Mindfulness has been en vogue for a while now. For many, the word conjures images of passive relaxation, meditation retreats, or wellness trends that feel entirely disconnected from a demanding daily life. “McMindfulness” has been popularized by influencers and social media. Strip away the marketing though and you find a practical, flexible, evidence based skill. In therapy mindfulness is often a core component as it is a practical tool for physiological deescalation and attentional control.
With chronic anxiety your brain’s threat-detection system is essentially doing too good of a job protecting you. Anxiety tends to be future-oriented; it is an internal simulation of upcoming challenges, worst-case scenarios, and potential pitfalls. Mindfulness helps turn off autopilot so we can be present in a more objective way and make the decisions we want, not the ones anxiety would have us make.
Cliche But True: A Vicious Cycle
Anxiety feeds on itself. A single anxious thought about a responsibility or a relationship can trigger a cascade of subtle physical responses: breathing gets a bit shallower, muscles tense, heart rate quickens a bit. Things we often don’t notice. Your brain interprets these physical symptoms as confirmation that a real threat exists, that the anxiety is valid and deserving of further worry.
Mindfulness interrupts this cycle by introducing a gap between a thought and your reaction to it. A few of the things at play:
- Attentional Shifting: Anxiety hijacks your focus, forcing you to fixate on variables you cannot control. Mindfulness trains you to recognize when your mind has drifted into future-pacing and systematically pulls your attention back to your immediate environment.
- Physiological deescalation: While not a necessity, mindfulness ofter involves focusing on the breath. This breathwork stimulates the vagus nerve, which plays a role in lowering our hearth rate and soothing the central nervous system.
- Cognitive Defusion: This is the ability to observe a thought without automatically accepting it as a fact, without getting “fused” to it. Instead of reacting to the thought “I am falling behind,” mindfulness allows you to notice, “I am having the thought that I am falling behind.” That slight shift in perspective reduces the emotional fallout of the anxious thought.
A Direct Approach to Practice
Men can scoff at mindfulness often believing that it “isn’t for them” and that it requires clearing their mind of all thoughts, which is an impossible bar (especially when anxious). The goal of mindfulness isn’t a silent mind; it is noticing a thought, noticing when your mind begins to wander with a thought, and being intentional with where you put your attention after the wandering.
Mindfulness doesn’t require a formal practice in terms of sitting in silence for a period of time. Small moments moments of intentional observation also count. It can be as simple as spending two minutes focusing entirely on the physical mechanics of your breathing before a difficult conversation, or noticing the sensory details of your immediate surroundings when you notice your shoulders tightening. It is training your mind the same way you would train any other muscle: through repetition and consistency.
Finding Cognitive Space
Anxiety would have you believe an outcome that hasn’t happened yet warrants the suffering that is happening now. Mostly it serves the function of keeping us safe and/or prepared, but can do too good of a job sometimes.
Utilizing mindfulness within anxiety therapy, to paraphrase an elusive quote that Viktor Frankl didn’t actually write, helps lengthen the gap between stimulus and response. The wider that gap gets the better the odds are we can take an objective step back from anxiety and stop reinforcing it.
