How Meditating Helps in Dealing with Fear
'I have this theory that when you lose it all, that's when you can start again. So when I feel I've lost my spirit, I sit down and close my eyes and do some Meditation.'
Justin Timberlake
How Meditation helps in Dealing with Physical Effects of Fears
Scientific research has proved beyond any doubt that relaxation techniques can break through the fight-flight or stress reaction. The most well-known of these are: autogenous training, progressive relaxation, breathing techniques, hypnosis, auto-suggestion, Visualization, Yoga, and Meditation. After Dr. Benson's important research done at Harvard, it was already known in the seventies that Meditation brings about the opposite reaction of the fight-or-flight reaction. When we meditate, our breathing, our muscle tension, and our blood pressure decrease, we often have a tingling feeling in our skin and rumblings in our stomach (the result of an increase in the blood supply). We also often feel little aches because there is a decrease in the production of stress hormones. This means that we can use Meditation or similar relaxation techniques to neutralize the stress reaction.
Meditation goes further than the other methods mentioned above. In the first place, Meditation teaches us how to listen to ourselves better. We can observe our body and our mind so that we will soon recognize the fight-flight reaction. For instance, think about our breathing: an excellent indicator of how body and mind feel at a certain moment. When we are better able to recognize stress caused by fear, we can easily do something about it. Meditation also teaches us to be attentive, to accept, not to judge, and to be highly conscious of what happens around us. These are skills that can help us a lot to learn how to deal with stress and fears better, instead of reacting to them.
Scientific research has demonstrated that people who meditate recover much faster from a stress reaction. For people who often find themselves in a state of excitement and tension, this is good news. The latest brain scan technology has proved that Meditation not only trains our mind but also permanently changes its functioning. People who meditate regularly do not show the fight-flight reaction so often. This means that they do not get irritated or upset so easily compared to people who do not meditate. Being in a fight-or-flight state for long periods of time is more and more often viewed as one of the main causes of Western diseases that are related to people's wealth, professions, and stress. This state of being too over-taxed for very long periods of time costs a lot of energy, it has a negative influence on physical processes, it overburdens certain parts of our body and has a strong effect on our emotional well-being.
How Meditation helps in Dealing with Mental Effects of Fears
Fears and phobias are actually the result of not being able to control your reactions to thoughts. This means that Meditation can probably mean a lot to you. Meditating teaches us that we do not have to feel anxious all the time, that fear is only a temporary state of mind, that we do not coincide with our fears, that even when we are scared we can feel happy and that perhaps we are more in control of ourselves and our state of mind than we are inclined to think.
Research done by J. Kabat Zinn of the University of Massachusetts shows that Meditation can bring about great improvement as regards to the suffering of people who have been advised to seek professional help for their fears and panic attacks. The patients felt that they could better cope with their feelings of panic. It also turned out that the fears and the physical reactions became less severe as regards to their frequency and seriousness. The improvement did not disappear after the eight week stress reduction programme was finished (this programme is based on Meditation).
 When we meditate regularly and begin to apply the philosophy behind Meditation in our daily lives, we will suffer less from unnecessary, unpleasant, and harmful trains of thought. We will live more in the NOW. When you observe and accept the problem in the NOW, our perspective becomes wider, it changes and it becomes easier to accept our problems. When we manage to see things in their proper perspective, we can analyze them better because we can look at a problem clearly and without prejudice. We become witnesses and only then does insight really get a chance. Then you will come to see that suffering, pain, fears, or problems are really just a means or a signal to lead us to the underlying truth. In this process, we use our brain instead of letting our brain use us. That is true power!
When, by means of focus and concentration during our Meditations, we develop our consciousness further, we are not going to direct our attention in a condemning manner on the fears themselves. When you are aware of the fears and their consequences, you are a part of the situation, you can influence what happens, you have a number of options and you can cope with the situation more successfully. This means that we must develop our attention and our focus to create this level of consciousness. When we meditate, we train ourselves by means of focus and concentration to be now and for ever willfully in the present. This means that we train exactly those skills that we need to deal with fears instead of being subconsciously moved along by them.
Meditation also gives us confidence. Once you have learned how to cope with fears, panic attacks, and phobias by techniques like Meditation, you will discover that this kind of attacks happen less frequently. A reduction of 10 to 20% of fear or stress may often be enough to prevent a real panic attack.
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