Frequently asked questions

• Does guided meditation for everyday anxiety work?

  Anxiety is a cognitive state connected to an inability to regulate emotions. By using a guided meditation for anxiety, you familiarize yourself with thoughts and storylines that induce everyday anxiety. You learn to see them, identify them, and let them go within an understanding that thoughts do not define anyone. Realizing this means you give thoughts less weight. Within this newfound perspective, you are then able to gradually change your relationship with everyday anxiety, to the extent that it no longer has the same hold over you. One study shows that eight weeks of using the Headspace app results in a 19% decrease in anxiety symptoms.

• How to meditate for everyday anxiety

  Sitting still and being with the mind can sometimes feel like the last thing you want to do when feeling anxious. But it’s by pausing, breathing, and meditating that you can actually stop the loop of anxious thoughts. This “force stop” will actually stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system and counter any stress response. When it comes to anxiety meditation, a popular one among Headspace members is this “Managing Anxiety” course, showing you how to breathe through everyday anxiety, release that anxiety, and then manage it, day to day. And as with any guided meditations for anxiety, the key, when anxious thoughts arise, is to return your focus to the breath. This is practice — anchoring your mind to the breath, not the loop of thinking that fuels anxiousness.

• How does meditation help everyday anxiety?

  Located deep within the brain’s limbic system are two almond-sized nuclei called the amygdala — these are essentially tiny processing chips that govern our senses, memories, decisions, moods, and reactivity. The amygdala is our emotional thermostat. As with all thermostats, it is susceptible to certain forces, and certainly everyday anxiety. The more anxiety we experience, the more disproportionate the reaction. What’s more, the drip, drip, drip effect of constant anxiousness can reshape the structure and neural pathways of the brain — a process called neuroplasticity. So it follows, then, that a meditation for everyday anxiety would have an opposite, more beneficial effect. In fact, studies using MRI scans show that the amygdala shrinks in response to a meditation practice. As the amygdala reduces in size, the prefrontal cortex — the area of the brain governing our awareness — becomes thicker. And so by meditating, we increase our capacity to manage anxiety. The more we practice guided meditations for everyday anxiety, the more we build this skill for mental resilience.

• What meditation is good for everyday anxiety?

  Our “Managing Anxiety” course is designed to help you cultivate a new perspective on the everyday anxiety you experience. It’s essentially an anxiety meditation every day for 30 days, teaching you to have awareness of whatever arises, and then how to move through it, and manage it. The more you learn about everyday anxiety, and the role the mind has in fueling it, the more you can frame it differently; and the more you can do that, the less power everyday anxiety has over you. A body scan exercise is also a good, faster way of dropping out of the head and into the body to calm yourself down.