Joelle Jane Marshall

Want to find out more about how to manage your anxiety with mindfulness? Look at the cheat sheet and discover the common causes of anxiety. Try a short mindfulness exercise that can help your anxiety. Explore ways of managing your anxious thoughts mindfully. Find out easy ways to be mindful each day. This cheat sheet will give you all the basics and is a fun way to get useful information fast!

Although there is no known formula that can cause anxiety in adults, environment, stress, genetics, upbringing and even modern day living can affect your anxiety. You may recognise the cause of your anxiety or you may not, as sometimes it can appear for no clear reason. Here I have outlined the common causes of anxiety.

Mindfulness isn’t about stopping thoughts, trying to suppress them or having a clear mind. Rather it is about bringing them to the surface with awareness and curiosity so you can manage them. Once you change your attitude and perception towards your thoughts, they can lose their power over you. Here are some quick exercises to manage your thoughts mindfully.

This mindfulness exercise is called STOP, which stands for Stop, Take a breath, Observe and Proceed. You can use it when you feel your anxiety start to arise. As it’s only a short meditation, it can be used anywhere; you don’t need to set aside 30 minutes of your time to sit still or lie down. Stop. If you are in the middle of something take some time to stop if you can.

It is likely that you are interested in mindfulness because you have heard that it can help manage your anxiety. As well as managing anxiety, mindfulness also has a range of other great benefits that you can enjoy, such as better relationships, greater emotional awareness, stress reduction, better overall wellbeing and feeling calmer and more peaceful generally.

When you have anxiety, you can use mindfulness to seek relief. It may seem that you have too much energy rather than too little and it may feel like your brain is in overdrive. This is because of the amount of adrenaline your body is releasing. However, anxiety causes low energy as well and this is because you use up all of your energy with anxiety and your body becomes more tired, much faster.

As with a lot of practices, mindfulness takes time to learn, understand, and incorporate into a daily routine. As with anything new, it will have its share of difficulties but they can all be overcome. Finding the time for formal mindfulness practice One of the most difficult things about mindfulness practice is finding the time to get into the habit of doing it.

As well as doing long formal mindful meditations, such as the body scan and the sitting meditation, there are informal meditations that you can easily fit into your routine on a daily basis. Incorporate these with everyday activities that you already do. Brushing your teeth: This can be done in a mindful way. Feel the sensations of the brush on your teeth, smell the smell of the toothpaste and use your opposite hand to feel all the sensations in your arm and hand as you brush.