Learn how mindfulness for anxiety can help us stop fighting difficult emotions, reduce unnecessary suffering, and respond to stress with greater intention.
When we feel stressed or anxious, our natural instinct is usually to do something about it so we don’t have to feel terrible anymore. We want to figure out why we feel this way, determine what needs to change, and find a way to feel better. We may replay the situation that triggered us, think through everything that could go wrong, search for reassurance, or start making plans to regain a sense of control. In other words, when we experience difficult emotions, we tend to mount a huge resistance response.
This makes sense. Our brains are excellent problem solvers, and stress and anxiety are uncomfortable. We want relief. Now! The problem is that our attempts to get rid of these feelings can sometimes have the opposite effect. Instead of helping the stress response settle, we continue thinking about the threat, monitoring how we feel, and reinforcing the message that something is wrong. In other words, our resistance only serves to reinforce and exacerbate the negative emotions.
One of the lessons we can learn from practicing mindfulness for anxiety is that sometimes we need to stop fighting the feeling before we can move through it. This is beautifully explained by Mark Williams and Danny Penman in Mindfulness: An 8-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World. Their explanation of what happens when we resist difficult emotions has had a significant influence on how I think about and manage stress and anxiety, both personally and in my work.
Previously, I wrote about another mindfulness technique from Williams and Penman’s book. Read about it here!
What We Resist Persists
As the authors explain, when we resist difficult emotions, like anxiety, we can unintentionally intensify them or keep them around longer. This is where an important lesson from mindfulness comes in: Resistance = Persistence.
The more we resist feeling stressed or anxious, the more attention and energy we may give those feelings. We aren’t only experiencing the original stressor anymore. We are also worrying about our reaction to it, judging ourselves for feeling this way, and trying to make the discomfort disappear. What may have been a temporary stress response can turn into a much longer cycle of stress and anxiety.
Mindfulness offers another option. Instead of immediately trying to escape, explain, suppress, or change what we are feeling, we can learn to surrender to the experience. I know this may sound counterintuitive. Why would we surrender to anxiety? That sounds awful! But bear with me here, because this technique had a huge impact on my own experience with anxiety.
Surrender does not mean giving up, accepting a stressful situation that needs to change, or deciding that there is nothing we can do to help ourselves. We’re not resigning to being hopeless and helpless.
Instead, we are acknowledging what is already true in this moment without increasing our suffering. If we are anxious, we acknowledge that anxiety is present. If we are overwhelmed, we allow ourselves to recognize that we feel overwhelmed. We don’t have to like the feeling, but we also don’t have to immediately fight it.
In doing so, we are practicing equanimity, or the ability to experience thoughts, emotions, and sensations with greater steadiness, without immediately judging or reacting to them. Equanimity allows us to recognize that an experience is uncomfortable without immediately treating that discomfort as an emergency or a problem to solve.
This is one reason mindfulness is included as an Emotional technique in my Take Five Framework. When stress and anxiety are high, it is easy to become wrapped up in our emotional state and react automatically. Mindfulness helps us notice what is happening internally and creates a little space between the feeling and what we do next. That space gives us a better opportunity to respond with intention.
Why Resistance Can Make Stress and Anxiety Worse
Williams and Penman explain how many of us end up caught in mental loops of anxiety and suffering. Once something triggers us, the mind begins searching for explanations and meaning. We look backward at what has happened and forward toward what might happen, trying to understand the threat and rationalize why we feel the way we do.
This is particularly relevant to stress and anxiety because both naturally orient our attention toward potential threats. If we are stressed about something that happened at work, our mind may replay the interaction over and over. If we are anxious about an upcoming medical appointment, we may mentally rehearse everything that could go wrong. If we wake up feeling anxious for no obvious reason, we may start searching for an explanation.
Why do I feel this way?
What’s wrong with me?
What does it mean?
What needs to change immediately?
Williams and Penman explain that this mental search can make it difficult for us to disengage from the stress response. Instead of allowing an initial reaction to settle, we continue supplying the brain with thoughts, memories, and predictions related to the threat. As they summarize it, “the mind can end up making things far worse” (p. 27).
We feel like we have to DO something to quell the anxiety, explain the stress, or escape the uncomfortable emotion. The simple act of worrying or stressing more feels productive to the mind. Yet, oftentimes there isn’t an immediate problem to solve. There is an emotional and physiological response that needs time to settle, and our attempts to run from it can actually keep it going.
Williams and Penman explain, “tensions, unhappiness or exhaustion aren’t ‘problems’ that can be solved. They are emotions. They reflect states of mind and body. As such, they cannot be solved – only felt. Once you’ve felt them – that is, acknowledged their existence – and let go of the tendency to explain or get rid of them, they are much more likely to vanish naturally” (p. 28).
They describe our tendency to problem solve as the “Doing mode.” Our minds notice a gap between where we are and where we want to be. We feel anxious, but we want to feel calm. We feel overwhelmed, but we want to feel in control. We feel tense, but we want to relax. The brain detects that gap and immediately gets to work trying to close it.
This approach is incredibly useful when there is a concrete problem we can solve. If our stress is caused by an overflowing calendar, we may need to cancel something. If we are anxious because we haven’t prepared for an important presentation, we may need to prepare. But not every uncomfortable feeling has a rational explanation, and trying to force ourselves from anxious to calm can keep our attention fixed on the anxiety itself.
We begin monitoring: Am I calmer yet? Why isn’t this working? Why am I still anxious? We may replay events from the past, imagine problems in the future, criticize ourselves for our reaction, or continue searching for an explanation. Now the original stressor has been joined by rumination, worry, frustration, and self-judgment.
Our bodies can reinforce this cycle. Stress and anxiety affect how we breathe, hold our muscles, move, and interact with our environment. We may clench our jaws, tense our shoulders, breathe more rapidly, frown, withdraw, or become restless. Those physical changes are part of the body’s response to perceived threat. When our thoughts continue signaling danger and our bodies continue behaving as though danger is present, it can become harder for the stress response to settle.
Accept + Surrender > Resistance
Williams and Penman explain that mindfulness offers a different approach. Rather than automatically trying to think our way out of difficult emotions, we can become aware of what we are experiencing and allow our thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations to be present without immediately trying to suppress, avoid, or change them. The goal is not simply awareness, but learning to approach our experiences with greater acceptance and equanimity.
This distinction is important when we are using mindfulness for anxiety. Mindfulness is not simply noticing, “I’m anxious.” We are practicing noticing anxiety without immediately deciding that anxiety is unacceptable, dangerous, or something we must eliminate. The goal is not to force ourselves to calm down because that can become another form of resistance. Instead, we allow the stress response to be present without continuing to feed it with additional judgment, analysis, and worry.
How to Accept & Surrender When Stressed or Anxious
Accepting and surrendering to anxiety may sound simple, but it takes practice, especially when our mind is telling us that we need to do something immediately. The goal is not to make ourselves stop feeling anxious. Instead, we are learning to recognize what is happening, allow the experience to be present, and give our stress response an opportunity to settle before deciding what to do next.
Step 1: Become aware of thought patterns.
The next time we notice stress or anxiety building, the first step is to become aware of what our mind is doing. Are we replaying a stressful conversation? Predicting everything that could go wrong? Searching for an explanation for why we feel anxious? Trying to reassure ourselves repeatedly? Judging ourselves because we think we should be handling the situation better? We don’t have to force those thoughts to stop. We simply recognize that our mind may have shifted into problem-solving mode.
Step 2: Label the emotions and thoughts.
Next, we can identify the emotion itself. “Stress” can become a catch-all description for many different experiences. We may actually be feeling anxious, frustrated, disappointed, embarrassed, angry, helpless, uncertain, or overwhelmed. Emotional clarity can be gained by using an emotions wheel. Identifying what we are actually feeling can make it easier to observe the experience rather than simply becoming consumed by it.
We can also label what our mind is doing. We may notice that we are worrying, predicting, judging, replaying, or problem solving. Simply recognizing the thought pattern can help us observe what is happening rather than automatically following every thought wherever it leads.
Another option is to use Name. Notice. Nurture. We Name what we are feeling, Notice how the emotion is showing up in our thoughts and body, and Nurture ourselves by responding with understanding and self-compassion. If we are anxious, for example, we might notice racing thoughts, tightness in the chest, a clenched jaw, or an unsettled stomach. Rather than immediately trying to make those sensations disappear, we allow ourselves to experience them for a moment.
This is what surrender can look like in practice. We are not surrendering to stress or deciding that anxiety gets to control what happens next. We are surrendering the resistance to our uncomfortable emotions and sensations. We might simply remind ourselves, “I feel anxious right now. I don’t have to figure everything out this second.”
Step 3: Come back to the present moment.
Once we have acknowledged what we are experiencing, we can gently bring our attention back to the present. Stress and anxiety tend to pull us away from the present by focusing on triggers from the past and potential threats in the future. Returning our attention to what is actually happening right now can interrupt some of that mental time travel.
We might practice our favorite breathwork technique. We could try horizon gazing by lifting our eyes from a screen or close focal point and allowing our gaze to soften across the distance. We could also intentionally engage our five senses by noticing what we can see, hear, feel, smell, and taste in our immediate environment. These practices are not intended to distract us from anxiety or force ourselves to calm down. They give our attention somewhere to land in the present instead of continuing to follow every anxious thought.
Step 4: Decide if action is needed (later).
Finally, we can give ourselves some time before deciding whether there really is a problem that needs to be addressed. Acceptance does not mean that we ignore chronic stress or repeatedly dismiss emotions that may be telling us something important. Anxiety may be drawing our attention to uncertainty that needs to be addressed. Anger may point toward a boundary that needs to be established. Persistent overwhelm may be telling us that our current workload, caregiving responsibilities, or pace of life really is unsustainable.
If the same negative emotions continue to surface over time, that is when we can start looking for patterns and considering what might need to change. We may need to address the stressor itself, change a habit, ask for help, set a boundary, reconsider an expectation, work on a recurring thought pattern, or seek additional support. The goal is not to use mindfulness to tolerate circumstances that are harming our well-being.
The difference is that we don’t necessarily have to solve those problems while our stress response is activated. When we are caught in anxiety, urgency can make everything feel as though it needs to be figured out right now. By first acknowledging what we are experiencing, allowing ourselves to feel it, and reconnecting with the present, we give our minds and bodies an opportunity to settle before deciding what deserves our attention.
Stress and anxiety are part of being human. We cannot eliminate every stressor, prevent every anxious thought, or control every emotional response. What we can learn to change is our relationship with and reactions to those emotions. Mindfulness helps us experience difficult emotions without automatically fighting them or becoming wrapped up in them.
Simple, Science-Based Habits
This is one example of how you can build real resilience without adding more to your plate. Through simple, evidence-based habits and my Take Five Framework, you can feel calmer and be more resilient.
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