Meditation as first aid - a #MindfulPhD post
The first time a therapist explained mindfulness to me, I'm pretty sure I laughed out loud, and not in the most kind way. Why, why on earth, would I want to sit still and listen to my thoughts? Even now, there are many moods and times of day where that sounds like absolute torture to me. Because of that, and my naturally stubborn disposition, I do not have a regular meditation practice (although I do have a fairly regular yoga practice, which is similar but not the same!)
But I do have a whole arsenal of meditation, mindfulness, and breathwork techniques that I have used to live with my anxiety. I basically use meditation as "first aid" - I pull it out when I need it, I feel safer knowing that the techniques are easy to do, and easy to reach for. I am hoping to build meditation into more of an every day, or "preventative health" model, but for now, this is what I'm working with.
So if the idea of "sitting quietly to get to know your mind" terrifies you, read on for how I do it in a way that makes me feel safe, supported, and lessens my anxiety.
I have never "cleared my mind." I don't even often sit completely still while meditating.
I for years used the "Headspace" app for my meditation, and I found many of the videos to be extremely helpful in challenging some of my worries and fears about meditation. The concept I return to again and again is that meditation is less about me "clearing" my mind or getting to a state of complete emptiness, and more of accepting my mind and what hangs out in there. Meditation and mindfulness are ways to get in touch with what I am thinking, what words I'm using to describe myself, or my work, or others, and how I feel - in my mind, in my emotions, in my body.
When my anxiety kicks up, the last thing I want to do is sit down and meditate. But doing so usually helps.
My anxiety happens on a curve. Eustress is the 'good' kind of nerves - the buzz before a big test that helps you perform better, or the extra hit of adrenaline before the big game. I then follow a pretty steady climb from stress, to anxiety, to high anxiety, to a panic attack. Meditation is not a helpful tool (for me, could be different for you) for anything above a 6 or 7 on the anxiety scale (with 10 being a full panic attack.) But for lower levels, it successful can help me refocus and usually prevent me from moving up the anxiety ladder.
When I'm above the "good stress" and before I hit the panic levels, meditation is very effective in re-centering me and usually can stop a full blown attack from happening.
Here's what I mean when I say "meditate": a combination of observing my thoughts and focusing on my breathing.
Andy Puddicombe is the face behind the Headspace app, and I find his explanation of how meditation works when you're anxious to be particularly accurate to my experience.
So, here's what I do, step by step:
If I can, I move locations. Getting up, shaking my body out a bit, and resettling in a new space (even sitting on the floor of my office) signals to me that we are doing something different.
I sit in a comfortable position. There is no rule that you have to be sitting cross legged. I sometimes sit in a chair, other times on the floor on a blanket, or with my back resting against the wall. Laying down can work too, especially if the anxiety is very high, but if I'm more relaxed, laying down on the floor can lead to a nap.
I put on a mindful breathing meditation. I used to pay for the Headspace app subscription, which was great but expensive. I also have used Stop. Breathe, & Think, and sometimes I just go onto Youtube and search for "Mindful breathing" and click until I find someone whose voice doesn't annoy me. There are also usually mindful breathing tracks on Spotify or Google Music, if you're with your phone. I like having someone lead me through the meditation, because then I know how long it will be before I start, and I am less worried about "doing it right."
I go through the meditation, which often prompts me to pay attention to my breath, or literally say "inhale" to myself when I inhale, and "exhale" when I exhale. Sometimes I'm prompted to count my breaths. Other times I might be told to focus on how my body feels in the space- the pants against my leg, the sounds I can hear. The important part to remember is that I'm not trying to "stop thinking," or "clearing the mind." I'm just trying to focus on one specific thing.
When it finishes, I give myself a minute to "come back" to the real world, and make a quick note (mental, or in my bullet journal) how I feel. I often do not feel 100%, or even 60% better. So I keep checking in throughout the day -how do I feel an hour later? Before bed? Collecting this data proved to me that eventually, meditating when I start to feel anxious will calm me down, even if it isn't a "miracle cure." 40 or 50% less anxious at the end of a work session is still a huge accomplishment.
More than reducing or eliminating it, meditation has helped me to "get to know" my anxiety.
I am learning much more clearly about my anxiety since I've started to approach it with a curiosity, and knowing more about it helps me short-circuit it before it gets out of control. Before I started working with mindfulness, it was not uncommon for me to get a panic attack "out of nowhere" or "out of the blue." It would feel like I would be fine all day and then one little thing would happen and boom, I'm in the midst of a panic attack, or severe anxiety episode. But, being more aware of my anxiety has shown me that my anxiety experience is usually less like getting into a 140 degree sauna and instantly feeling uncomfortable and unsafe, and more like being in that sauna as the temperature slowly climbs, but doing my best to ignore the growing discomfort.
I am getting better at realizing that if I've opened 15 tabs in a 25 minute pom, I am probably starting to feel a little anxious. Same goes for feeling my neck tense up, or making overly detailed to-do lists. These are all little signs that the anxiety is creeping up, signs that I wasn't aware of until I started to pay more attention to my body and my mind. I can intervene earlier because I know what the warning signs are, and this helps me keep the anxiety at a lower level.
This did not happen overnight. It has been almost a decade since I was first diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and I still have bad days. But meditation has helped me to make those bad anxiety days less frequent, and less severe when they do happen. And I didn't have to turn into a super chill person to do it - I just had to do a little bit of practicing when it came to observing, and not controlling, my mind.
What is mindfulness?
People started recommending meditation to me when I was in high school. I, because I am at heart a contrarian, resisted the idea forever - I had no desire to sit "with my mind" because my mind was often a hostile place, swirling and negative and anxious.
But then, a therapist introduced me to a similar but distinct concept: mindfulness. Her basic explanation was that mindfulness was any time that you made an effort to be present and notice what was happening right now. Sometimes this is physical, and sometimes this is mental, and sometimes both, but it was always about what was happening now, rather than what had happened or what will happen.
(A note: I am, for the purposes of this write-up, presenting mindfulness as it exists colloquially or in a therapeutic context. I am aware of, and actually a practitioner, of mindfulness as a Buddhist practice, but that is another post for another time.)
The opposite of mindfulness is distraction. For me, this can look like: scrolling through Twitter, and looking up to see that 20 minutes have gone by, going for a run and replaying the conversation I had two weeks ago, or sitting down to write only to find myself answering emails and shopping for a fountain pen I have no intention of buying. It isn't bad, necessarily - we all spend most of our days in some version of this state. No one can be perfectly mindful all the time. But, the thinking goes, the more distracted we are, the harder it is to identify, and eventually change, unhelpful patterns, habits, and thoughts.
Okay, I said - how do I get to be less distracted? How do I get to be more mindful? And, most importantly, why would I want to be mindful about something that objectively sucked (difficult emotions, challenging situations, pain of any kind, etc)?
THE MOST FREQUENT PATH TO MINDFULNESS
The first, and most common, path into mindfulness is some kind of attention to the breath. Lots of us have (probably) been told to take a deep breath at some point in our lives, often as a remedy to an overwhelming situation. It is no surprise, then, that many mindfulness practices take the breath as the starting point. We breathe all day and all night with little to no conscious intervention - like blinking - but we can also choose to breathe on purpose. Long, slow, deep breathing has also been shown to slow stress responses, and by paying attention to the breath, one can shift towards a longer, slower, deeper breath. For me, at least, the breath is helpful because it is always there, and I can always choose to pay attention to it, or not. Even a few seconds of breathing in and out can help me get out of my head as it spins in a thousand different directions and focus back on the task at hand. And if I wander off, I can check in on my breath again with no one around me being any the wiser.
Common places/activities that can benefit directly from a mindful breath:
30 seconds during a writing break
Yoga
Before bedtime
Cardio activity
In transition points between activities
Any time you feel stressed or anxious
WHY WOULD I WANT TO BE MORE AWARE OF THINGS THAT ARE UNPLEASANT?
This continues to be my most vexing question about mindfulness. It seems counterintuitive to pay attention to how your body and mind feel and react during stressful or unpleasant situations. Everyone has their own experience, but I have absolutely found that mindfulness has helped me work with/around my anxiety.
I have a few physical giveaways that I am feeling anxious. I start to fidget, I pull on my left thumb, I start to tense up in my shoulders and back. I can also start to have headaches, or stomachaches, or even nausea. Before a more conscious mindfulness practice, I would surface from a day of writing or teaching feeling physically drained, sore, and not hungry at all. Despite those symptoms lasting for a good part of the day, I was only aware of them after the fact. I literally wouldn't notice what my body was doing, or how I was physically feeling, until after the period of stress or anxiety was over, or had abated a little bit.
Mentally, it was much of the same cloud. I would be working on something but my mind would be wandering. I would sit down to read a book and all the sudden remember that I hadn't planned dinner, and off I went. Or I would be writing, and feel so anxious about the writing that before I knew it, I had responded to every email in my inbox in excruciating detail. I wasn't disassociating - I knew that I had switched to email, or I knew I was surfing for recipes, but I wasn't always aware of the choice I was making to switch tasks, or how long I had really spent on any task.
Mindfulness gave me the tools to stop myself and say "okay, how did you get on to Twitter again?" I would notice that I was on Twitter, and stop myself to say - what made me open the tab? Did I have a research question I needed to answer or was writing starting to feel uncomfortable in some way so I switched tasks. Or, if I found myself tapping my leg, I could take a few deep breaths and say - "what is making you feel anxious right now?" To be perfectly clear, I still feel anxious sometimes. I'm just getting better, through mindfulness, of noticing the concrete symptoms of my abstract mental rhythms, and adjusting my behavior more quickly than I would have before. Rather than avoiding my anxiety, or pretending it didn't exist, I am more familiar with it and its rhythms, letting me recognize it, and deal with it.
ARE YOU MINDFUL?
There's a great measure that I have been given in various therapeutic settings to measure mindfulness. I am NOT offering this as a diagnostic tool - only medical professionals can do that - but as a way to check your own practices. Here's the link to the study about its effectiveness as a tool, and here's the sheet itself for you to fill out.
If you find that you're circling a lot of low numbers on the sheet, I encourage you to think about incorporating some mindfulness into your routines.
Follow me and Rebecca Enderby, of Enderby Yoga, as we talk mindfulness on Twitter every other Monday under the hashtag #MindfulPhD . We start Monday, 8/7, with a day of questions, conversation and resources!