Using Mindfulness for Anxiety Relief: 4 Mindfulness Exercises

Are you feeling overwhelmed by anxiety? You’re not alone. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorders in the world, but fortunately, there are many highly effective anxiety management techniques and treatments to help you cope.

In this blog, we’ll discuss mindfulness – one of the simple yet powerful tools that can help you manage stress and anxiety. Discover the many benefits of using mindfulness for anxiety as well as some exercises to get you started today.

Key Takeaways

• Practicing mindfulness for anxiety relief has physical, mental, and emotional benefits.
• Mindfulness exercises can be as simple or structured as you’d like, the goal is to find a technique that works for you.
• Mindfulness can be practiced anywhere and anytime during your everyday life.
• It’s recommended to practice mindfulness exercises regularly, even if you aren’t feeling anxious at that moment because it helps retrain your mind and body’s reactions to stress.

What Is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is defined as the basic human ability to be fully present and aware of where we are and what we’re doing without becoming overwhelmed by our surroundings. While it’s a quality we all possess, we may need help learning how to access it in order to reap its benefits.

When we do this, we can begin to use mindfulness for anxiety and stress management. Additionally, studies have proven that daily mindfulness practices are beneficial for everyone’s mental health and well-being, not just individuals who may be struggling with anxiety disorders.

Benefits of Mindfulness for Anxiety

Using mindfulness for anxiety management can be as effective as anxiety medications. It’s important to note that every individual is different, and while this may be the case for some, it’s not to say this is the case for all. Furthermore, mental health professionals encourage those prescribed anxiety medication to still practice mindfulness techniques since the combination of using both is the most effective way to improve your mental health.

People use mindfulness exercises for anxiety relief because they can help alleviate the physical, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral symptoms that often come with all types of anxiety disorders. Mindfulness offers many other health benefits as well, including:

• Improving cognitive ability
• Reducing unwanted cravings and/or substance use
• Alleviating stress, depression, and anxiety
• Lowering blood pressure
• Strengthening immune system
• Providing better sleep patterns and habits
• Helping with pain management

Practicing mindfulness and relaxation techniques regularly can help retrain your brain and shift your thinking. Daily mindfulness exercises such as deep breathing can change how your mind and body respond to stress by replacing the fight or flight response with a rest and digest response.

Learning how to practice mindfulness when you’re not anxious or stressed is important because it makes it easier to adopt these techniques and put them to use if you eventually find yourself in distress.

4 Mindfulness Exercises for Anxiety Relief

As we mentioned before, there are many types of mindfulness exercises for anxiety relief. Not every exercise may be comfortable for everyone, so we recommend experimenting with a few and finding which techniques work best for you.

Practicing mindfulness can be as simple as pausing throughout the day and taking a few minutes to notice our surroundings and feelings. However, some techniques offer more structure. These can be helpful if you want to use mindfulness for anxiety since they provide a framework to use when faced with stressful situations.

1. Mindful Seeing and Listening

Mindful seeing exercises are ideal if you prefer to keep your eyes open during meditation or find comfort in noticing your visual surroundings. You can practice mindful seeing in several ways. Whether you’re sitting on a park bench or looking out your bedroom window, the purpose of these exercises is to be observant and aware but not critical or fixated.

When observing, rather than labeling everything, notice unique elements or characteristics. For example, if you see a bird, try to notice colors, patterns, and textures rather than just thinking “bird” in your mind. You can also pay attention to movement, like the wind moving tree branches or clouds moving in front of the sun.

If you’re outside, you can also take this opportunity to practice mindful listening. Keeping your eyes open, or closing them, take a few minutes to listen to the sounds around you. Even if you’re in a quiet or more remote location, try to hone in on the subtle noises heard in nature. Like mindful seeing, don’t simply label these noises. Instead, practice noticing them and how they make you feel without passing judgment on yourself.

2. Mindful Breathing

Mindful breathing exercises can be the most basic, but also most powerful anxiety management techniques. When we are stressed, anxious, or in a state of panic, our bodies can show physical signs of distress, one of the most common being difficulty breathing.

Mindful breathing exercises teach us how to breathe intentionally, allowing us to relax our minds and bodies as well as ground ourselves if we are feeling anxious or panicked. Because of their popularity, there are countless breathing exercises you can try, but if you’re not sure where to start try this 5 to 7-minute breathing exercise.

3. Mindful Walking

While you can practice walking meditation anywhere, we recommend finding an area where you won’t feel like you’re being observed. The area should be relatively peaceful and allow you to move back and forth for 10-15 paces.

Walking involves a series of actions that come naturally to us, for example, lifting one foot, placing it down, and then lifting the next. The purpose of this exercise is to walk intentionally, noticing every action as you take it.

You can do this by taking 10-15 steps forward — breaking down each movement as you go — pausing, breathing, and then turning and walking back the same way. It’s important that the movements feel natural, not exaggerated or forced, so you should move at whatever pace feels comfortable.

4. Body Scan & Progressive Muscle Relaxation

A body scan is a type of mindfulness meditation where you slowly move your attention from one end of your body to the other. The purpose of a body scan is to notice the sensations in your body without feeling a particular way. This mindfulness exercise is great if you tend to hold your stress of anxiety in your body or find yourself tense up in anxiety-inducing situations.

As you are practicing the body scan technique, you can also try progressive muscle relaxation. To do this, as you’re moving your attention from your head to your feet, you consciously tighten and relax each muscle one by one. Progressive muscle relaxation helps reduce stress and alleviate any areas in our body where we hold tension. It is also one of the best ways to become in tune with your body and its sensations.

Feeling stressed or anxious from time to time is natural, but when these feelings begin to negatively affect our daily lives it’s time to seek help. With a mental health professional’s help, you can learn how to use mindfulness for anxiety and stress management as well as other coping techniques that work for you.

Don’t let anxiety run your life. Talk to us today to see how we can provide you or someone you love the relief they deserve.