What to Do When Meditation Makes You More Anxious
What's the advice you've heard forever about lowering stress? Try meditation.
It's what every top performer credits. It turned your formerly high-strung friend into a newly unflappable person.
And the research on it is legitimately strong. It lowers cortisol, improves focus, and builds positive changes in brain health.
So you're convinced and sit yourself down, close your eyes, but instead of finding a peaceful inner world, you feel a little itchy. Anxious even. Did my breathing somehow get more choppy? Is my chest now tighter? Am I failing at meditation?
Don’t worry and cut yourself some slack. You can still find a way to meditate because there’s more than one door into this.
First, it helps to understand what's actually happening when meditation doesn't feel calming.
Your body's messages are very loud
Your mind and body are always in conversation. You think an anxious thought and your shoulders clench, you get a pit in your stomach. That feeling travels up to the brain, which gets the message and agrees (Yes, you're right, we're stressed! Let’s think more about it!).
The brain sends stressed thoughts back down to the body. The body responds. And around it goes. Over time, that loop gets memorized, creating well-worn grooves that your system keeps finding automatically.
And since most of the signals between body and mind travel upward, from body to brain, eventually those grooves and patterns are so strong that your body is telling your mind what to think.
So when you sit down to meditate and ask your mind to be still, your body isn't necessarily ready to get the memo. With nothing else competing for your attention, those signals can get louder.
The body is just trying to keep you safe. You can want calm and intend on finding calm, yet still have your nervous system running a completely different program underneath. And the body's messages will win.
Letting go
As a lifelong rule-following, good girl perfectionist (I'd like to say recovering, but I'm also honest), I can make any task into an overthinking moment of am I doing this right. So I understand meditation pressure anxiety.
But as the cliche goes, perfection is the enemy of good. The pressure I was putting on the outcome was keeping me from relaxing.
What helped wasn't more effort but taking the expectations off entirely.
Three ways to do that
1. Rethink the label
The word meditation can carry a lot of weight. The image of sitting perfectly still, clearing your mind, and breathing easy. For a nervous system already on alert, and while managing the realities of our days, that can be a big ask.
Try this instead: just take a moment to be still and breathe. No state of zen to achieve. Sit somewhere quiet, close your eyes, and breathe. If you start to feel like you're not doing it right, say to yourself, “this is enough”. Or one of my favorites: on the inhale, say to yourself “right here”. On the exhale, “right now”.
That's it. Keep it simple.
2. Let yourself move
Sometimes the best way to inner stillness is through outer movement.
Walks are pretty powerful for simultaneously getting you out of your head but also in it (in a good way). There is a reason writers, philosophers, and mentors go for walks to sort their thoughts and come up with new ideas. The key is to make it a walk without inputs. No headphones, podcast, or playlist.
You're giving your body something to do to loosen its grip on the mind and create some decluttered white space in your head.
3. Let your hands do something
Knitting, drawing, doodling, working with clay, or baking bread are all hobbies, but they can also be a path to presence.
When your hands are engaged in something tactile and repetitive, the brain shifts out of the verbal, planning, overthinking mode and into a quieter, creative mode. If you struggle to sit still with nothing, this is like a side door into meditation.
One more thing about results
Whether you try one of these or eventually find your way back to a more traditional practice, the effects don't always show up in the moment.
Sometimes you'll notice something right away. You can breathe a little easier, your shoulders aren't in your ears, and everything feels a little lighter.
Other times you won't feel much at all, but then a few days later you'll realize that a stressful email rolls off your back, or you were able to take a beat before responding rather than knee-jerk reacting.
It's cumulative, the same way getting more exercise helps you sleep better or tiny changes in your diet give you more energy. Small steps count because the body is listening even when you aren't paying attention.
If you want more tools for working with your nervous system instead of fighting it, the Calm Reset audio series is a good place to start. Five short episodes, free.