On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown? Try Meditating To Calm Yourself Down

Daily life is filled with stress. Your job, your family, even your friends can cause you stress. Sometimes it can feel like the stress in your life is utterly overwhelming.

Depression and anxiety are on the rise even among teens, possible owing to the pressures of current events, worries about the future and the struggle to make a living that actually supports your family. For many people, stress is just a fact of life and lost of people ignore the warning signs about the physical toll is it taking on them for many years. Stress and anxiety will eventually catch up with you, and it can make itself known in a variety of unpleasant and debilitating ways.

If you have ever felt like this and have not known what to do to help yourself feel better, you are not alone. Many people struggle daily with anxiety and stress that is affecting their overall health and well-being.  For those people, life can feel depressing, scary and lonely with no resolution in sight.

What is a Nervous Break Down?

A nervous breakdown is an acute experience that is classified as an acute, time-limited mental disorder that is characterized by stress-induced anxiety, depression or disassociation happening to a formerly functional individual.  Nervous breakdowns can happen to anyone and can be triggered by job stress, parenting worries, family chaos or any other stressful life event.

Even if you are not experiencing a true nervous breakdown, the anxiety and stress that you are dealing with might be making you feel sick, tired or even angry every day. For those people who are struggling against this type of problem, sometimes professional help is not enough.

The biggest thing that someone dealing with stress and anxiety needs to be able to do is to calm down. This can seem like an impossible feat when you are in the throes of an anxiety attack, but there are some great skills that can be learned from meditation that can help people dealing with crippling anxiety and stress to gain control of their emotions and their lives.

How Meditation Can Calm You Down From A Nervous Breakdown

Meditation has been proven to actually re-wire portions of the brain. Meditation has been proven to actually shrink the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that is responsible for your fight or flight mechanism.  Once the amygdala is calmed down, many people are suddenly able to see clearly that what felt threatening to them before was not so scary after all and removing the amygdala from your analysis of new experiences can help you to welcome them with positivity instead of fear.

Meditation focuses on calming the mind and teaching your brain to look at experiences in the present without framing them through knowledge of the past. If you have had a bad experience with something or someone in the past, your brain is inclined to hold onto this bad experience as its main source of information about that type of event. Your brain will basically create a set-point that is built around past fear and stress and will not allow you to experience the moment you are in accurately.

Meditation can help you learn to remove those negative events from your presence of mind and allow you to simply accept the things that are happening to you in your daily life as new experiences that are not associated with any emotions as of yet. This re-framing of experiences can allow you to grow your awareness of incorrect thinking and allow you to be your own brain mechanic.

One of the most useful meditation skills for calming yourself down is mantra meditation. This involves the repetition of a phrase such as, “I am safe and I am healthy”, over and over until your brain starts to calm down.  This mantra of positive thoughts will overcome your brain’s desire to focus on negative things or to speed too quickly for clarity and allow you to calm down.

Mindfulness is another great tool when you are meditating for calmness. Mindfulness allows you to dismiss all of your thoughts through focus on the body only and the present moment only. Reducing your world view to this small set of inputs can really help to calm a racing mind and heart and allow you to reassess things that seemed upsetting only moments before. Sometimes, once your brain is calm, you can re-classify a scary memory as something that you only interpreted incorrectly.

If you tend to experience physical discomfort and tension when you are anxious, progressive muscle relaxation can help you. You simply start at the top of the head or the bottom of the feet and travel mentally through your body, relaxing each body part until you are calm. This is a great trick for those who struggle with insomnia related to anxiety as well.

Last but not least, visualization can be a great tool to allow your brain to find a calm state.  Visualization is particularly helpful for those whose brains tend to speed too fast for coherent thought. To use visualization, you simply imagine something happening in your mind’s eye. A classic example is a stream that is running by you and you place your thoughts onto the leaves in the stream and allow them to slip away. Freed of your anxious thoughts, your body can calm down enough for you to simply be aware of yourself in the moment.

Conclusion: Meditation For Nervous Breakdown

Being able to harness your thoughts and your body’s reactions to them can allow you to gain control over your anxiety and can also help your brain to heal.  Removing the negative connections that your brain has made to events and people in your life will allow you to greet those events or people with an open mind and then deal with any future difficulties related to them with ease. Being able to calm your thoughts is a very powerful tool for overall health and well-being.