Mindfulness, resilience and anxiety

Every living organism on this planet is biologically equipped with a capacity to recover from difficult situations. We have our own stories about orchestrating resilience. And these stories serve as an education in face of yet another difficult situation. Resilience begets resilience.

By practicing mindfulness, we give birth to many such stories that have the capacity to serve us. And when we are not mindful about what we are doing, we tell ourselves and others stories about our actions, needs and desires that are not entirely true, which force us to conceal our wrongdoings using convenient moral reasonings, exaggerate about our successes, and love and hate each other in secret.

While we all are storytellers, being attentive, like an audience in a movie theatre, is a healthy way to bring more objectivity and truth to our stories. Attention helps in revealing the truth. The scope and hope to be resilient without voluntarily practicing mindfulness are limited and short-lived.

Mindfulness at work

There is an amount of work that weighs just enough to give us a sense of balance and confidence to sustainably plan for the future, one day at a time. And if the nature and intent of the work at hand remain undiscovered, we are unlikely to know the amount of attention that it needs or deserves. This causes our minds to linger in a perpetual-hurried state. Sense of balance is always missing and lack of confidence seduces unknown insecurities.

In today’s world where most people find it easier to identify themselves with their endeavours, and where work seemingly has large impact on our wellbeing, it is imperative to recognise facts about the work.

Mindfulness is about trying to be aware of our actions, needs and desires to discover more truths about our surroundings and works; truths that can be used to identify the nature and intent of our work in relation to our surroundings.

Awareness is not so much a means to correct the work and situation, but to understand what is going on. Without awareness, the gaps caused by absence of knowledge of the situation are filled with information that causes stress and breeds anxiety.

Resilience against anxiety

Stretched across societies, good and bad deeds are equally prevalent and these deeds influence and shape our environment. But our predisposition to the lure of all that is wrong fuels anxiety attacks. Anxiety disorder is partly a product of this predisposition coupled with social conditioning and lack of awareness.

A mind pinned on flaws dominates our way of thinking and makes us susceptible to anxiety. While identifying flaws and defects is necessary, acknowledging what is good is equally important.

Expressing gratitude does not mean turning a blind eye to all that is wrong, it is not an outcome of ignorance, it is a conscious effort to dive into thoughts and emotions that help us recover from difficult situations and increase our capacity to endure.

However, to treat anxiety disorder as a disorder nothing like in a medical sense would be a mistake. Medical attention is sometimes needed to alleviate the impacts of anxiety attacks.

And as the normal self begins to resurface, practicing gratitude and simply being aware of the flaws without being unfairly critical can bring in some new perspective to deal with panic inducing situations. So that with enough practice, the awareness reaches the scene before emotions that harbinger panic.

Does meditation help?

Meditation is something our minds already practice. The idea of meditation, if there is only one, has been extensively improvised and seemingly reduced to a task that involves merely sitting quietly at one place with eyes shut.

Meditation is a tool to bring about awareness, and the fact that we know many things about our environment, from the exact location of the refrigerator in our homes to Sun’s appearances and disappearances, tells us that we are aware and posses spectacular capacity for awareness.

However, most of the awareness comes involuntarily, unconsciously and subconsciously. Meditation is a simple way to learn how to consciously invest amount of attention enough to fulfil our goals. Meditation is an act of taking a brief pause, wherein the breath becomes the clock, as we slowly and silently bend our knees to deliberately jump from one thought to another.

Meditation can help if we treat it like an institution that demands a certain amount of dedication and discipline. While stay-at-home mandates are in place, getting involved in an online course or app of your choice can be an effective start.

I would recommend looking into Sam Harris’ Waking Up app, which discusses various schools of meditation and their techniques. While access to most of the material on the app is paid, and if money is a problem, you can write to the Waking Up team and they will give you a free subscription for a year.