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I don't have it anymore. I think that anxiety is just a symptom of being disconnected from the body - just not having proper body awareness. I think that many people get pulled into anxiety (at least those visiting this site) through their work (and as for the general population, ever-present infinite scroll feeds have the same effect). When you spend a lot of time in front of a computer, you don't have to use your body at all, you get sucked more and more into the intellectual world and the body awareness you were born with gradually erodes. Now you have no control of your body, which means your emotional control is lower as well. You are more prone to the effect of random thoughts that create anxiety and don't know how to pull yourself out. That was me in my teenage years and early 20s. At some point I started doing Zen meditation (and not just like 20 min / day, way more). The basics of Zen practice are basically body awareness, being mindful of the surroundings and dismissing thoughts / calming down the mind - in other words, learning naked attention. My problem with anxiety was that I was sometimes hyperventilating when walking alone outside. What did that look like internally? Drowning in my own thoughts, no awareness of the body, hyperventilating, poor, fog-like awareness of the outside. Pursuing Zen aggressively allowed me to fix everything about that internal imbalance, it took some time and effort though. Maybe I have just learned to ignore it (by refocusing on the practice) and the negative pathways in the forest of the brain grew over, that surely is at least part of what happened, but I also do experience slight anxiety comeback from time to time (but nothing near hyperventilating) and I am able to defuse it in 20 minutes - and it always follows the realization that, oh I'm just too much in my head, I don't have proper body awareness, so I just focus on that again, to focus on the outside, to bring my centre of attention to hara, I start to feel much more control of my body and anxiety cannot co-exist in that state. The gist of it is that, Zen practice or not, anxiety is a physiological state and you can exert a lot of control on your physiological and emotional state through regular practice in the long term. I can only speak from my own experience, but I'm pretty confident that this would work for the majority of cases but the most severe perhaps. Of course, we would never ever see this is as the mainstream cure for anxiety - it's too much effort (10000x ?) vs. a quick-fix med. But if you are really really determined to fix this and put a lot of time into it, you probably can. To me, my day to day internal state is just as important as general health, I have long term goals but I live for the moment and cannot envision going through negative mental states on a daily basis, I would just do everything to fix it, and having it done (and continuing to do it - practicing Zen, use it or lose it), I would say without a doubt that was one of the best time investments in my entire life (past and future). |