Breaking the Anxiety Cycle Through Mindfulness

By Jamie Bussin

I’ve advocated for mindfulness as a tool to manage stress and anxiety for a long time. Frequent guest on the show, and mindfulness expert, Tracy Soghrati and I discussed this in one our first interviews. This is a digest of that conversation.

Mindfulness is simply the act of paying attention in the present moment with curiosity, and so that means you come into the present and you connect to your body.  You notice what’s happening in your body. 

Anxiety isn’t just in your head, it rests in your body. When you’re feeling anxious you might notice that you’re experiencing muscle tension. Perhaps you clench your jaw or your hands or have a stiff neck. I tend to experience stomach pain and headaches. 

When we experience that type of tension and physical discomfort, we tend to concoct a vast, elaborate story about why it’s happening, and that perpetuates a whole cascade of often negative emotions about something that’s actually not even real.

Through mindfulness we can learn to notice what’s happening in our body with an open mind and with curiosity. We block the narrative. We just experience our body as it is. I look at it as taking the ego out of the equation. Don’t focus on yourself, don’t focus on how you’re feeling, place yourself in the world and try to contextualize what’s happening. There are criteria that you are responding to, and it’s your response which edifies where you’re going to go with your story. 

Tracy believes that we see the world through the lens of our own preferences, our own expectations. And that colours everything that we’re seeing. And so if we can take ourselves out of that subjective lens, and just tune into things as they actually are, the world tends to be a much more simple place, and then we will react to it from a much more stable perspective.

In addition to being aware of how our body feels, utilizing a mindfulness practice will allow us to become more aware of our emotions without engaging in them. We tend to think that our feelings and emotions are both fixed and actually true. We’re all convinced that what we’re feeling is true…but it isn’t.

Tracy says; “We have a feeling about something, we think that it’s true, and then we act accordingly, and that creates a whole host of problems in our lived experience. And if we actually tune into the fact that our feelings are like waves in the ocean, they’re passing. And if we just sit with them and watch them, they will actually naturally dissipate on their own without us having to behaviourally act them out.”

Mindfulness teaches us simply to become the observer of our experience. In that way we can start to see that we aren’t actually our experience, we aren’t our emotions; there’s something that lies outside of that. 

Another part of the problem, and this is especially true for me, is that we believe that we’re all unique and special and the only ones who are experiencing these feelings. We see ourselves as the lead player in our own show and everybody else is a supporting actor. By simply observing our feelings rather than buying into them, we can avoid this innate narcissism and stop the cycle of anxiety.