Overcome Anxiety. Is It Possible?

One of the benefits of meditation is how it can and does, quite literally, rewire the brain. It gives us a new perspective to relate to our worlds.

If we are in a situation where we are anxious about something happening in the future, we are likely imagining a particular outcome that we are uncomfortable with. This causes us to experience, mental, emotional, and physiological responses, and usually ones that we “do not like” or they are painful. We are also likely injecting a huge amount of our past and into the future rather than allowing the future to be as it is.

We create a “painful experience” in our mind at the current moment. This causes us to likely “run away” from that experience and put it off or avoid it completely.

If we can learn to sit in meditation and notice what our minds and bodies are doing without reacting to them, then we can begin to “decondition” that anxiety response. If we start having a calm state of mind at the same time as we experience the physical sensations of anxiety, the anxiety symptoms will begin to fade.

Conditioning and DeConditioning through Mental Training

These are fancy terms for training our mind. In fact, your mind is already trained if you are experiencing anxiety. You are simply trained to imagine negative outcomes. What we call “pessimism” is often simply the act of imagining negative possible outcomes. This thinking comes from repeatedly imagining these outcomes.

This is like rehearsing negativity; training for negativity.

That negative imagination causes a great deal of anxiety. This is what we call anticipatory anxiety.

If you can condition your mind (train your mind) for negativity through repeated use of imagination, you can use your imagination to train your mind for positive outcomes. This will greatly reduce anxiety.