Category: Anxiety

Escape from worries about past and future and find it easier to focus on the present moment.

Just ten minutes of mindfulness each day is effective against repetitive anxious thoughts, research reveals.

The practice can also help stop your mind from wandering.

People in the study who meditated for only a short period found it easier to focus on their present-moment external experience rather than their internal thoughts.

Mr Mengran Xu, the study’s first author, said:

“Our results indicate that mindfulness training may have protective effects on mind wandering for anxious individuals.

We also found that meditation practice appears to help anxious people to shift their attention from their own internal worries to the present-moment external world, which enables better focus on a task at hand.”

82 participants in the study either did 10 minutes meditation or listened to an audio story.

Those who meditated were better able to stay focused on a subsequent task they were given.

Mr Xu said:

“Mind wandering accounts for nearly half of any person’s daily stream of consciousness.

For people with anxiety, repetitive off-task thoughts can negatively affect their ability to learn, to complete tasks, or even function safely.

It would be interesting to see what the impacts would be if mindful meditation was practiced by anxious populations more widely.”

Studies have also found that mindfulness meditation has many benefits, including reducing depression and pain, accelerating cognition, increasing creativity, debiasing the mind and much more.

• Now try these 10 mindfulness exercises.

The study was published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition (Xu et al., 2017).

The ultra-brief test can help identify an anxiety problem quickly.

Almost 20 percent of people who visit their doctor have an anxiety disorder, research finds.

And just two questions are often enough to suggest there is a problem that needs to be addressed:

1. In the past two weeks, have you felt nervous, anxious or on edge?
2. In the past two weeks, have you been unable to stop or control worrying?

There are four possible responses for these two questions: Not at all, several days, more than half the days, nearly every day.

The more frequently someone is worrying  and unable to stop or control it (i.e. every day or half the days), the more chance there is a problem.

Dr Kurt Kroenke, the study’s first author, said:

“Anxiety often manifests as a physical symptom like pain, fatigue, or inability to sleep, so it is not surprising that one out of five patients who come to a doctor’s office with a physical complaint have anxiety.”

The study was carried out on 965 people in 15 primary care clinics.

Dr Kroenke said:

“Doctors like to quantify things.

We can objectively measure blood pressure, blood sugar or cholesterol, but symptoms of anxiety can be missed in a busy primary care practice.

The seven-question GAD-7 and remarkably even the two-question “ultra brief” version gives the physician a tool to quantify the patient’s symptoms — sort of a lab test for anxiety.”

Clearly these two questions on their own are not enough for a diagnosis, but they can help identify when there is a need for further help.

The study was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine (Kroenke et al., 2007).