The way you meditate completely depends on what your goals are. Someone meditating for personal development reasons will approach it completely differently to someone meditating to relax and relieve stress. So what is the ideal approach to meditation to deal with anxiety?
Shorter, more frequent meditation sessions are ideal for tackling anxiety. Start with 5-10 minutes, twice per day, and work your way up slowly, allowing you to develop the equanimity to deal with deeper issues. More frequent sessions will inhibit the negative mind-body feedback loop and allow your mind to build new positive neural pathways sooner.
There is obviously a lot to unpack here. Let’s delve a little deeper into these areas and see why approaching meditation in this way for anxiety is the most effective.
How Long to Meditate for Anxiety
Meditation has the immediate effect of calming and relaxing the mind and body by hindering any further unpleasant physiological changes caused by the body’s stress response. The longer you meditate, the deeper into the mind you go, which sometimes stirs up emotions that you may not be ready for yet – making 5-15 minute sessions ideal for anxiety.
So generally, you want to aim for shorter sessions, especially if you are a beginner. Start with 5-10 minutes sessions, working your way up slowly to 15 minutes, and if you are feeling adventurous, don’t shy away from the amazing effects of 20 minute sits!
Meditation is a wonderful tool to bring the mind and body back into balance and equilibrium. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the body’s rest and digest function. This system is responsible for those feelings of calmness and peace. As a result of this, when the dust settles, we are able to become more aware of the inner workings of our minds. Sometimes we like what we see, and sometimes we don’t. Meditating for longer leads us deeper into our subconscious, where our more complex issues are stored.
While it is important that we eventually face all our issues, we need to do this slowly, particularly if we are susceptible to persistent anxiety. Sometimes we are just not ready for them. Meditation is about balancing awareness and equanimity. If we become aware of too much, we may not be composed enough to deal with it in that moment.
Shorter meditation sessions simply allow our problems to surface in more manageable doses. We get to experience the immediate calming effects of meditation, without being overwhelmed. This is where the importance of how often you meditate comes into play.
How Often to Meditate for Anxiety
Ideally, you should aim to meditate twice a day for anxiety. As we are aiming to replace old unhelpful habit patterns with new ones, research shows that we are more likely to succeed with consistent repetition. Practicing more often also helps stop negative thinking patterns before they build too much momentum and overpower us.
Anxiety and stress cause physiological changes in the body which are triggered by our body’s fight or flight mechanism.
- The body releases chemicals such as cortisol and adrenaline in the bloodstream which increases our blood pressure, heart rate, limits our digestive functions in addition to inhibiting our pre-frontal cortex.
- These physical bodily sensations often cause further anxiety and stress, inducing even more uncomfortable sensations in an unconstructive feedback loop.
This is a situation which you may already be very familiar with.
Negative thoughts usually kick off this process, and our aim in fighting anxiety is to stop this process in its tracks. The more frequently we stop it the better. By watching our thoughts and feelings without reacting to them we short-circuit this process and stop feeding our negative thinking patterns. We effectively ‘reset’ the mind and body. The more often we do this, the less fuel we provide these unhelpful habits, and we are therefore more likely we are to overcome them.
Beyond the initial calming effects of meditation, we start to change the underlying neural connections in the brain, a process otherwise known as neuroplasticity. These neural networks are the underlying habit patterns of the mind, or simply, the sum of our repeated actions. The more often we repeat them, the stronger they get. We can use this principle to our advantage. Meditating more often and consistently provides a greater chance for one to build more solid positive habit patterns as various studies on habit formation have shown.
In saying this, however, you should never feel pressured to meditate. Don’t let this be a cause for further tension and anxiety. Always remember your motivation of why you want to meditate in the first place. This will usually kick you into gear and inspire you to keep going. Try and approach your meditation sessions as loosely and flexibly as possible. By doing this you are also training your mind in letting go even off the cushion, a key for overcoming anxiety.
Why We Should Meditate Twice A Day
Human beings, like most mammals, are diurnal animals, generally operating in two cycles – an awake and sleeping cycle. Our circadian clock benefits from more regular clearing of mental tensions:
- Meditating in the evening clears away the tensions built up during the day, while
- Morning sessions focus us for the day and clear any tensions brought up during our sleep cycle. Most of our experiences are processed during sleep.
Many experienced meditators around the world have observed that practicing in this way is very helpful and effective. In saying this however, it is just a recommendation and one should just meditate whenever they can and whenever their schedule suits them. The time of day doesn’t matter. If you can sit more often, good. If not, it doesn’t matter. If you miss a day, you just start again – no problem. The most important thing is that, just like you take care of your body with regular exercise, you take some time to also look after your mental hygiene.
How long does it take for meditation to help anxiety?
Anxiety is a learned neural pathway or habit pattern of the brain and as such can be unlearned and replaced. It generally takes around 60 days (8 weeks) of regular meditation practice for the brain to unwind old neural pathways and build new helpful ones, where we start seeing real and tangible improvements in anxiety levels.
This of course, depends on how strong your underlying habit patterns are. Traditionally in meditation, these neural pathways have been described as follows:
- Connections that are like lines drawn on water – the moment these appear, they send out a few small ripples then disappear rather quickly. This applies to most things that we do during the day which have little impact.
- Connections that are like lines drawn on sand – they stick around for a little while, but if they are not repeated, they are wiped by the tide overnight or the wind over a few days.
- Connections that are like lines carved into stone – these take a little while longer to be ‘weathered’ away. This of course ranges from weak habit patterns that can be easily changed to very strong lifelong habits.
Research shows can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit, with consistency being the biggest factor. On average, it seems to take around 66 days for a new behaviour to become automatic.
However don’t become discouraged by this, even if you feel your anxiety is quite strong. Practicing meditation, you will start seeing some form of benefits even from day one. However, just like the temperature fluctuates during the day, your mood will constantly fluctuate. You may notice that the fluctuations become less intense. You should just be confident that in the long run, you will slowly be moving towards a new equilibrium, where the temperature is consistently higher and more stable.
It may take a while to weaken your anxiety fully but if you stay committed you will notice that while previously you rolled around in your anxious thoughts for a period of 4 hours, now you only roll around in them for 2 hours. This is a major improvement – you have gotten 2 hours of your life back!
To understand this process, we need to appreciate how the neuroscience of how the practice of meditation helps anxiety. We have already briefly discussed this, however let’s see how meditation actually replaces our anxiety with happiness and peace.
How Does Meditation Help Anxiety?
During meditation, we are no longer repeating and strengthening our old unhelpful neural pathways (habit patterns) of constantly reacting to our thoughts and feelings. When practiced over a period of time, these old neural pathways unwind, getting weaker and weaker, and can eventually completely disappear.
Our habit patterns are deeply embedded into our subconscious, which is also referred to as our default mode network. When we aren’t activating our old default mode networks, our brain is given space to go into learning mode, and creates new synapses between neurons. Meditation is a mental training in developing your skills of patience, concentration, acceptance, tolerance, persistence and compassion.
Just like you strengthen your muscles when you go to the gym, you are strengthening all these mental qualities in yourself as you consistently practice meditation. For example, when you are doing breath awareness, you are practicing patience, calmness, focus and diligence in continually coming back to the breath in a gentle and accepting way. These are the helpful, positive neural connections that are replacing your old unhelpful ones.
This process is summarised perfectly by the story of the two wolves.
A wise old man tells his grandson, “My son, inside each of us is a battle between two wolves…one is unhelpful, full of anger, greed, jealously, sorrow and regret…the other is helpful, full of kindness, generosity, truth, joy, peace, tranquillity and love.”
“Which wolf would win the battle?”, the Grandson curiously asked.
The wise old man looked at him with gentleness and said, “The one you feed, my son”.
As long we are not repeating our unhelpful habit patterns by reacting in a negative way to our thoughts and emotions, we are not feeding the unhelpful wolf. Which wolf will you feed?
Which Meditation is Best for Anxiety?
Almost every meditation technique will assist with anxiety in some way, but some will be more effective than others. Some practices are very calming and soothing, however they only target the surface, conscious level of the mind, without changing the underlying habit patterns that are the primal cause of our anxiety.
The various meditation techniques available can be generally summarised in two categories – those that use natural objects of awareness and those that use created objects.
| Techniques that use natural objects of awareness | Techniques that use created objects of awareness |
| Meditations designed to aid the mind and body in relaxing and improving concentration by using the natural breath. Examples: Samatha, Anapana or breath awareness meditation. | Mantra meditation involving the use of mental or vocal words to pacify the mind. Examples: Mantra, Transcendental Meditation, Kundalini, Third eye. |
| Meditations designed to penetrate and observe reality as it really is, by using an object such as the sensations of the body. Examples: Vipassana, Mindfulness Meditation. | Visualisation practices. Examples: Loving-kindness, Goals visualisation, Kundalini, Third eye |
| Free flow or open present moment awareness practices like Zazen. |
Both categories of meditation practices have their own uses and unique goals. Meditation techniques that use a mantra or a visualisation are excellent at calming the mind through focussing your attention on an imaginary, created object.
While these techniques can be very useful in particular circumstances, they only achieve temporary peace by diverting your attention away from your problem. You will experience a level of calmness at the conscious or surface level of the mind because you have forced your negative thinking back into your subconscious. These neural pathways will continue to lie there until a trigger sets them off again.
Again, this is totally fine, as long as you are aware of it. If you goal is to simply get calm, you can’t look passed the effectiveness of these practices. They are helpful and do purify the mind at the surface level.
However, if we want to target our deepest unhelpful habitual tendencies and replace them with the qualities of awareness, focus, acceptance, resilience, love and compassion, we need a technique that helps us with this.
Mindfulness meditation is a great practice which has been adapted to suit the modern day lifestyle, and if practiced consistently, can assist immensely with tackling anxiety in this way. It uses natural objects of awareness such as our bodies, the scents we smell, the sounds we hear and the emotions we feel. Most ‘apps’ available today, and programs such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), are based on this practice.
Mindfulness is the ability to be fully aware in the present moment. When we are aware of our thoughts and feelings without getting caught up in them, we train ourselves to see reality for what it is – constantly changing, impersonal phenomena with no real power over us. In seeing this, we become less reactive and controlled by our negative thought patterns.
Vipassana, or insight meditation, is a practice that is essentially synonymous with mindfulness, however it places more emphasis on physical bodily sensations. If you observe your anxiety closely, you will see that it is accompanied by very unpleasant physical sensations and it is actually these sensations that we are reacting to, not the thoughts. Vipassana teaches us to observe these sensations equanimously, freeing us from their hold. I have written more about this technique and how to practice it in this post here.
Samatha, or calm abiding meditation, is another powerful meditation technique that can induce one with a sense of calm, peace and clarity. It is the perfect practice for beginner meditators in terms of relieving stress and improving mental function. Samatha meditation uses the breath to bring our body and mind back into alignment and balance by activating our parasympathetic nervous system and switching off our fight-or-flight response. It slows down the heart, breathing rate, blood pressure, and soothes the nerves. This is particularly helpful for those who are continually stressed and therefore overwork their sympathetic nervous system to be in perpetual survival mode. I have written more about this technique and how to practice it in this post here.