Meditating When Anxious

Meditation has been heralded as the way to transform your anxiety into ease but sometimes it can actually heighten it. Practising looking deeply with compassion at this aspect of your experience can be easier said than done. Thor guides you through how to both meditate and strengthen your ability to meditate when anxious. You’ll learn 4x4 breathing as well as how to speak compassionately to yourself. Feelings are information and it's more helpful to be curious than critical.

Transcript

Welcome to this meditation.

In this meditation we'll be focusing on anxiety and feeling anxious.

It can be incredibly hard to meditate when we are feeling anxious.

The key biochemicals in our body that come into being with anxiety are all designed to make us take action.

The stress hormones that drive us to either fight a potential threat or run away from it.

And so sitting still and attempting to still our minds or even soften our minds can be incredibly hard under those conditions.

Often we have thoughts and feelings about our thoughts and feelings and rarely do we welcome anxiety.

It's more likely that we're being critical of ourselves or wishing it away or feeling frustrated.

And so with anxiety like some of the other uncomfortable feelings,

Self-talk about self-talk can be very important to pay attention to.

Because yes we can run an inner critic about our inner critic.

So as you find yourself in this meditation taking a moment to just get a sense of what day is it,

What time is it,

Where are you and I do mean that literally,

Where are you in terms of space?

On this chair,

In this room,

In this building.

Orientating ourselves in space and time can be incredibly helpful because anxiety is almost always about the future.

Well that future is in five minutes or five days or five years.

So coming to now,

Getting a sense of what does here feel like,

What's the inside of my experience at this point,

Can help shift that focus.

And because anxiety is so often thought-based it can be helpful to come down into the physicality of your experience.

So getting a sense of your eyebrows,

That's often when we store quite a bit of attention.

Getting a sense of your jaw,

Maybe shuffle your jaw a little bit,

Opening and closing your mouth.

Getting a sense of your shoulders,

Maybe shuffling your shoulders and moving them in some way.

Checking out where is your breath landing in your body?

Is it quite high in your chest or mid chest?

It's unlikely that you're able to take very deep breaths given the fact that you are feeling anxious.

That's okay.

I would actually actively encourage you to not try and deepen your breath at this point.

When we try and draw a deep breath we can actually agitate our diaphragm so we end up hyperventilating a little bit.

So my invitation to you is much rather to just allow your breath to land where it's landing,

Maybe bringing a bit of a softness to it.

That's enough for now.

Getting a sense of your abdomen,

Maybe shuffling your sitting bones a little bit.

Getting a sense of your thighs,

Your knees,

All the way down your shins and calves,

Down along the soles of your feet to the tips of your toes.

Even just twiggling your toes a little bit.

When you do that you're reminding your brain of the other end of your body.

It can even be helpful to check with my mind's eye how many of my toes can I feel in this moment?

When you have that thought what you actually do is send a signal down to your toes and then you can get a sense of how long it takes for that signal to come back.

You may start with going hmm I've got three of my toes online so to speak and then gradually you will feel five,

Six,

Seven,

Eight,

Nine and there's the last toe.

When we do this when we deliberately direct our focus to a physical experience that we're having you're actually interrupting the anxiety that you are thinking and experiencing at the beginning of this meditation.

It's like it's really hard to to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time.

It can be really hard to run thoughts of anxiety at the same time as we're checking out our toes.

And so this focus on the physical experience can give us a little bit of a respite just almost tapping the brakes on the speed of the anxiety and then we can start to work with our breath.

So we're gonna do breathing called box breathing or four by four breathing.

It can be quite helpful to do this particularly when we're highly agitated or anxious.

It doesn't focus so much on breathing deeply but focus is more on breathing in a structured way.

So I'll talk us through it.

We start by breathing into the counter for we then hold our breath to the counter for breathing out to the counter for and then hold our breath again to the counter for before the next inhalation.

So hence it's called the four by four breathing.

It's like the four sides of a box or a square and we will do this four times.

So breathing in two three four and hold two three four breathing out two three four and hold two three four.

Give your breath a bit of space in between and then for the second time breathing in two three four and hold two three four.

Breathing out two three four and hold two three four and giving your breath that little bit of in-between space and then for the third time breathing in two three four and hold two three four.

Breathing out two three four and hold two three four.

Giving your lungs a bit of time in between just allowing your lungs to do what they need to do and then for the fourth and final time breathing in two three four and hold two three four.

Breathing out two three four and hold two three four and then give yourself a deep breath as deep as feels okay and comfortable for you.

Yeah you may find that at this point you need to shuffle a bit in your body.

You might need to open your chest or even stretch out your arms.

Shuffle your feet or reposition the way you're sitting.

We've basically given your breath a bit of a workout and through that we've shifted the focus away from whatever it was that was driving your anxiety to literally what is happening right here right now.

The thing with breath is that it's always in real time.

You cannot catch up on breath from last week and you certainly can't stash away some breath supplies for next week.

Yeah so just notice what it feels like to be here.

What does this experience feel like?

You are giving yourself this space and time to care for yourself.

Being here with yourself and for yourself is an act of self-care and self-love.

Yeah.

Give yourself a moment to observe and absorb what you are learning,

What you are feeling.

This is what here feels like.

This is the inside of your experience now.

Notice if you're hearing through your self-talk any advice or information whether it's something like you've got this or you'll find your way or even though I don't know yet how to find my way forward I am practicing showing up for myself.

Whatever advice or self-talk feels helpful to you at this point.

Yeah.

Feelings are always information and so it is with the experience you were having at the start of this meditation.

Honouring it and practicing being with it in itself evolves it and moves it forward.

As always it's more helpful to be curious than critical.

Go gently with yourself.

Reviews

Absolutely perfect thank you! I love how you understand hyperventilation is not helpful when we have anxiety attack

Wonderful calm comforting voice. Excellent guidance. Will bookmark.

Informative, no-nonsense and helpful. It includes the best version of box breathing I’ve come across, allowing for pauses in between and the teacher has a lovely soothing voice.
Edit: I agree with others that the bell is too loud Thor, for people with PTSD. It would be great if you could edit that out. 💚

I really enjoyed this, it brought me a sense of calm. Thank you 🙏🏻

Lovely thank you 🙏
I would just say the loud bell at the end was quite jarring juxtaposed to your calm voice. Perhaps something softer? Thank you in any case! 🙏

I was so full of anxiety today amd once i chose to try this one out, i immidiately felt it melt away. Your ability to gently switch the experiemce from anxiety to calm and present was wonderful. thank you.

I was feeling overwhelmed and on the verge of an anxiety attack while fighting back tears. Your brief yet incredibly effective message worked me back to calmness. I’m going to save this meditation. Thank you.

This was just what I needed to help me. I feel more grounded. Thank you so much!

Thank you Thor! I am so grateful for this meditation—it was just what I needed right now as I’ve been feeling anxiety about an upcoming event. It was very grounding, especially feeling and noticing my toes. I also really appreciated how you incorporated breaks into the box breathing—that made it easier for me, especially when my breathing felt like it was more in my chest. Really appreciate you and this meditation!

Absolutely excellent meditation and teaching thank you 💕🙏🏻

Thanks I found this centering. Can't manage box breathing but that didn't matter, listening to you counting was calming to me. Have a peaceful day, mine will be better now