How Modern Misguided Meditation Makes Anxiety Worse (& What To Do Instead)

Meditation has gained widespread popularity as a potent tool to combat stress and anxiety, offering a sanctuary of tranquility amidst the hustle and bustle of modern life. Numerous studies have showcased its positive effects on mental health, bringing a sense of peace and balance to practitioners.

However, like any practice, the benefits of meditation depend on how it is approached and utilised.

When meditation is misused as a mere escape from anxiety, it can inadvertently exacerbate the very emotions it aims to alleviate.

In this article, we explore the potential pitfalls of misguidedly using meditation to fend off anxiety, the adverse effects it may lead to, and how to harness meditation in a way that empowers us to confront and release anxiety constructively.

Why Practicing Meditation Daily Can Be A Bad Idea

This goes against the popular belief that assumes meditation is the mecca to opening self-awareness, but the point of this article is not to distract from how meditation can help raise self-awareness and create calm in your life, it certainly can, but to raise a point in the potential danger of using meditation as a comfort blanket against daily stresses in life.

When something in life becomes challenging or stressful it may seem like a healthy habit to seek to calm yourself down so you can deal with the situation better, but imagine this scenario:

You are cornered by a gang in an alleyway and you suddenly sit down, cross your legs, circle your thumb and fingers, close your eyes, and begin to meditate (or you think happy thoughts to yourself praying for the law of attraction to work in your favour and for the gang to have a sudden change of heart and not harm you).

If you can picture this scene you’d likely see how ludicrous it can be to choose that response to a given challenge, and yet this is what many people are now doing with other challenges that arise in life.

Whilst the gang alleyway cornering example is a bit extreme, if we think we can deal with anxieties that arise in life by zenning them away then we would find that we likely only have more anxieties build up over time, and that meditation done this way just becomes habitual escapism instead of a tool to help us challenge adversity.

Why Meditation Should Provoke Anxiety, Not Protect Us From It

Too often today we get the idea of comfort is what we need to solve problems (i.e. modern mindfulness and toxic positivity). Countless articles and videos are produced on how you just need to settle your mind, think positively, and you can do anything. It’s not to say some of these suggestions aren’t useful in certain circumstances, but the issue is in how we seek to settle our minds so that anxieties are kept at bay rather than actively provoked and brought to the surface.

There’s really two sides of fear – one where we let fear rise above us and we find coping strategies of escapism and self-sabotage to cope with the fear so it doesn’t feel as bad, and the other is when we chose to display courage and actively challenge and rise above fear.

The second option is what most people in today’s comfort-led world don’t do. Instead, we are societally conditioned to seek to ‘feel’ okay for the moment as a short-term survival instinct rather than embrace the fear.

Then the fear is avoided or denied, only for it to come up again and again, and so people seek to meditate to bring the fear down again, on this up-and-down pendulum, which is ineffective meditation.

Meditation itself is not the problem, but the issue is the modern version of meditation. The one where we think we have to be in a quiet zen room or natural setting and have tribalistic music playing, just to create the illusion of a buddhist-like setting to make our meditation feel more real.

There’s certainly truth in how certain music helps relax the mind through brainwaves, sure, and how grounding with nature helps us relax, again sure, but even though we can relax ourselves in these moments it won’t help us one hour later if we suddenly have a more stressful situation arise. We can’t just meditate in quiet harmony all day long to deal with life’s challenges.

Yes, meditation is a practice, and the more we practice the more at ease we become with ourselves, but what we need to do is move away from seeking a calm environment that has zero distraction, because in life most of the time we feel stress it’s when we are not in calm, tranquil settings, and so we need to get used to being able to deal with the environments that provoke real anxieties and meditate there.

Setting Us Up For Effective Meditation Of Letting Go

Meditation doesn’t need a calm environment, even if it’s easier to get used to meditating in calmer, distraction-free environments at first. Meditation means to ponder deeper thoughts, and this feels easier when in a place we can focus inwards more, but the most benefit comes from doing so in an environment that provokes anxiety, and so it would make sense to practice meditating in those environments.

Let’s say you are afraid of rejection when speaking to a group of new people, so you avoid it, or meditate before you go to make yourself calm, only for the anxiety to be provoked in the moment of the networking event.

If we don’t practice pushing through that anxiety at the moment we simply retreat back to the ‘feel-good’ meditation mindset, where we find calm after, tell ourselves ‘we got this’, and then proceed to avoid when the actual trigger comes up again in a challenging situation or environment. All the while the anxiety actually builds.

Instead, we need to meditate in the moment of fear. Doing visualisations before can help a bit, but the real benefit of meditation comes when we allow the sensation to come up in the moment and to simply be with the fear and allow it, to be aware that the situation isn’t going to hurt us, to maybe just label the emotion at the moment (‘I’m anxious right now, but it’s okay’), and to then let the fear pass.

This is how we deal with anxiety productively. We don’t seek to feel better by seeking happier emotions or environments, but we allow the anxiety to be present and guide ourselves through it.

That’s the other thing misunderstood about this modern wave of meditation. Meditation doesn’t have to feel good or have positive talk alongside it. Meditation can actually be very effective when we acknowledge the child within fears by expressing the fears, rather than putting a fake front on that ‘we are okay’ when we aren’t.

What we need to do is tell ourselves we are okay with the fear, with the mistake, the rejection etc. Only then does it start to dissipate. It sounds counterintuitive, but fear goes when we allow fear to be present. When we try to push fear down it just sits underneath us waiting to pop up again.

Meditation isn’t about positive musings, but engaging and releasing anger and fear, a place where we tap into our subconscious to allow our inner child to stand up and speak up again – as most fears are routed from the disconnect our adult self has with our own inner child.

Thinking you have to be calm when inside you are feeling anything but is counterproductive as you end up just suppressing the real emotions that need to get out.

There are times when it would be more beneficial to meditate in the zen surroundings such as if you were particularly wired with anxiety and need to bring yourself back to a calm state so you don’t have panic attack episodes or lash out at other people because you are stressed and overrun etc. In those circumstances then the goal is to bring the stress and anxiety down immediately, so finding a place of calm is helpful here.

This is because mindful meditation encourages individuals to acknowledge their anxiety without judgment and observe the sensations, feelings, and thoughts that arise. From here we can cultivate a deeper understanding of our anxieties and, over time, learn to respond to them more effectively.

However, practicing in triggering settings and in safe settings is very different. One is real, one is artificial. And, if you have been practicing meditation for a while and you find you are still being triggered a lot by stressful situations then you likely need to ask yourself whether meditation is actually doing its job, or if it has just become a form of instant gratification – a feel-good-now habit that takes you away from pressure rather than being able to face pressure.

Therefore, effective mindful meditation is best done in the environment that actually stifles you the most, and you may even find that meditating whilst hitting a punch bag or when walking through heavy rain is more effective than when in a comfortable zen-like setting too (as you connect meditating with getting out your comfort zone and releasing fear rather than blanketing fear).

And, if you can get used to meditating in places that are noisy and not get distracted then even better. It’s a good skill to learn.

Effective Active Mindful Meditation Techniques

There are techniques to help you meditate more effectively in noisy or pressured environments such as counting yourself in or using a hand signal you’ve set yourself as a trigger to be calm under pressure (i.e. to become more aware of your emotional reactions in the moment before succumbing to them).

There are also numerous forms of calming meditations we can apply such as walking meditations (grounding the mind whilst walking and bringing focus to the present moment), body scan meditations (scanning the body for physical tension to release it), gratitude meditations (turning negative stressors into positive experiences), and breathing techniques (focusing on deep intentional breaths), but these all seem to be most effective when we use these with active mindful meditation exposure in triggering settings.

Another thing we can do is set ourselves ‘boundaries’. We often think of boundaries as safe places to go to so we can keep out toxicity and work on ourselves, but we can also use boundaries to help us avoid automatically going back to a comfort zone flight or fight response.

So, instead of switching on the TV for escapism when stressed, we can give ourselves a boundary that says no to this escapism habit, until we find we don’t need that escapism as much as we thought we did after we’ve tackled the fear through effective active meditation and mindfulness.

To conclude, instead of using meditation as a form of escapism, integrating mindfulness into the exploration of anxiety can be transformative, whilst avoiding confronting anxiety may ultimately lead to emotional suppression and stagnation, false security, and worsen the need for instant gratification and tolerance levels to meditations real benefits.

Putting these into practice is of course another matter, and as part of freeing our minds from fears and biases so we can be more adaptable, creative, and forward-minded thinkers, you could absolutely benefit from weekly coaching to learn how to actively apply these techniques to your particular situation or fear.

It’s a tragic thing when we see fear and anxiety control us and stifle what would otherwise be open doors to more opportunities and experiences in life, and it’s understandable when people try to self-help through meditating to ‘feel’ better, but if we are honest with ourselves we would prefer to be able to do more things without fear holding us back, and so you would benefit from adaptability coaching that trains you how to not fear change and how to navigate it better.

The benefits on your life are enormous but it requires action and vision creation, so get in touch today to see how we can help.