
Getting goal-ready: how mindfulness can help you tackle anything
Tackling goals—whether at work, at home, or in fitness—can be challenging. But if you take care of the mind, it can help you take care of everything else.
I suppose what lead me to Headspace was my car accident in 2012. I always considered myself a nervous person and had experienced many panic attacks during my teens, but nothing comparable to the way my mental state turned for the worst after that accident. I was having a panic attack while driving when it happened, so naturally I started to associate driving with sheer fear. Instead of dealing with my anxiety and driving I completely ignored it and made excuses to myself and those around me.
Because I was ignoring anxiety in one aspect of my life, it began to quickly creep into other parts as well. It became a pattern that whenever panic/anxiety would pop up in one part of my life, I would resist it and then immediately avoid it afterwards. It got so bad that there was a time I could barely leave the house to walk to the mailbox down the street with fear of having a major panic attack (I was basically an agoraphobic). Panic attacks and anxiety had clouded over everything in my life; there wasn’t a moment that wasn’t used to anticipate every outcome or to argue with my own thoughts and feelings. I walked around in a fog of anxiety, completely at the mercy of my thoughts and feelings. It was exhausting.
The author of this post is an editorial contributor to Headspace. These are their views, experiences and results and theirs alone. This contributor was not paid for their writing.