The Science Behind the Law of Attraction Magazine October, 2015 | Page 5

approach work, family, and the world in general.
There are many theories about what causes chronic
anxiety, but they are as diverse as explanations for
depression. It?s more useful to consider how to retrain
your mind so that your worry subsides and is replaced by
a normal undisturbed mood. The standard medical advice
is to take medication (usually some form of tranquilizer),
augmented by talking to a therapist. However, self-care
has other tools, such as meditation, diet, sleep, massage,
and exercise that you can pursue on your own.
One aspect of anxiety is racing thoughts that won?t go
away. Meditation helps with this part of the problem by
making the overactive
mind quiet. Instead of
buying into your fearful
thoughts, you can start
identifying with the
silence that exists
between every mental
action. Through regular
practice, you experience
that you are not simply your thoughts and feelings. You
can detach yourself from these to rest in your own being.
This involves remaining centered, and if a thought or
outside trigger pulls you out of your center, your
meditation practice allows you to return there again.
Being able to center yourself is a skill that anyone can
learn, once they have the intention and the experience of
what it feels like. Anxious people often shy away from
meditation for various reasons. ?I can?t meditate? is code
for feeling too restless to sit still or having too many
thoughts while trying to meditate. With a patient teacher,
these objections can be overcome. Anyone can meditate,
even if the first sessions are short and need to be guided.
Being on tranquilizers, which for some anxious people has
become the only way they can cope, isn?t a block to
meditation.
Numerous scientific studies have found meditation to be
effective for treating anxiety. One study, published in the
Psychological Bulletin, combined the findings of 163
different studies. The overall conclusion was that
practicing mindfulness or meditation produced beneficial
results, with a substantial improvement in areas like
negative personality traits, anxiety and stress. Another
study focused on a wide range of anxiety, form cancer
patients to those with social anxiety disorder, and found
mindfulness to be an effective management tool.
The researchers analyzed 39 studies totaling 1,140
participants and discovered that the anxiety-reducing

benefits from mindfulness might be enjoyed across
such a wide range of conditions because when
someone learn mindfulness, they learn how to work
with difficult and stressful situations.
All mental activity has to have a physical correlation
in the brain, and this aspect has been studied in
relation to anxiety. Chronic worriers often display
increased reactivity in the amygdala, the area of the
brain associated with regulating emotions, including
fear. Neuroscientists at Stanford University found that
people who practiced mindfulness meditation for
eight weeks were more able to turn down the
reactivity of this area. Other researchers from Harvard
found that mindfulness can physically