Can you use guided meditation to control your anxiety?
Firstly lets understand anxiety, it comes from your amygdala (link). It is a powerful part of your mental core and is hard wired to protect you (important to remember it is there to protect you, to keep you safe). However, in the modern world it can (it is powerful but a little dim) have an issue with perspective. It can perceive everyday situations, change and things you are naturally nervous about as being a critical risk to your safety and wellbeing. It feeds off your own limiting beliefs, beliefs you generated for yourself when you were just a child (link) and can amplify them to such levels that it creates the same reaction you would expect if you were in a life and death situation. It is real, it can be debilitating and it can understandably cause you to allow it to control what you do (and don’t do) and miss those wonderful opportunities to learn and experience new exciting things.
Learning to control it really does depend on you and what you can allow yourself to believe about yourself. I can tell you that you have the power within yourself to take control of that feeling, you can read here that the answer is simply to educate your amygdala that, even if you may be nervous or even a little worried, your life is not in danger, that it is Ok to feel a little anxious about things that you see as important to you. Actually, just reading this last paragraph – as long as you can see the truth in it – is the first step.
The second step is to start training it to be more rational, to re-align to what your really want to do in your life – to how you really want to be. This you do situation by situation, your anxiety will have triggers – some have one or two – others can have multiple triggers that set the old amygdala off pumping you full of adrenaline usually at exactly the time you want to be relaxed and calm. Imagine it as a big burly body guard following you around everywhere you go. The body guard is there to protect you from all the bad people in the world, but the body guard (for extreme anxiety) believes that every person wants to do you harm. So if anyone looks at you, smiles at you or even just comes close to you the body guard bounds over and punches them in the face. The ‘people’ in this analogy are opportunities (which can be people too in your life) and this is what anxiety caused by an uneducated amygdala can do, it can (with only positive intentions) run havoc in your life punching every opportunity you have to love, develop and experience new wonderful things in the face – all in the name of ‘keeping you safe’.
So what you need to do is start training the body guard to only punch the truly bad people in the face on your behalf (obviously sticking with the analogy – I would never condone violence) and to welcome the good positive people (opportunities) into your life with a VIP pass. To achieve this it needs your help, it needs your guidance. So the second step is to start training it. Each time you start feeling anxious, you will recognise the starting points which are personal to you complete the below Mental Core Training guided mediation session. Don’t expect your anxiety to just suddenly disappear, even though with really receptive individuals it can, acknowledge that you will need to invest some time in the training of your body guard (Amygdala) it has a whole lifetime of habitually punching opportunities in the face so may need a little time and repetition before it really becomes aligned to who you really are now and what you really want to experience in your life. The quick guided meditation will enable you to rationalise and decide for yourself where your own boundaries are, define how you want your body guard to protect you.
The third step is really important, you must give it praise when it gets it right. You must give yourself credit when you start to take control and start making a positive difference to your life. Even if it starts really small, even if it just begins by feeling a little calmer – any positive step you (and your body guard makes) must be met with praise and recognition. Saying thank you to yourself for starting this journey, thanking the body guard for letting you take that first step of trying something new, meeting someone or just having fun must be met with praise, it has to know when it is getting it right for you. Remember, the amygdala is there to serve you, it wants to keep you safe but it also wants you to be happy and enjoying your precious life.
Do the quick 5 minute guided meditation below to get started. (Please feel free to laugh as I try to hold my breath, count to 4 and give you instruction all at the same time :))
The fourth step is, once you have made progress and can genuinely notice the difference then tell people about it, talk about this change and how you did it. So many in our modern world suffer in silence with anxiety, you know that from your own experiences, seeing/hearing and knowing that someone else felt that same and then found the way to make themselves feel better can be the starting point of them getting control of their own body guard and stop it punching all of their opportunities to love, learn and experience the world in the face.
Mental Core Training 