Acceptance Meditation for Anxiety

About This Meditation

One of the most counterintuitive discoveries in anxiety research is that trying to eliminate anxiety often makes it worse. The more you fight, resist, or suppress anxious feelings, the stronger they tend to become—a phenomenon psychologists call the rebound effect. The acceptance meditation for anxiety takes the opposite approach: instead of trying to get rid of anxiety, you learn to make room for it. This practice is rooted in Acceptance and Commitment practice, developed by psychologist Steven Hayes, which has accumulated substantial evidence showing that acceptance-based approaches produce better outcomes for anxiety than control-based approaches. The central principle is radical acceptance—not approval or resignation, but a willingness to have the experience you are having without adding a layer of resistance on top of it. When you stop fighting anxiety, something remarkable happens: the anxiety itself often decreases, because much of what you experience as anxiety is actually resistance to anxiety. The original anxious sensation might be a flutter in your chest. The resistance adds frustration about the flutter, worry about what the flutter means, anger that you are anxious again, and fear that it will never end. Remove the resistance, and you are left with just the flutter—which is often quite manageable. This twenty-minute practice teaches the art of dropping resistance and making room for difficult feelings, fundamentally changing your relationship with anxiety from adversarial to accepting.

More Anxiety Relief Meditations