Anxiety is the reaction of your body and your mind to a perceived threat—i.e. to some apparent danger or perceived negative event in the future. Everyone experiences stress and anxiety; it is just a question of how much. We are all biologically programmed to experience anxiety. In an evolutionary sense, this has adaptive value (like for the “caveman or cavewoman”). For performance, a moderate amount of anxiety can be optimal—i.e. anxiety isn’t necessarily “bad”.
The difference between anxiety and excitement is: 1) how you breathe, and 2) how you think.
Anxiety has three components:
- Physical sensations (what you feel in your body)
- Behavioral (how you act)
- Cognitive (how you think)
Each of these three components can be changed. Stress will manifest itself in different ways; it’s what you do about it that counts! And mindfulness practice has direct application to each of these three components.
Stress results from how the body and mind together experience the pain and challenges of life. Whether pain is physical or emotional, the way of coping with it is the same. From a mindfulness perspective, the idea is not to run away from our pain or avoid it, because that would just keep it bottled up and festering, or even escalating. Rather, by fully facing our pain, physical or emotional, we have the opportunity to accept it by not fighting it any longer. If we fight the pain, it fights back. But if we allow the pain to just be, and do so in a compassionate, gentle, loving way, we create space for things to change; to be more in the flow. And from this standpoint, the pain, too, may change or flow. By accepting it, we’re no longer holding on to it, but allowing it to be freed, and to be transformed. By letting our pain just be, it allows us to let it go.