Chapter 12

Ten Mindful Attitudes for Easing Anxiety

Your attitude about something can change everything. In this chapter, you explore a range of attitudes that can help with your mindfulness practice and in daily life as well. After all, mindfulness is a way of living and not just a set of practices to do whenever you remember, and so using these attitudes on a daily basis helps you consistently.

All these ten attitudes overlap, and through mindfulness, you find that they help strengthen each other, leading to greater levels of wellbeing.

Here are ten mindful attitudes that can help to ease your anxiety.

Practising Present-Moment Awareness

In essence, mindfulness is a present-moment awareness. The more mindful you are, the more aware you are of your surroundings, your thoughts and feelings, any task at hand and any physical or bodily sensations.

If you're very anxious, being naturally aware is quite difficult. For example, you may not be aware of your negative thoughts, the tension in your jaw or any other physical or physiological sensations your anxiety is causing.

For example, when I was studying at university, I was feeling really anxious. I had lots of negative thoughts about the fact that I may not achieve a good grade. My shoulders and jaw were tense. Actually, all I needed was a few regular breaks and some fresh air to help recharge me, but my anxiety was stopping me from seeing that. Mindfulness helps you take a step back and see things as they really are.

Sometimes you may feel that you're hyper-aware of your bodily sensations and want to reduce that feeling. But if you look more carefully, you discover that the problem isn't your awareness of bodily sensations; the problem is your judgement of those sensations.

Mindfulness is about being aware of the physical sensations, for example, and letting go of the associated judgements. The key to mindful living is discovering ways to be with the present-moment experience, kindly and curiously.

When you have an attitude of awareness, you can recognise unhelpful thoughts and physical and bodily sensations. Through this awareness, you can then make choices of how you behave and react to things instead of it being automatic.

You can cultivate awareness with a variety of mindfulness meditations. The body scan is one that can help you become more physically aware of your body. Check out Chapter 5 for more information on these meditations.

Helping Your Beginner's Mind to Blossom

The beginner's mind is about seeing things for the first time with new eyes – taking habitual behaviours, thoughts, responses and so on that you've done before and looking at them as if for the first time, afresh.

For a young child, this state is natural, but as you become older and used to the surrounding world, you're less inquisitive and excited by everything. Mindfulness encourages you to relearn this beginner's mind and therefore become excited just by the very experience of being alive.

Here's a story about a university professor and a Zen master about the importance of beginner's mind:

Fill in Table 12-1 with some of your habitual daily activities. Notice what happens to them when you pay attention to them for the first time. I provide an example to get you started.

Spotting Your Tendency to Judge

The human mind naturally puts judgements on everything. When you leave your house and walk down the street, you've probably judged several things before you even reach where you need to be. For example, you may pass building work and think that it looks messy, pass a garden and think that it looks pretty or pass people and make silent automatic judgements about them.

This behaviour is perfectly natural and mindfulness can help you become aware of your judging. You don't need to stop judging entirely; you need some judgement in your everyday life. For example, if you're a teacher and a student gives you a piece of work to look at, you have to judge it. The student needs to know what to improve upon so that he can improve.

Instead, mindfulness is about noticing the judgement as it arises without putting a judgement on the judgement! Becoming aware of this tendency helps you to realise when you're putting judgements on situations so that you can step back from them. It may also help you to see when you're putting certain judgements on your anxiety and whether that's having an effect on it.

For example, when you're meditating on your breath, you may be thinking, ‘I'm breathing too fast. I must slow down. What's wrong with me? This is too hard for me. I must relax. I'm not good enough to be mindful.’

It's okay for your mind to judge. Mindfulness is about noticing the fact that your mind is judging, rather than taking those judgments as facts.

Self-judgement is normal among humans. Have you ever been referred to as your own worst critic? I know I have! Mindfulness helps you to spot your own self-judgements, go easy on yourself, and breathe and smile.

Considering Curiosity

A great attitude to cultivate is curiosity. If you're curious when learning something new, you're likely to get excited about the process. You ask lots of questions, research deeply and listen to everything that's related much more.

When you bring this attitude of curiosity into your mindfulness practice, you can help ease your anxiety. The more curious you are about the thoughts, feelings and emotions that cause your anxiety, the less overwhelming and frightening it feels.

Imagine that you're camping in a remote place. In the middle of the night, you hear a lot of noises. It's very dark, and you can't imagine what's making all the noise. However, you use your curiosity, get a torch and shine it all around your tent. You discover that an animal, perhaps a hedgehog or a badger, is wandering through your camping area, and it caused all the rustling noises. After you discover what the noise is, you diminish any fear.

In the same way, when you become curious about the sensation of anxiety in your body (noticing its shape and location), it becomes less scary and more like something to explore. You discover how to live with it rather than run away.

Opening up to Anxiety

Mindfulness is about being open to your inner and outer experiences. Openness is about stepping back from your experiences, but not avoiding them.

Stepping back is useful when you have difficult or disturbing emotions. With this sense of openness, you can discover that you don't need to believe everything you think, and in turn you can watch emotions come and go without feeling attached or stuck to them.

For example, say that you've got a doctor's appointment coming up, and you feel anxious about it. If you don't take any time to open up to your feelings and acknowledge that you're a bit nervous about the upcoming experience, you may end up replacing the feelings with unhelpful behaviours. Maybe you'll cancel the appointment, or overeat or get too busy doing tasks that aren't very important.

With this sense of openness, you're more equipped to deal with emotions head-on instead of using avoidance or oppression toward them. You can use these words: ‘I'm not anxious, I'm observing anxiety. The anxiety comes and goes, but I remain an open observer – separate, safe and free.’

Developing Self-Compassion

Most people are their own worst critics. How often do you think you show compassion to yourself? A way to be more self-compassionate with mindfulness is to become more aware of self-critical thoughts, emotions and physical sensations. (Flip to Chapter 4 for more on mindful management of thoughts).

When you can see things in a wider context, you start to be naturally more compassionate to yourself.

I'm not good when I'm very tired. I can make mistakes and am sometimes a little grumpy! When I'm in this state, however, being mindful allows me to recognise it and make allowances for myself. Instead of getting annoyed at myself, I try to make sure that I get a good rest as soon as I can and start again the next day with a clearer perspective.

Pursuing Patience – without Rushing

Mindfulness isn't a quick fix, and you're unlikely to have peace, joy and relaxation every time you practise (sorry!). Like anything new, mindfulness takes time and development. In the modern world, achieving patience can be difficult, because people are so used to getting everything immediately, whether its food, communication or even commuting!

Try the following steps to help administer an attitude of patience and lessen your impatience:

1. Think of a scenario where you become impatient.

   Examples include waiting in line at the post office or in the supermarket checkout queue.

2. Ask yourself, ‘Do I always need to be impatient here?

   For example, perhaps you can allow yourself more time to do your daily activities. If you're always busy, consider letting go of some of your tasks on your to-do list. Being too busy goes hand in hand with impatience. Practise this step when you're next in a situation that makes you feel impatient.

3. Keep a diary of your experiences for 1 to 2 weeks, writing in it when you felt impatient and recording the thoughts and feelings that you had at the time.

   Look for any patterns. You may discover that your impatience is more related to the state of mind you were in at the time rather than to any external event.

Operating with Optimism

An attitude of realistic optimism when practising mindfulness is very important. Your anxiety may have made you feel discouraged from trying new things or hopeless about finding a technique that works.

An attitude of optimism isn't a delusion that mindfulness is going to fix all your problems immediately. A delusional attitude causes disappointment and frustration with the mindfulness practice.

Optimism in mindfulness is about developing a willingness to try new practices and not becoming disheartened if they don't work immediately. It's about saying to yourself, ‘Okay, this didn't work for me this time, but with time, patience and discipline, it may work in the future.’ With optimism, you discover what works for you and what doesn't while maintaining a positive approach.

When you first learned to ride a bike, you can't do it immediately. You probably wobbled all over the road, fell off a few times and got some bruises, I know I did! But with time and patience and maybe your parent's help, you managed to get rid of your training wheels and cycle away on your own.

Like mindfulness, it took patience, discipline and an optimistic attitude.

Generating Gratitude

The brain is more malleable than people used to think, which is useful because it means that you can change any negativity programming you have. By practising gratitude regularly, you remind yourself of everything that's going well in your life, and your brain starts to think more positively. In turn, your wellbeing levels are raised.

Gratitude is well-known in positive psychology. Here are two ways to start practising:

Research shows that gratitude can have an effect on lessening anxiety, especially combined with lots of rest and a good night's sleep (something that gratitude also helps with).

Experiment with doing your gratitude journal at different times of the day. If you're having issues sleeping, try doing it right before you go to bed.

Here are some more positive outcomes of gratitude:

Allowing Acceptance to Grow

An accepting attitude is key to mindfulness practice, but can be a complex one to master. The major difficulty with practising acceptance is the common misconceptions that go with it.

Acceptance doesn't mean giving up. Often anxiety sufferers feel that if they let go, everything will fall apart. They can sometimes believe that if they let go of their anxiety, the very thing that's making them anxious is going to be made worse.

But acceptance isn't about complacency; it involves accepting your present-moment experience as it is right now. It doesn't mean accepting that the situation will be the same forever. You may find that using the words ‘allow’ or ‘let be’ is helpful.

When you have strong anxiety feelings, you quite naturally want to try to avoid them. In the short term, doing so may help, but in the long term, you can end up more frustrated.

When you're practising mindfulness, your mind naturally wanders off to a million other things, and so a sense of acceptance is useful here as well. Remember that your judgement of yourself has been conditioned and isn't natural. The more you judge yourself, the less room is left for acceptance.

Anxiety can be quite overwhelming when you first experience it. I have suffered anxiety in the past and found that my first responses were to avoid and try to rid myself of the anxious feelings. However, once I looked at my anxiety in a different way and began to accept it rather than fight it, I was better able to manage it.

Anxiety is something that everyone suffers from at some point in their lives at various different levels. It can be managed, and there is help out there. I hope you have found this book to be useful, and I hope you get to enjoy the many benefits of mindfulness, not just with managing anxiety, but for greater wellbeing overall.

Acceptance of what's in the here-and-now can be the beginning of transformation. See what happens if you let go and just accept (or allow) your anxiety feelings. But mindfulness doesn't involve practising with the hope that anxious feelings will suddenly disappear. It's about acceptance of the present moment with whatever outcome that may bring.