Chronic anxiety is more than feeling on edge. When you’re experiencing an anxiety disorder, psychological and physical feelings of fear and stress prevent you from engaging in life the way you truly want to. If you feel like your anxiety has more control over you than you do over it, mindfulness can help.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is just what it sounds like—when your mind is tuned in. Mindfulness is used a lot when talking about wellness—in psychology and meditation, for example—because turning your mind toward the present moment can help you to better understand your thoughts and feelings.

How can Mindfulness Help?

Mindfulness can help you get control of your life in a couple of different ways.

Often times in the moments when your anxiety is most acute, you focus so much on your racing heart and sweaty palms that you begin to feel more anxious. It can feel like you’re trapped in that moment with your fear.

Mindfulness helps prevent you from folding your anxiety over on itself and multiplying your negative feelings. When you begin feeling anxious, instead of reacting with more anxiety, allowing yourself to stay in that moment experiencing what your mind and body are going through, can paradoxically help reduce your anxious reactions over time.

Facing your anxious feelings head on can be a more difficult route to take in the moment than trying to put your feelings on mute. In the long run, however, mindfulness aids you in understanding what makes you you feel anxious, what your anxiety feels like, and what does and doesn’t help resolve it. When you practice mindfulness, you respond to your negative thoughts and engage with them, rather than letting those bad feelings run your life.

Sometimes, when you’re trying to control your anxiety, you might frantically attempt to replace negative thoughts with different ones. Mindfulness will, instead, teach you to change how you think about your feelings. For example, if you experience social anxiety, tuning into your body’s reaction to a social situation can help you realize your biggest social fears really can’t come true. Instead of pushing thoughts away, you’re coming to a healthier understanding of your fears and how you relate to the world around you.

One important component of coping with anxiety using mindfulness is sorting through those anxious moments non-judgmentally. The goal is to better understand yourself, and that understanding is what can enable you to feel better. When you’re being mindful you don’t have to chastise yourself or feel bad about feeling afraid.

A big help in getting the upper hand in your struggle with anxiety is realizing that you come by your feelings honestly. Although your fears might not make sense to you, environmental and biological factors led to your feeling this way. Many people experience anxiety. When you start to see that there’s nothing wrong with you, you can slowly begin to face situations with a greater sense of calm.

With mindfulness, you can defeat anxiety’s biggest cheerleader—avoidance. If your social anxiety makes going to the mall a frightening event for you, not going to the mall reinforces the idea in your mind that the mall is scary and should be avoided. Similarly, avoiding your anxious thoughts can make them loom even larger in the back of your mind as something frightening and unresolvable.

Because anxiety is so future-focused, practicing mindfulness in other areas of your life can also help reduce anxious feelings. For instance, if you practice staying mindful at work, keeping your focus on what you’re working on in that moment can prevent you from giving yourself over to worry.