Mindfulness and Anxiety.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)

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I’m a sober person. I stopped drinking in 2004. I had become increasingly aware that a large part of why I drank had to do with anxiety. I was fearful that if stopped drinking, I would be overwhelmed by it.

To be clear, I’m not talking about “oh man, work is stressful” kind of anxiety. I’m talking about intense anxiety and panic attacks. The kind of experiences that make you worry that you might “lose it” or go crazy. In my early 20’s and 30’s I had thousands of anxiety or panic attacks. They were very frequent and often destabilizing. I drank to control them.

I got sober in my 30’s with the the help of my Buddhist teacher at the time. I remember telling him that I had some resistance to getting sober because of my levels of anxiety. He said “you’re going to have to get in the ring with this and invite it to come kill you”. What he meant, was that I’d have to welcome it in and come to understand that it can’t “kill you.”

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I had been dabbling in meditation for years by that point and had gotten pretty serious about it after meeting my teacher. I had some confidence that I could manage my experience in ways that hadn’t been available to me in my 20’s. And so I got sober.

When the anxiety came, I would study it. With mindfulness, I could look objectively at the experience. What I discovered is that anxiety was just sensation. The sensations had specific locations in my body. Eventually I could discern different kinds of anxiety based on location. Relational anxiety lived in the middle of my chest. Existential anxiety and fear in the middle of my back. Horror involved the top of my head.

In deconstructing anxiety, I became aware that because anxiety had such specific locations that there were parts of me that were only sympathetically contracting. Those places could be relaxed. And there were parts of me that were not anxious at all (my elbows, feet and forearms were not anxious). What felt global and dominating was now local and compelling but not usually overwhelming.

From there I could study the conditions in which anxiety tended to arise. It was then that I figured out that caffeine was driving 80% of my anxiety issues. I stopped consuming coffee, sodas and chocolate. This made a huge difference.

The 20% that was not driven by caffeine was what I would grapple with for the rest of my adult life. In 2011, I had a major anxiety event at a residential meditation retreat and someone suggested that I learn about trauma. I began a training in Somatic Experiencing that same year and learned about the activation and deactivation cycles of the nervous system and how childhood trauma, single event shock traumas and the experience of being a gay kid/man growing up in a hostile country (the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s were a very different time) all sensitized the stress response system and made me a very sensitive person.

Somatic experiencing is very much built on awareness similar to the way mindfulness works. It involves anchoring your attention, spreading awareness to sensations, memories, thoughts etc…

To be mindful of anxiety requires the development of basic mindfulness skills including objective awareness of the body, heart and mind. It also requires developing equanimity.

Equanimity is a sort of grounded stable ability to stay present when things get rocky. You develop it by acknowledging the pleasant and unpleasant qualities of experience as they arise in meditation. You take a posture and you don’t react no matter what comes up, unless it’s too much. You develop an ability respond to pain and unpleasant experiences with compassion and presence rather than aversion and avoidance.

Mindfulness can be used to be present with, study, deconstruct and respond to any strong emotions: anger, grief, lust, craving, sadness etc…

People who have been impacted by trauma may need to develop a set of skills related to stabilization and emotional regulation otherwise traditional mindfulness can be overwhelming or even re-traumatizing.