How to control your anxiety by using your breath.

Hey hey!

Quick intro of who I am, my name is Dan and i'm a 23 year old from the U.K currently living in India.

I'm new to Sythe and wanted to give something that I've learnt and picked up along my travels and life experiences.

So like many other people, living in a city in the U.K really played on my mental health. I would suffer with severe panic attacks and anxious shakes throughout my daily life. (On the tube, basically wherever there were crowds of people etc..)

I found out some simple methods to train my mind to keep my anxiety under control.

Step 1 -

Breathing meditation (You don't have to be a monk or a buddhist, this stuff actually works and it's so easy to do!)

Every morning when I wake up, I would have my shower, brush my teeth.. all the normal people stuff.
Then afterwards I would sit for 10 minutes, with my eyes shut.

Technique 1 ​

1. Focus on how the body feels.
2. Focus on the sounds around me.
3. Breath in deeply for 4 seconds.
4. Breath out for 4 seconds.
5. Then begin to notice each inhale and each exhale. (You can count them if it helps)
6. Continue to come back to the breath when any thoughts arrive.
7. Repeat steps 3 & 4 till the end of the meditation.

Technique 2 ​

1. Focus on how the body feels.
2. Focus on the sounds around me.
3. Notice the rising & falling feeling of the breath (Where your body moves etc..)
4. Move your attention to the feeling of the breath inside the nose.
5. Then begin to count each breath up until a count of 10.
6. Repeat steps 4 & 5 till the end of the meditation.

Catching the mind when it wonders into a thought loop during your meditation is key, it's so easy for us to attach on to a really negative/positive thought and then shit spirals into some kind of loop.
When this happens, bringing your attention back to the breath is the easiest way to break the cycle.

The important thing with this is consistency.

The more you do this everyday the more you'll see the benefits in your life, overtime you'll notice that 1000 anxious thoughts you previously had will begin to reduce into say 1-2 thoughts a day. (Which is way easier to maintain)


tl:dr - Meditate on the breath everyday for atleast 10 minutes and you'll feel more free, more happy and turn into an all round more chill person.


Feel free to pm me if you have any questions about meditation, I'm more than happy to respond!

 

will give this a try

 

Let me know how you get on!
I do this every morning after I wake up and every evening before I go to bed.

 

this is cool. i will try this tonight! Thanks for this