Meditation and Anxiety
Are you having feelings of restlessness, or feelings or worry and dread? Are you having trouble sleeping? If you answered yes to any of the questions above, you could be dealing with anxiety.
While many people rely on psychiatric medications to relieve their anxiety, meditation can also be used as a method to calm anxiety.
In a recent study, doctors took 276 adults who where diagnosed with untreated anxiety disorder and split them into two groups. Group one received a 10 to 20 mg daily dose of escitalopram, a generic name for Lexapro, which is a widely prescribed anxiety drug. Group two was assigned a weekly two-and-a-half hour class on mindfulness, which included 45 minutes of daily meditation as homework.
The study concluded that both the prescribed medication and the mindfulness option helped to reduce anxiety. Both groups showed about a 20% reduction in the severity of their anxiety symptoms.
Mindfulness-Based-Stress Reduction, or MBSR, was developed over 40 years ago by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and was the technique used amongst the group that relied on mindfulness to reduce their anxiety. MBSR teaches to focus on the breath and direct attention to one body part at a time. MBSR also encourages students to focus on what's happening now, rather than focusing on the future or the past.
While anxiety can be a difficult feeling to escape, it can be managed, and now we know that some form of mindful meditation can aid in the campaign against anxiety.