Life can be filled with countless stressors and challenges that make you anxious and overwhelmed, from managing your responsibilities and obligations at work and home to being bombarded with social media and the news. It is easy to get caught up in life stressors and seek maladaptive coping strategies like addiction to alleviate anxiety. By turning to these strategies, however, you avoid understanding your experiences, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to effectively work through your distress. Thus, mindfulness for anxiety can be an invaluable recovery tool to deepen self-awareness and dismantle unhealthy coping mechanisms.
At The Guest House, we believe in providing a diverse array of therapeutic modalities like mindfulness for anxiety to support your individual needs to heal. When left unaddressed, anxiety can lead to severe impairment that impedes functioning in your daily life and relationships. Anxiety disrupts your sense of self, happiness, and fulfillment in life.
Moreover, your distress can expand into an anxiety disorder and co-occurring disorders like substance use disorder (SUD). Understanding the roots of your challenges can provide insight into the factors that have contributed to your distress. When traditional programs only focus on the disorder, it leaves little space to heal the roots of your self-defeating behaviors. Yet, at The Guest House, we are committed to holistic care like mindfulness for anxiety and addiction to support healing.
Yet, you may question what is mindfulness. How can mindfulness act as a support tool to address co-occurring anxiety and addiction? Expanding your understanding of mindfulness can provide insight into the benefits of mindfulness for anxiety and addiction for long-term recovery.
What Is Mindfulness?
When people think of mindfulness, they often associate it with meditation and yoga. Although mindfulness and meditation can be interrelated, some forms of meditation have no relationship to mindfulness. Whereas, yoga and mindfulness often share a deeper connection. Physical movement and mindfulness support building awareness and understanding of the inner world of your thoughts and feelings. Yet, mindfulness can be used in conjunction as a support tool with yoga, meditation, and a variety of other modalities. Mindfulness is used as an umbrella term to reference a wide range of practices, ideals, and characteristics.
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), mindfulness is a mental state where you remain focused on the present. Through mindfulness, you acknowledge and accept your thoughts and feelings without judgment. Moreover, mindfulness is a sense of self-awareness born out of being consciously present in every moment of your life. Therefore, mindfulness can shift the way you think about yourself and others, as well as how you navigate the world.
At first glance, understanding what it means to be present without judgment may feel understandably confusing. According to the University of South Carolina in the “Seven Key Attitudes of Mindfulness,” there are seven principles of mindfulness. Knowing the principles of mindfulness can deepen your understanding of mindfulness practices. Listed below are these seven principles of mindfulness:
- Non-judging: Involves learning how to be an impartial witness to your own experiences
- First, you learn how to become aware of your constant judgment and reactions to your inner and outer experiences in life
- Avoiding potential job or academic opportunities because you think you are not smart enough
- Skipping out on opportunities to connect with others because you think you never fit in, you are boring, or too loud
- First, you learn how to become aware of your constant judgment and reactions to your inner and outer experiences in life
- Patience: Involves recognizing and allowing things to unfold in their own time
- Taking time to understand different situations rather than reacting immediately
- Learning how to wait for outcomes rather than assuming what will happen
- Taking a step back from a situation or interaction when you start to feel overwhelmed
- Beginner’s mind: Involves learning how to remain open and curious about yourself, others, and the world
- You can be more receptive to new possibilities rather than closed off to people and situations
- Prevents you from getting stuck in your old negative thinking and behavior patterns
- Trust: Involves learning to trust in yourself and your feelings
- Recognizing that mistakes happen and that it is okay to make mistakes
- Helps you connect to yourself and others by embracing emotional vulnerability
- More able to be yourself without judging yourself or worrying about how others see you
- You can set healthy boundaries with yourself and others
- Recognizing that mistakes happen and that it is okay to make mistakes
- Non-striving: Involves focusing on how to be the healthy version of yourself in the here and now
- You can find peace in being yourself
- Better able to pay attention to things happening around you without trying to change things
- Acceptance: Involves learning how to recognize and take things as they are
- Better able to respond effectively in a variety of different situations and interactions
- Able to find the silver lining in negative experiences and find more compassion for yourself
- You are better able to recognize and celebrate your strengths
- Letting go: Involves learning how to recognize and let your experiences be what they are
- You recognize that there are certain experiences, thoughts, feelings, and situations your mind will try to hold onto
- Better able to live in the present moment instead of in the past
- Teaches you how to make small goals to tackle bigger challenges
- You learn not to compare yourself to others
- Helps you acknowledge difficult thoughts and feelings
- Experience less fear of the unknown
- You are better at seeking and reaching out for support
Looking at the seven principles of mindfulness highlights the benefits of mindfulness for effecting change. The capacity to change your thinking and behavior with mindfulness is invaluable for challenges with SUD and anxiety. Mindfulness for anxiety and addiction understands the interconnected relationships between well-being and self-understanding. Anxiety and addiction foster self-defeating thought patterns that can create a harmful cycle of negative self-beliefs you get stuck in. For instance, anxiety can trap and convince you that every worried thought or imagined scenario is fact or reality.
The loop in which you have negative thoughts about yourself creates negative self-beliefs, and thus maladaptive coping strategies fester. It can be difficult to break out of a negative loop once those negative thoughts and feelings become beliefs. However, mindfulness can help disrupt negative feelings, as well as negative thinking and behavior patterns. With more understanding of mindfulness, you can explore in more depth the healing benefits of mindfulness for anxiety and addiction.
Healing With Mindfulness for Anxiety and Addiction
Whether you are experiencing self-defeating challenges with anxiety and or co-occurring SUD, mindfulness for anxiety is an effective treatment. When many people think of mindfulness for anxiety in general, they may think of basic daily life interventions like deep breathing and meditation. While breathing techniques and meditation are great tools in mindfulness for anxiety, it can be difficult to put them into practice. You may be at a point where your anxiety overwhelms your ability to function and or you are self-medicating with substances. Impaired functioning and self-medicating for anxiety can suggest that you may need professional support before you can effectively utilize mindful techniques like diaphragmatic breathing.
As noted in the Psychiatric Clinics of North America, there are several successful standardized mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs). Mindfulness-based interventions like mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) have been incorporated into cognitive-behavioral practices for healing. Some of the practices in mindfulness for anxiety can be found in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). The combination of cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness for anxiety practices works to address anxiety from a holistic approach.
Listed below are some of the ways MBIs like MBSTR are used to treat anxiety disorders:
- MBSTR: An eight-week course designed to help reduce stress
- Stress is reduced through enhanced mindfulness skills from meditation practices
- You learn how to be mindfully attuned to your body sensations with various mind-body meditative practices
- Body scan
- Sitting meditation
- Gentle stretches
- Yoga
- Significantly helps you reduce anxiety symptoms by diminishing habitual tendencies toward emotional reactions and ruminating over negative thoughts and feelings
- Modify emotion regulation abilities
- Reduces emotional reactivity and the regulation of negative self-beliefs
- Modify emotion regulation abilities
Moreover, mindfulness-based therapy (MBT) is an effective treatment for disorders like anxiety and depression. You can recognize and understand your physical symptoms of anxiety in relation to your psychological distress. Through a shift in the way you experience and respond to your symptoms, mindfulness for anxiety decreases the amount of disturbance you experience. At the core of mindfulness is its place as both a practice and a skill.
Through the practice of mindfulness, you develop the skill to stay mindful. As a result, the impact becomes significant as mindfulness for anxiety and addiction supports your ability to handle the ups and downs of life. Looking at mindfulness as a tool for adaptive coping with the ups and downs of life speaks to its ability to address addiction as a maladaptive coping strategy. As stated in Addiction Science & Clinical Practice, MBIs like mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP) and mindfulness meditation (MM) are specifically tailored to address addiction.
In particular, the practice of mindfulness elements of focused attention and open monitoring can create a buffer for addictive behavior. Thus, the frequent and regular use of mindfulness practices increases your trait mindfulness over time. With increased trait mindfulness, as noted in Substance Abuse and Rehabilitation, you experience less reactivity to distressing thoughts and emotions. Additionally, you are better able to observe and accept your momentary thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and sensations.
The benefits of developing trait mindfulness through mindful practices support a decrease in the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral tendencies that contribute to sustaining addiction. Now with holistic support, you can build the psychological tools you need to engage in mindfulness for anxiety and addiction recovery in your daily life. Through a holistic approach to care, you can engage in therapeutic modalities like yoga and meditation to support your mindful healing.
The Mindful Benefits of Yoga and Meditation
Yoga and meditation can be impactful tools in mindfulness for anxiety and addiction recovery. Mindfulness and yoga share a long interconnected history, as the purpose of yoga is to promote well-being by empowering self-realization through the connection of the mind and body. Thus, as a holistic tradition, yoga supports deeper self-awareness and self-understanding to diminish distressing thoughts and feelings. Moreover, much like mindfulness and yoga, meditation is committed to fostering a deeper awareness and understanding of the self.
Some of the ways yoga and meditation support healing anxiety and addiction include:
- Reducing stress and anxiety
- Helping with stress management
- Calming the mind
- Supporting relaxation
- Improving mood and self-esteem
- Enhancing positive emotions
- Supporting adaptive emotion regulation
- Breaking the habit of rumination and negative patterns
- Connecting your mind, body, and environment to each other
- Fostering healthy perspective of stressful and negative life events
- Building resilience to life stressors and traumatic experiences
- Providing the space to encounter life stressors without being overly reactive or overwhelmed
- Increasing satisfaction in your life
- Fostering greater satisfaction in your relationships
Together, mindfulness, yoga, and meditation can connect you deeper to your inner self. With awareness and understanding of the inner self, you can uncover the roots of your challenges to truly heal. Now with support, you can take the tools you learn in treatment to effectively engage in mindfulness in your daily life.
Fostering Mindfulness for Anxiety and Addiction in Daily Life
Yoga and meditation are excellent ways to engage in fostering mindfulness for anxiety and addiction recovery. However, everyone has different needs to best support their recovery. From the hustle and bustle of work and school or responsibilities as a parent, it can feel difficult to make time for mindfulness in your daily life. Listed below are some ways you can incorporate mindfulness in your daily life to continue supporting your recovery:
- Setting your intention for the day
- Write down or visualize how you want to and how you can best care for yourself today
- Make a manageable to-do list that can be chunked into smaller tasks
- Build a small list that does not focus on only chores
- Find meditative activities that work for you
- Doodle in a notebook
- Color in a coloring book
- Go for a walk in your neighborhood or a park
- Form some mindful routines
- Make a warm cup of tea for yourself as you unwind for the evening
- Practice being mindful of each step of the brewing process with your five senses
- Make a warm cup of tea for yourself as you unwind for the evening
- Try out different journaling methods that work for you
- Keep a gratitude journal
- Write for five minutes
- List the best things that happened to you during the day
- Practice breathing techniques and other grounding exercises at traffic/stoplights and stop signs
- Take intentional breaks from your phone and apps
- Do not take your phone with you to every room in your home
- Put your phone down during dinner
- Do not take your phone in the bathroom every time
- Logout of your social media apps
- Find a type of meditation that works for you
- Mantra meditation: Make or find a word or phrase that speaks to you and repeat it
- Engage in physical activity
- Explore mindful eating
There are numerous mindful practices you can fit into your daily life. Life can be hectic, but whether you are washing the dishes or driving to work, you can build mindful practices to support your long-term well-being.
Finding Mindfulness for Anxiety and Addiction at The Guest House
You are not alone in feeling overwhelmed by life stressors and traumatic experiences. At The Guest House, we know uncovering the underlying causes of your self-defeating actions and behaviors is invaluable to recovery. Therefore, we are committed to helping you foster mindfulness for anxiety and addiction recovery. With a wide range of holistic therapeutic modalities like yoga and meditation, you can build mindful resilience.
Further, our treatment plans are customizable because we know your experiences are unique to you. Thus, you can work with your clinician to build a plan of care to address your specific needs. We provide a holistic, safe, and judgment-free space where you can share your experiences. Meanwhile, access to mindful practices and modalities gives you the foundation you need to lead the meaningful life you deserve.
Feeling overwhelmed by life stressors and traumatic experiences can lead to negative thinking patterns and maladaptive coping like addiction to suppress distress. However, overcoming self-defeating thinking and behaviors can feel impossible when you identify with negative thought patterns. Mindfulness for anxiety and addiction can help you understand and overcome self-defeating behaviors. Through mindfulness, you can find deeper awareness and understanding of your inner self and world. When you understand your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, you can learn how to more effectively respond to challenges to heal. At The Guest House, we are dedicated to providing holistic care with therapeutic modalities to address your specific needs to heal and thrive in your daily life. Call us at (855) 483-7800 today.