Anxiety Archives - Mindful Call

Lightness of being

Milan Kundera’s Kundera’s 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is set in the Prague Spring era of 1968. The “lightness of being” refers to a sense of freedom; the characters have one life to live and everything that happens to them is unique and occurs once in a lifetime. The unbearable lightness refers to the weightlessness of the unique choices we make. The novel explores the paradox of lightness versus heaviness. Does a sense of lightness make life less significant, or does feeling the burden of life make it more meaningful? Philosophy and fiction aside, when we examine our own lives, we can see times of lightness and times when life seems heavy. Maybe we’re on holiday and really relaxed and all is well with our world. Or we’re under pressure at work and in our home life, with difficulties and so much going on that we feel overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious.

When we stop for a moment during the day and really take the time to check in with ourselves, we will find that a lot is going on in the background of our experience. Parts of our body may be tight and tense, tired and heavy. Our mind may be restless, with some anxious or depleting thoughts about our story or situation, but the mind does not know what to do with itself. One quite common experience is a quiet feeling of unease hovering in the background, as if either we’ve done something wrong, or something is wrong with our situation, but we can’t quite remember what it was. Does any of this sound familiar? When we’re under pressure this restless, slightly uneasy, and heavy state is a common experience. As if the force of gravity is pulling us down.

During the day it’s natural that we come across difficulties and challenges. These could be anything from a train delay, a bad-tempered response from a colleague, or an unwanted, difficult email. Maybe there’s some future worry that’s been hanging around unresolved. Or perhaps we had a disagreement with our partner before we left the house? All these events cause us to react emotionally as well as physically in some way. They may well lead to a stream of thoughts that keep the emotions energized in a vicious spiral. And every little challenge is stacked on top of what we’re already holding in ourselves at that moment. Like adding more rocks into the overly heavy rucksack on our back.

Sometimes feeling like this happens every day, so becomes normalized. And what becomes normal slips into the background and becomes less visible. If we discover that we’re in a state like this, do we just accept that’s the way things are, or is it possible to lift ourselves out and defy the gravity of these self-imposed burdens?

The good news is that we can change this way of being, by being more aware of what’s going on, and letting go of clinging onto feelings and thoughts that are not serving us in this moment. This does not mean that the challenges go away by themselves, or that problems do not need to be resolved. We can work through these and find solutions at another time, but it’s not necessary to carry this accumulated burden of restlessness and unease around with us now. Beneath the layers of agitation, restlessness, stress, low mood, and anxiety we can discover a lightness of being that’s quietly waiting in the background of our experience.

Next time you discover that you’re feeling a bit heavy, take a short break and go outside if you can:

Start by noticing and acknowledging the whole tangled state of feelings, thoughts, and physical tensions that limit and weigh down who you are in this moment.
Then take a deep breath and see if you can let go of the whole illusion. Like a plane rising above the clouds.
Allow a half-smile to appear on the corners of your mouth, as you take another deep breath.
Ask yourself, “What problems do I have at this moment?”
Already feeling lighter – reaching out to the world around you through your senses.
Noticing the beautiful colours in nature and the play of light from the sun.
Looking up at the broad, open sky and expanding your hearing out as far as it will go.
Connecting with a sense of spaciousness and stillness and feeling full of vitality and aliveness.
As you take a walk, notice how your body supports your weight so that each footstep feels as if you’re almost defying gravity, reinforcing your lightness of being.

In our modern world many of us fulfil multiple roles; our role at work, as a parent, supportive sibling, carer to aging parents, helping friends and family and contributing to the local community, or broader society. It’s easy to take on too much and become stressed and overwhelmed. When the pressure and heaviness build up, we need to protect our precious well-being with awareness, self-compassion, peace, and calm in the lightness of being.

Suggested weekly practice

Set the intention to live lightly during the week, living with ease by practising acceptance rather than resistance and flowing with your experience.
Noticing when tension, tightness, and heaviness start to appear during the day and taking time to relax, release, and let go.
When you’re walking notice how light your body can feel as the muscles work, putting a spring in your step.

Guided practice

Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then close your eyes while this meditation plays to explore the lightness of being.

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Releasing tension and emotion

There are around 650 skeletal muscles in the human body. Although the primary purpose of these muscles is to provide movement, we also often hold tension and emotions in the muscles of our body. Recent research backs up what we may have already noticed: that we tend to feel anger in the face and jaw, anxiety in the chest and belly, and stress around the neck and shoulders. When we hold tension in our muscles the fibres tend to shorten, which causes tightness. Of course, we can also build tightness and tension by doing things like sitting at a computer all day without proper breaks.

Interestingly, we have only sat on chairs for a recent part of human history. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors tended to squat. As early agriculture developed, chairs were mainly for people of high status, like a King’s throne. With the Industrial Revolution, chairs became more common. Our great-grandparents worked physically harder than we do today, so were less likely to sit during the day. Today we lead much more sedentary lifestyles, often sitting for hours, and exercising little more than our eyeballs and fingers.

Emotions emerged early on in our evolution before we developed the ability to communicate through language and think conceptually. There are three main purposes of emotions; to tell us that something needs attention, to communicate how we feel to others, and to drive us to act. So, emotions are a potentially powerful and useful resource that can be used to complement thinking. However, as thinking became more dominant, our ability to notice and make use of emotions declined. Although there are differences between people’s sensitivity to emotions, many of us fail to notice when emotions arise, or what they are telling us.

Our ancient ancestors survived and thrived by developing the ability to quickly identify and respond to threats. This evolutionary bias is still with us today as our physiology, senses, and cognition prioritize and process threats much faster and with greater intensity than something neutral or pleasant.

Where our ancient ancestors would have encountered stress and then moved on, the challenge for us in the modern world is that we can encounter multiple mini stressors during the day, and we have neither the time nor the ability to allow the stress to dissolve naturally. So, we accumulate emotional tightness and tension in our bodies, which becomes the normal way our bodies feel. Not surprisingly, holding stress, tension, and negative emotions in the body can lead to long-term mental and physical health issues – from dis-ease to disease.

So how can we notice when we take on tension as emotions arise before they do any damage? A big part of the answer is to become more aware of what’s going on in our bodies in the present moment. For instance, say you’re in a meeting and someone challenges what you are doing on a project. You may notice your jaw, face, and neck tightening and your body generally contracting, as feelings of frustration and defensiveness arise.

Practising mindfulness in this same scenario, you notice and acknowledge these feelings, maybe thinking, “Oh, there’s some anger arising”, but instead of reacting automatically, you choose to respond more skilfully by noticing the impulse to react, acknowledging the other person’s concerns, and calmly reassuring them about the project. Then take a slow, deep breath, and as you exhale, release tension and allow the anger to dissolve in its own time.

Emotions are energy in motion (e-motion) that have meaning. Emotions come and go; they naturally arise, play out, and dissolve if they are properly acknowledged and allowed to run their natural course. They may be about us and our situation, but we are not our emotions. The trouble is that we sometimes strongly attach ourselves to our emotions and end up holding onto them in our bodies for much longer than necessary.

There are several steps to mindfully release tension and emotions:

Being aware, alert, and open to your present moment experience, so you’re better able to notice tension and emotions as they arise in your body.
Breathing in; acknowledging the emotion, noticing what it’s telling you, and allowing the emotion to be just as it is without wanting to change it.
Breathing out; letting go of holding on and allowing the tension and emotion to release and dissolve in its own time.

As you become more skilful in working with and releasing tension and emotions, you’ll become more open and flexible, working with greater ease in the flow of your experience, as well as being happier and healthier.

Suggested weekly practice

Notice tension and emotions rising, playing out, and dissolving in your body. For instance, in a meeting or a social event.
Use curiosity to explore what it means to become aware of and acknowledge emotions. Exploring where you feel the emotion in your body and acknowledging what the emotion is telling you.
When you notice tightness and tension accumulating in your body, take a break, connect to the present, and breathe deeply as you relax and release the affected areas of your body.

Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice to explore releasing tension and emotion.

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Positive mind-wandering

The world of science is full of “Eureka” moments, where a sudden insight or solution to a problem suddenly appears in the mind, from the story of Archimedes in the bathtub to Newton’s apple and Einstein’s theory of relativity.

There are two modes of thinking, intentional and unintentional. Intentional thinking is thinking on purpose, including planning, analysis, and problem-solving. Unintentional thinking is when our attention is drawn towards automatic thoughts when our mind wanders away from what we are doing in the present. The thoughts that arise when our mind wanders can be negative, positive, or neutral and about the past, present, or future. Unintentional automatic thoughts tend to be more negative for several reasons:

Our brains evolved with an inbuilt negativity bias, which accentuates things that are threatening, or unpleasant, over things that are safe and pleasant.
Like many social media algorithms, automatic thoughts are subject to the law of entropy, so degrade from order to disorder.
They may be negative repeating habit patterns or beliefs about ourselves and our story. For instance, “I’m not attractive, successful, or intelligent enough”.

Neuroscientists have discovered a part of the brain called the default mode network that becomes active when there is not much going on, for instance, cleaning our teeth or taking a shower. The default mode network switches our attention to internal dialogue, similar to a smart speaker, like Amazon’s Alexa in our heads. This internal dialogue tells us things like, “Still haven’t organized that holiday. Not looking at my best today. Are those bags under my eyes getting worse? This mirror needs cleaning…”

The latest research on mind-wandering explores the idea that we have an unconscious monitoring function that scans our mental content just below awareness and automatically switches it into attention in moments of apparent downtime. This function alerts us to unresolved activities and unfinished business that may be useful in the future, as well as habitual past and present-moment commentary about us and our situation. So, for example, our attention may be drifting when driving a car as our mind wanders to explore pre-conscious mental content about who we are meeting at the destination.

Some automatic thoughts can be positive, expanding, and nurturing and others can be negative, limiting and depleting. A big part of mindfulness practice is about noticing and observing these as they pass through the mind with what is called meta-awareness – the awareness of the content of our conscious experience.

Like the eureka moments, positive automatic thoughts can help us solve complex problems as well as be creative. Positive mind-wandering plays an important and inspiring role in many creative and performing arts, including music, literature, painting, acting, and photography. Interestingly, some artists, poets, and writers use daydreaming as part of the creative process. Obviously, they must remain aware and awake while they drift off. So maybe all those times when your attention drifted off in the classroom at school, or in those overly long meetings at work, can now be justified!

The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe and is amazingly powerful. One well-known technique for solving difficult problems is to send a well-formed question to the back of our minds and wait for the answer to percolate. For instance, asking “How can I overcome the block on the project I’m working on?” and then move on to something else. The chances are that sometime later, maybe when you are walking the dog or taking a shower, a useful answer pops into your head.

When we practise mindfulness, we learn to become more aware of and notice when our mind wanders. This is not so that we stop this activity or block thoughts; it’s to step back and gain insight and understanding of how our mind operates. Without awareness, negative automatic thoughts define and limit who we are, and we miss the positive, useful, and creative ideas and insights that emerge. So being more aware of both positive and negative mind-wandering can make a real difference to our wellbeing and performance.

Suggested weekly practice

Use curiosity and awareness to observe whether your mind works in the ways described above and see what insights emerge.
Have a go at solving a difficult problem by sending a well-formed question to the back of your mind, leaving it to percolate and see what happens.
Watch your automatic thoughts and observe whether they are useful positive, expanding, and nurturing or negative, limiting, and depleting.

Guided practice

Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then close your eyes while this meditation plays that starts with noticing sounds and then explores noticing thoughts.

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Emotional resilience

Anyone who watches the news knows that the world is not in a good place now. With escalating conflicts, political and economic uncertainty, and environmental devastation. The climate crisis is already changing the lives of many people across the world; from coping and recovering from extreme weather, wildfires, floods, and droughts. As well as the practical and physical health responses to these disasters, providing psychological and emotional help, support and guidance is now an important focus for researchers and public health professionals.

On an individual level, we all encounter the challenges that life throws at us at work and in our personal lives. We cope with adversity in different ways; some people seem to flow through difficulties relatively unscathed, while others appear to crumble under the burden. As with many things in life, it’s not just the event, it’s how we react and relate to the difficulty that makes a difference.

In material science, resilience is the ability of a material to absorb energy when it’s bent, compressed, or stretched and release energy and bounce back as the force subsides. Similarly, developing emotional resilience allows us to absorb adversity, stress, and pressure by being more flexible and skilful in managing our thoughts, emotions, behaviour, and relationships. This allows us to emerge stronger, wiser, and with a positive outlook on life.

Before going through what it means to practise resilience, it’s useful to explore what typically happens when we encounter difficulty. For example, an email arrives with some bad news at work. The first thing we normally do is react unconsciously. Emotions are much faster than thoughts, so strong feelings like anger or anxiety are the first to appear. At the same time, our body may become tight and tense as the flight-or-fight response is triggered. Then thoughts appear that reflect the feelings, for instance, thoughts about who’s to blame, self-criticism, or worry. As we entertain these thoughts two things happen. The first is that our attention on critical and worrying thoughts amplifies feelings of anger and anxiety. The second is that we identify with the whole state which includes the emotions, agitated thoughts, and physical tension, which intensifies how we feel. When we are stressed or experience strong emotions like anger or anxiety, we lose the inner resources, like thinking clearly, that would otherwise help us respond more skilfully, so we tend to react automatically, which rarely serves us, other people, or the situation well.

Bringing resilience to the same situation requires some important missing ingredients. The key one is our awareness and focus on what’s happening in the present moment. So, we notice, acknowledge, and allow the feelings that arise in our bodies as we start to read the email. We may even label the emotions, for instance, “There’s some anger and anxiety”. When thoughts appear, we’re ready to observe them, maybe even noting them as, “Angry, self-critical and worrying thoughts”, or “Useful and constructive thoughts”. Rather than automatically identifying with the state, we know that we’re not our thoughts and emotions, which makes it easier to let go of limiting thoughts and beliefs. This stops the emotions from being amplified by our thoughts in a vicious spiral. Realizing the challenging situation, we can create some inner space by taking a brief pause, for instance, by taking a couple of aware breaths and relaxing tension in the body.

This gives us a more open perspective that allows us to respond more flexibly and skilfully. This does not mean that we become passive victims and accept things that are wrong or unfair in the world without acting. Quite the reverse; from an aware place we can use the energy from the emotions to drive us to act and explore a range of solutions with an attitude of realistic optimism. By responding in this way, we are better placed to act skilfully and appropriately.

Cultivating and practising mindfulness skills can help us develop resilience in all areas of our lives. Other mindfulness skills like practising patience, gratitude, and kindness are also relevant and useful. Having access to caring friends and family in a support network is also important. All of this relies on using the right skills when challenges arise. Although it’s not easy, the next time you experience a difficult event or situation, start by quickly tuning into your body and how it feels, before being drawn into worrying and angry thoughts, and being more skilful in how you respond and see what difference that makes.

Suggested weekly practice

Explore what happens in your body, emotions, and mind when you next experience a challenging or stressful event.
When you react, take a moment to reflect on whether how you reacted served you, other people, or the situation. Did you notice that there was a choice of options, including one that may have been a more skilful response?
Reflect on the health of your social support network, especially given the limitations of the pandemic, and take positive action if it needs improvement.

Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware. There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then close your eyes while this meditation plays to explore and experience using skills that help develop emotional resilience.

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Sleep

If there was a pill that gave you energy, improved emotional resilience, and boosted cognitive performance, would you take it? What if this was freely available and was not a pill, but something you can do naturally? So, what is this amazing, secret thing? Well, it’s getting a proper night’s sleep. Although we are told that we need the right amount of exercise and nutrition to remain healthy, it turns out that sleep is even more important.

We all need a good night’s sleep, but many people have difficulty getting to sleep, have their sleep disrupted, or do not get enough. Many of these issues stem from our overly busy lifestyles and addiction to our always-on devices and screens. Since the pandemic, researchers have reported an increase in sleep disorders caused by changes in work-life boundaries, greater screen time, and general underlying anxiety.

Biologically we’re foraging hunter-gatherers who were built for a simple life that included a good amount of physical activity and socialising within a small group of mainly trusted and familiar people. Today, we are less active and healthy, interact with a much greater number of strangers, and lead more complex lives. So, it’s no wonder we sometimes experience problems with such an essential physiological process as sleeping.

There’s historical evidence that before street lighting appeared in the mid-1800s people used to have two separate periods of sleep each night. The first sleep would be for three or four hours, then wakefulness for two to three hours, followed by a second sleep until the morning. In experiments on natural sleep patterns, researchers discovered that this cycle may be more natural than the straight eight hours that we’ve become used to. So, people who wake in the night may actually be reverting to the sleep pattern we evolved with.

There’s a lot of science about the purpose and functions of sleep. Like many other animals, we go through a daily sleep cycle, which refreshes the body and mind. This includes the immune, skeletal, muscular, and nervous systems as well as our memory. Humans sleep in roughly ninety-minute cycles with between four or five REM, or “rapid eye movement”, and non-REM phases each night. Scientists believe that the fast eye movements of REM sleep relate to the visual elements of our dreams, which correlates with greater activity in the visual cortex.

An average adult needs around eight hours of sleep, about a third of our lives. If we go without sleep, or our sleep is disrupted, we suffer from mental and physical fatigue, which affects our health, mood, well-being, and performance. If you have ever experienced a bad night’s sleep you may have noticed that it takes a few nights to recover your “sleep debt”, which can accumulate over time. Insomnia, the difficulty in falling or remaining asleep, is the most common sleep disorder and affects around ten percent of the population. Over time, insomnia can cause serious health issues including an increased risk of type two diabetes, heart disease, and reduced immunity.

So, what are the practical things you can do to improve the quality of your sleep?

If you can, get some exercise in the morning, or early afternoon
Wind down and relax in the hours before bedtime
Limit consumption of caffeine-based drinks and other stimulants after midday
Avoid tackling a stressful or difficult conversation in the hours before bedtime
Apart from reading a book, avoid smartphones, tablets, and other devices for at least an hour before bedtime

If you find that you cannot get to sleep, or wake up in the middle of the night with an over-active mind, here’s a mindful sleeping process that may help:

See what’s going on in your mind
Train your mind to allow you to sleep
Relax your body and take some deep slow breaths
Shift your attention and awareness away from your head
Use curiosity and beginner’s mind to really explore the sensations in your body
And every time that the mind grabs your attention, gently take your attention back to your body away from your head
Until you enter a deep sleep…

For more detail on this process play or download the guided practice below.

We all experience times of stress and difficulty in our lives that sometimes disrupt our sleep. Getting a good night’s sleep is critical to how we perform during the day and has an impact on both our physical and mental health. The good news is that there are practical things we can do to improve the quality of our sleep, which will benefit our health, happiness, well-being, and performance. Pleasant dreams!

Suggested weekly practice

If you are not sleeping well, keep a journal of your sleep patterns during the week. This could be done by noting the start, and end times and the quality of your sleep in a notebook, an app, or using a health and fitness tracker device if you have one.
If you cannot get to sleep, or wake and have difficulty getting back to sleep, try running through the process described above, or play the guided audio Mindful Sleep practice.
Settle thoughts by bringing your attention to your breath and body and train your mind to stop serving your thoughts when you need to sleep. Also, relax your eyes, as there is a high correlation between eye movement and thought.

Guidance

Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware. There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice which can be used to either wind down in preparation for a good night’s sleep or as a mindful sleep practice if your sleep is disrupted by an over-active mind.

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