Is my theory of how meditation helps anxiety right? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Tom Slijkerman, on Quora:
Anxiety is a result of anxious thoughts. After having thought the thought, some of the anxiety remains. It takes time for the hormones to fade away.
Anxiety is cumulative, meaning stress hormones keep adding if you keep following the train of thought, depending on the amount of belief and severity you put into the thought.
While doing this, you are not only doing something with your short term stress, you are also conditioning yourself for the longer term. Keep thinking the same negative type of thought often enough, and you'll make this conditioning worse and worse, with which you'll able to stress yourself out 1) much more and 2) in a much shorter amount of time.
This is also how phobias arise. You'll keep adding more to the conditioning by thinking the wrong way.
People get caught in the negative train of thoughts if they have belief in the thought, and if they have enough time on their hands not having a mind consuming task at hand. A task like surviving.
We have it too easy, nowadays, compared to the people we evolved from. We have more time on our hands to condition ourselves the wrong way. Our default mode network is the part of our brains where we think this way. It is also called the “task negative network”, because it shuts down as soon as you have a task at hand.
What meditation does, is that it stops the default mode network by giving us a task: the focus on the object of meditation. Furthermore, it stops the belief in the thought, because thoughts are clearly impersonal (Anatta) if you've spent enough time meditating. Thoughts are just mere results of the impersonal conditioning in your mind. Conditioning that the real you doesn’t want. And lastly, mindfulness meditation changes the conditioning by focusing on anxiety in a mindful way, which disconnects the “sensations part” of anxiety that’s stored within the Amygdala from the unpleasantness caused by the Anterior cingulate cortex. We intuitively think of anxiety as simply “bad sensations”, but it’s really a neutral signal that happens to normally be connected to the “unpleasantness” center. We have a hard time separating them, by years of unseparated association.
So what’s important to understand is that there’s not just 1) the thought, 2) the anxiety and 3) the defense mechanism, but there’s 1) time for thinking, 2) the thought itself, 3) your belief in the truth and your belief in the severity of the thought, 4) the sensations of the anxiety, 5) the unpleasantness associated with the sensation, 6) the conditioning and 7) mindfulness as a “defense mechanism.”
So what you need to do is simple but far from easy: you have to gradually break down years of conditioning by not avoiding thinking the thought, but by thinking the thought on purpose, but not fall into the trap of following the usual train of thought, but instead focus on the sensations mindfully, which is both impersonal, while accepting these sensations. The “not wanting" of the sensations is what connects the sensations of anxiety with the unpleasantness of anxiety.
This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:
