mild forms of social anxiety disorder or perhaps I was just anxious in general.

But in general that was my personality type.

I was just a ball of anxiety.

I felt anxious about everything.

As I grew older I learned more about myself.

I started doing more yoga and meditation obviously.

I started running and doing all these things to discharge all of this anxious energy from my body.

And I realized as time goes on,

Especially now,

My anxiety levels are almost non-existent.

Of course it crops up here.

They're depending on the situation,

Depending on what's going on.

But mostly I'm not spending my entire day in a state of anxiety like I used to.

And of course I would say running because running really helped me create a proper mind-body connection and helped me to discharge that negative energy.

But also yoga because again it created a great mind-body connection and helped me come into my body rather than staying in my head.

That helped a lot.

But I would say I think the major reason why I stopped being so anxious is because of meditation.

The major source of my anxiety was this general sense of uneasiness where I would be sitting there and everything's fine.

I'm sitting doing my work.

Everything's taken care of.

I'm not late on any deadlines if it was school or work.

And my relationship with my parents and everyone is fine.

Everything is in harmony.

I don't have any bills due and I have enough money to pay all my bills.

All of the different things that you could possibly worry about are taken care of.

And I'd be sitting there with all of those things taken care of and still have this general sense of uneasiness,

This general sense of feeling that something is missing,

Something is wrong.

I don't know what's wrong but there's something wrong and I need to figure it out because if I don't figure it out then my whole entire life is going to come tumbling down upon me and this one thing is going to take over my entire life and I'm never going to be able to be successful or do the things that I want to do with my life.

I'm going to be destitute on the street.

My parents are not going to be able to help me.

My family won't be able to help me and I'm going to have to give everything up because I'm going to be completely unsuccessful and I'm going to be bankrupt or whatever it might be.

And so this general sense of uneasiness would just crop up at random times when I've really taken care of everything that I could possibly take care of.

And I think that's where my general sense of control issues come from because I need to make sure everything was under control.

If I didn't then my anxiety levels would grow even higher.

I would get even more anxious about everything that's going on.

And so I do a lot of to-do lists.

I'm always writing down things that I should be taking care of,

Taxes or other things like that and I'm always writing them down so I tick them off and once I tick them off I feel a little bit easy for a few seconds and then again I have the sense of oh my god I'm missing something I'm missing something I'm missing something.

Something must have been missed and that is going to come and bite me in the bum later.

And so this is something that used to bug me and annoy me and really depreciate me I think.

It really just took away a lot of my energy and caused me a lot of mental exhaustion and physical exhaustion in the past because there is nothing specific that's causing anxiety really in this situation.

It's not a specific thing that you can pinpoint and say okay cool yeah this is it and then I can do something about it and then I can take action towards alleviating it and then I can move forward and pass this source of anxiety.

It's not like that source of anxiety.

It's not like oh I'm anxious because I have an exam coming up.

All right let me just study harder for it and let's see how the exam goes and then if it doesn't go well then maybe I can repeat the exam right or yeah I'm anxious because I had a fight with my sister and I'm just worried about it and okay that's fine you know I'm going to message her and apologize because it was my fault and then that's going to go away and everything's going to be fine.

It's not like there's a source of anxiety that you can pinpoint and say okay cool I can fix that because it's a generalized sense of uneasiness.

Basically there's nothing to pinpoint and there's nothing to fix.

There's nothing to work upon and you're just generally anxious because of nothing really because of something perhaps that your mind thinks exists but really that's nothing that you can pinpoint and say okay I can fix that.

I can work on it.

Let me work on it right and that's where the real issue comes from.

Because as an individual,

As a person that really wants to control their lives which is impossible obviously but as a person who really wants to control their anxiety as well it's a really terrible thing a really terrible cycle to be stuck in because there's nothing you can do about it.

There's nothing you can do about it because there's really nothing that is causing this anxiety.

It's just a general sense of uneasiness that's present in your mind because of the general sense of anxiety that you've become like a ball of anxiety.

If you don't feel anxious and I know I was like that if I didn't have something to be anxious about I would make something up to be anxious about.

And this is something terrible to even say out loud and I know that was a terrible thing to do to myself but it was impossible for me to believe that there is nothing to be anxious about.

Oh no nothing to be anxious about everything's taken care of.

How can that be?

There must be something to be anxious about.

There has to be something to be anxious about.

I'm sure there's something if I just pick at that scab enough I'm sure I'll find something to be anxious about.

And so I would pick at the scab and I would find oh yeah this is something I could be anxious about.

The fact that basically the world is going to end soon because I haven't done this particular thing or I haven't gone to school in a couple of days so yeah of course I'm going to fail this course or something like that.

I mean I would literally find something to worry about and then I'd pinpoint that and I'd be like alright cool so yeah great I have something to be anxious about that feels great now I can actually feel anxious about it rather than being unsure about what to be anxious about.

Right?

And if you actually if you actually listen to this audio or video and you're listening to me and you're thinking this is insane I can't believe people actually think this way unfortunately this is this was how I spent a lot of my life and I look back upon that ball of anxiety that I used to be and I feel a lot of compassion and empathy and a lot of sadness a lot of sadness because of all of those years where I just spent eons just wasting away my energy my mental status my sanity over something that was non-existent something that didn't even exist being anxious over something that was just not even there and I think about it and I think to myself what a waste of energy and time and mental capacity.

I could have been building spaceships or rockets the moon or something and I could have been doing something else with that mental space and energy but instead I was spending it berating myself because I didn't know what I was anxious about and also feeling anxious about something random something that was pinpointable and so just just like it was just a terrible time to be alive and of course as I said meditation was one of those things that really helped me realize that there's nothing to be anxious about and I can't really emphasize to you guys how much how grateful I am to the practice of meditation for this exact reason.

There's a hundred other reasons why meditation helped me I mean it in stress relief in the fact that it helped me be more aware of my body in the fact that it helped me be more compassionate in the fact that it helped me build my focus and attention and all of those amazing things that meditation does but I would say the main reasons why I love meditation is for this particular thing where the self-awareness and awareness of the waves of thought in my mind really helped me realize when I was going into that anxiety spiral.

So because of meditation I'll be able to say to myself you're just going you're going into the anxiety mode because you have nothing to be anxious about and that's the only reason there's nothing to worry about everything is taken care of you've done everything on your to-do list you've taken care of everything that needs to be taken care of nothing to worry about you're only going into the spiral because you have nothing to worry about and just that self-awareness that really extreme self-awareness and that realization that okay it's fine don't worry about it everything is okay you don't have to worry about anything that really changed my perspective on anxiety and perspective on life.

All of a sudden I had all this mental space released and free to think about other things all of a sudden I was able to think about the other questions of life you know what am I doing here what's my life purpose why am I sent to this planet at this particular time in time in point in time what am I supposed to be doing with myself how can I bring more of myself to this world how can I how can I serve this world in a better way how can I give back to the world to this world that has given me so much all those things that you know I wanted to think about but I didn't have the mental space for it now I had it now I had that space because the anxiety that I had been feeling on a general level on a constant level has dissipated not completely obviously and I am still I still have moments where I will wake up all of a sudden in the middle of the night and feel anxious about I don't know what and I'll take that moment and just really meditate on it and realize oh there's nothing to be anxious about it this is just my general this is just the way I'm generally used to behaving so that's why I'm just following the same neural patterns so just relax everything's fine and I'll be able to go back to sleep whereas in the past I would just stay awake all night thinking oh my god what am I supposed to be anxious about I don't know but I'm sure there's something what is it I don't know and so now I can actually be like alright cool just relax everything is fine either go back to sleep or if you want to do some work go do work but instead of letting yourself be mired by this anxiety and be just going into the spiral of depression and anxiety where nothing feels right and you're not able to do anything productive because you're just enamored with those thoughts of anxiety that's where I'm no that's where I never go anymore right I never go to that extreme anymore and I would have to say it mainly is due to meditation because of that self-awareness and because of the awareness of the waves of thought that I've built through meditation right so being more aware of the fact that yeah you're going to the spiral right now stop it stop it now it's okay everything's fine soothing myself being tender to myself and then stopping myself from going into the spiral and coming back into a space of equanimity that really is one of the key reasons why I suggest meditation not only to every person on this planet particularly to those people who I know suffer from anxiety which I'm thinking or believing or seeing affects almost everyone that I know a lot of people that I know suffer from this sort of generalized sense of anxiety and I don't know if it's just the world that we live in right now there's so many things happening in the world that could obviously cause us to be anxious or perhaps the food that we're eating or our general disconnection from the nature from nature from Mother Earth living in concrete jungles things like that there's so many reasons that could be the that could be the ultimate reason for why there's so much more anxiety on the planet but I do realize that meditation is one of those keys that can really help us alleviate that now I just really want to share this with you guys because I've been noticing that this is something that's coming up for a lot of my friends and I've been suggesting meditation to a lot of my girlfriends a lot of people that are in Chiang Mai a lot of people in Toronto a lot of people in general and I wanted to do this so that I could share my ideas with a bigger group of people hopefully hopefully this helps you as well perhaps you are suffering from this generalized sense of anxiety this generalized sense of uneasiness but not knowing why you feel uneasy you don't know what you're missing you don't know you don't think anything's missing but you still feel this anxiety and I hope that this video kind of helps you a little bit or this audio again thank you so much for listening and I shall see you guys the next time around bye for now

Reviews

I loved your talk, Boom, I used to run and meditate regularly, and I felt like a Jedi, but lately I came back to a rut of worry and anxiety - I think sometimes I dwell on things that are not important, and do not let ma to focus on the present. This seems like a waste of time, right? I feel encouraged now. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for inspiring me 🤩