Can meditation really reduce your stress and anxiety? Yes, but not by making the stress go away.
People assume I am relaxed. I am not. I get stressed and I get overwhelmed a lot. I sat at a wedding next to people I did not know and my body did the whole thing, blood pulled to the muscles, digestion stopped, pancreas working overtime, all for a room with no danger in it. Meditation will not sort out your boss. What it does is let you catch the stress early, while it is still small, before you stack the next one on top.
One thing to try: Sit, rest your arms on your legs, and watch the breath breathe you. It does it all night without your help.
In this episode
(1:38) Since I started meditating I feel it less
(2:51) Thirty seconds of waiting and out comes the phone
(3:49) The wedding, and a table of strangers
(6:40) What my body did with no danger in the room
(9:14) It will not fix your workplace
(10:18) Catching it early, before the comfort eating
(12:43) Try this with me now
(14:05) Just watch it. It breathes all night without you
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Can meditation really reduce your stress?
Yes, and not in the way people expect. It will not make the stress go away. It lets you catch it early, while it is still small enough to do something about.
The heart of it
Stress is a ladder. Most of us only notice we are on it around the fourth rung.
Meditation will not fix your boss, your bank or your workload.
What changes is how the outside world lands on the inside.
People assume I am relaxed. I get stressed and overwhelmed a good deal, and about every three or four months it builds until I want to run, which is quite a thing for somebody who is paralysed. Curtains shut, door locked, I have had enough of this.
Here is the moment I understood it. I was at a wedding, near the front, in a small warm room, sitting among people I did not know. I had been there about an hour.
I started to warm up. My breathing changed. My heart went. I was completely certain I was about to pass out in front of all of them, and I said nothing to anybody.
Months later I found out what a panic attack was.
What my body had actually done was prepare me for a fight to the death. Blood thickened in case I got cut. Digestion stopped. Blood pulled from my hands and legs into the muscles for running. My pancreas produced the glucose of about three chocolate bars in a few seconds.
All for a room with a bride in it.
The reason you feel every bit of that is that there is nothing to fight. In a real emergency you are far too busy to notice your own stomach.
Had I been a meditator that day I would have thought, I am somewhere unfamiliar, I am warm, my breathing has changed, this is anxiety. And it would very likely have stopped there.
One small thing to try
Sit for a few minutes and watch your breath, and do it with a soft focus rather than a hard one.
Breathe in calm, breathe out relax. Invite the body to let go rather than order it to. Do not manage the breathing at all. It has been doing that all night without your help.
Then let whatever is there come up and be looked at gently. That is where the clarity comes from, and clarity is what lets you act.
Most of what arrives does not need doing anything with. It is a child tugging your sleeve wanting to be heard, and once you say thank you, I have noticed, it goes quiet.
Questions people ask
Do I need to meditate for an hour a day?
No. Fifteen or twenty minutes once a day plus the habit of checking in during the day gets you most of the benefit. The check ins matter more than the length.
Is it wrong to be stressed sometimes?
Not at all. Deadlines are real and sometimes a bit of pressure is appropriate. The damage comes from stacking one on another without noticing, until you are four rungs up wondering how you got there.
Why is disconnecting so tempting?
Because it works briefly. A drink, a night out, anything that makes the feeling stop. What it does not do is deal with the cause, so the pile is still there in the morning and slightly higher.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
meditation-how-to · stress · anxiety · overwhelm
Read the transcript
So why does meditation reduce stress?
It's quite a simple question, really.
What a lot of people don't know about me is I really do get
stressed, and I suffer from overwhelm a lot.
And people say, yeah, but you're so relaxed and you're so chilled,
and you never seem to let anything get to you.
Well, the truth is, I do get really stressed, and I do get overwhelmed.
And what people don't see, and they certainly don't see it so much
on my podcast or on Facebook, is they never see the full picture.
You never see the full picture of someone else's life.
And my overwhelm creeps up about every three or four months,
and I want to run.
You know, it sounds funny saying, I want to run.
I'm paralyzed from just below my neck.
And, yeah, I just want to turn my back on it and get away from everything.
I want to draw the curtains, lock the door, sit down on the front
room floor.
I cannot cope with this anymore.
I'm tired, I'm overwhelmed, and I don't want to do it anymore.
Enough is enough.
And yes, I feel like that quite often, not all the time, but
I do feel like that.
But here's the thing.
Since I've been meditating, I feel like that less.
And here's why.
On today's podcast, I will share why and the kind of techniques
I use in meditation that will help you to reduce your stress and
anxiety.
But before that, I want to say thank you to my patrons and to my
supporters on Facebook.
You are awesome.
Without you, I would not have been able to upgrade my microphone.
So you've got a better sounding cooler, Steven.
And for anybody new to this podcast, I'm Stephen Webb, and I'm
paralyzed in a wheelchair.
I have been for nearly 30 years.
And I use my suffering as a stepping stone to find more inner
peace and help to spread inner peace around the world.
And this podcast is Stillness in the Storms.
So let's get on with the show.
Stress, anxiety.
You know, they seem to be a normal part of society now.
It's just life.
We're just all stressed.
We're busier.
Well, we are busy.
We don't have a moment peace.
If we have a moment peace, we pick up our phones and start scrolling.
If we're waiting for the train for just 30 seconds, we whip our
phone out or we do something else.
You know, I smoked.
I have smoked for the best part of my life.
And when I did not have a phone or anything like that, I would
light up a cigarette.
It almost Seems like we don't want to sit and do nothing.
If we sit and do nothing, we let boredom creep in and we don't
know what to do with ourselves.
And here's the thing.
We don't know what's going on inside of our bodies.
We don't know what's going on inside of our minds and how our emotions
are if we don't give any time to have a look at them.
I can remember I was sat at a wedding, and I was one of the ones
in the.
Near the front of the wedding.
It was a really small room, and we all sat in like, a square.
And just in front of me was the square where the bride and groom
were going to come in.
And I didn't know most of the people at the wedding.
I was sat next to my partner, and I did not know any of them any
more than, you know, that day.
And people to my right was the same, and a few dignitaries that
I'd never seen before.
And I was sat there and I was.
It was warm.
It was, you know, quite stuffy.
And we've been sat there about an hour.
And while I sat there, I was starting to feel a bit anxious.
I could feel myself warming up.
And then my breathing started changing.
And then I thought I was going to pass out.
I thought I was going to pass out.
I thought I was going to, you know, die there.
In the next 10 minutes, my heart started beating out through
my chest.
I say my hands and legs started to go dead.
They're already dead anyway, because I'm paralyzed.
But I'm sure they would have felt dead if I.
If they weren't paralyzed.
And I just.
I didn't say anything to my partner, but I was sitting there
really thinking, I am going to pass out any minute.
This is not right.
Something's not right in my body.
Some things really.
And little did I know I was having a panic attack.
I didn't know anything about panic attacks.
I never heard the phrase before.
I didn't even know I was someone that gets stressed or overwhelmed.
But there I was in this room, and I had the image in my head of
me passing out in front of all these people, ending up laying on
the floor, my bum stuck up in the air, you know, exposing that
tattoo that I've got on the bottom of my back, the one that says,
if you can read this, please place back in chair.
I'm joking.
I haven't got that tattoo.
Really.
If you could want to have.
Oh, it'd be funny.
And I wouldn't Even feel it if they did that for me, you know, if
you, if you could read this tattoo, please place back in chair.
Oh, anyway, right.
Where was I?
Too?
Yeah.
I had this image of me lying on the floor in front of me and I
just realized I'd had a panic attack a few months later.
It was like, oh, that's what a panic attack is.
Here's the thing.
I had no idea that in that moment my body and myself thought
I was under attack.
I thought at that moment my body done the equivalent to as if
I was going to be eaten by two saber toothed tigers.
My heart started beating faster, my blood started thickening,
my breathing started to become deeper.
My body was preparing for a fight of its life.
My body was preparing just in case I got cut, that it could heal
the cut.
It stopped digesting my food.
It stopped putting the blood to my hands and legs.
They put all the blood to the muscles just in case I needed to
run.
My, my pancreas was producing enough glucose of the equivalent
of two or three chocolate bars, all in those few seconds.
And normally if you're really under attack, you don't worry about
the feelings because you're so in that fight, flight or freeze scenario
that you're not feeling them.
You know, if you're fighting someone, you're not feeling that
your belly's feeling a bit off or your breathing's a bit heavier
and your heart's beating out your chest.
But there I was, I was being attacked by saber toothed tigers
without even knowing it, and my body was doing that same thing.
So where does meditation come into helping this?
In meditation, unless you're meditating that you want to communicate
with aliens or you're trying to find some blissful, wonderful
state, you know, I'm not talking about that kind of meditation.
I'm talking about the kind of meditation that you're trying to
reduce your suffering.
You're trying to wake up to what's real.
You're trying to really improve your life.
So when we sit in that kind of meditation, we observe our feelings,
we observe our thoughts and we recognize them and we're a bit inquisitive
about them.
Why am I feeling like this?
Where is this feeling coming from?
What is the information in the feeling?
And now, because I do that, because I meditate several times
a week, sometimes several times a day, and I try to bring meditation
into my normal day, I now recognize when my body's feeling
a certain way.
I recognize when I'm starting to feel overwhelmed because I can
see the Signs.
So that day when I was sat at that wedding, I would have sat there.
If I was a meditator at that point I would have gone, ha, I'm
feeling a little anxious.
I am amongst people that I don't know.
My breathing's going a bit heavier, that's okay.
And I would have recognized the process.
I would not have gone down the or.
It's highly unlikely that I would have gone down that same scenario
of the body coming under attack by a couple of saber toothed
tigers.
So meditation really helps you to reduce stress.
It won't get rid of the stress out your life.
You've got to deal with the things that's giving you stress.
You know, it won't sort out your workplace.
You won't meditate and go into work and your boss will sudden suddenly
be kind and compassionate and lovely towards you and suddenly give
you that pay rise you're looking for.
Suddenly when you phone the bank, they're not going to suddenly
go, oh, here's $500.
When you're a little skinned.
No, it's not going to change the external world, but it changes
the way you experience the external world from an internal perspective.
It reduces the effects of what the stress give you.
And stress is like something that builds up.
So you take the first step onto the stress ladder and you're
feeling a little anxious, feeling a little stressed.
Most people can cope at that point.
And then things pile on top of you a little more and you get a little
more stressed.
You step up another one.
Now then what meditation does is recognize you on the ladder.
Oh, I'm on the ladder.
I'm starting to feel stressed.
I'm starting to really get annoyed and short tempered with people
and I'm starting to feel overwhelmed.
And then instead of just automatically jumping to the comfort
things of comfort eating or avoidance or drinking or whatever
we do to try to avoid the stress.
Because what we're doing is running around trying to disconnect
from the stress instead of dealing with the stress and recognizing
it.
So what we do is we recognize the stress.
Ah, I'm starting to feel stressed.
Why is that?
And sometimes it's okay to be stressed.
Sometimes you got a couple of deadlines at work and the boss, rightly
so, is on your back a little bit.
He might be able to do it a little bit nicer way, rightly so
things need to be done.
Perhaps you haven't done that work you needed to do or perhaps
you haven't completed something.
You know, whatever the reason, you know, perhaps people are off
sick and you've got an extra workload on you and they're relying
on you, things like that.
So it's okay to have a bit of stress.
What it is, is when we stack it on top of each other and we don't
recognize it, we don't see it.
So meditation, just by simply observing our thoughts, watching
them come and go, not recognizing that we don't have to
do anything with them, or recognizing why they are there, automatically
has the outcome of reducing our stress.
I hope that makes sense.
I hope that makes sense.
Just by recognizing and becoming aware of something, you
can do something about it.
Very often we get stressed and we try to disconnect because we think
that's the only way of feeling better.
And yes, having a drink, having a night out, yes, having sex,
all those other things do give us that little bit of freedom from
stress temporarily, but really they're just adding the more chemicals
on top of each other and they're adding to the stress.
In the long run, you just end up more stressed.
So at the beginning of the podcast, I promise you that I would
tell you what I do, some of the techniques I use in my meditations,
and it'll probably disappoint you because you may be looking for
something profound and something amazing.
It's really not.
I sit and I become aware of my breath.
And we can do this now do this with me.
So just take a breath and let your arms go down either side of
you and rest them on top of your legs.
Don't think about grounding.
Don't think about all the other meditation things.
All we're going to do is sit and watch our breath.
I'm breathing in and I'm breathing out.
And invite your body to relax.
Don't tell it to relax.
Don't like, tell it to speed up its breath or slow down.
Don't tell it to do anything.
Just invite it to be there with you now.
And as you invite it, just allow it to happen.
So breathe in, calm.
Breathe out.
Relax.
When you breathe out, relax.
Just allow your body to relax.
You're just giving it permission.
You cannot tell it.
You don't have to do anything with your breathing.
Just observe your breathing.
Just watch it.
Just sit back and watch your breathing.
Because it breathes all night and does it all day.
When you're not involved, when you're busy thinking about your to
do list or your ice cream or your wonderful partner or your intimate
moments.
Whatever you're dreaming and whatever you're thinking about could
be your food, your Body's doing the breathing, so we just become
aware of what's coming up, what's going on in our bodies right
now, what's going on in our minds.
And the idea is not to focus too much on your breath, not to focus
too much on your thinking.
It's to have a soften with it.
So imagine observing your breath right now.
If you observe your breath, just watch it.
I'm breathing in, I'm breathing out.
But do it from a soft focus, not as in a rigid.
Right.
That's a breath.
Ah, A gentle breath.
Ah, A gentle thought.
When we soften our gaze on it, we can allow whatever's going on
inside of our bodies, whether it's a stress or whether we're worried
about something, we can allow it to come up and we can soften that
focus on it without it affecting us too much.
And it's almost like we're not focused on it.
And we gain clarity just by allowing it to be.
Very often we're pushing these things away.
And when we allow things to come up and we gain clarity on it,
we gain insight, and we gain insight to how the body works, what
is going on in our lives, what's going on in the world, why
are we feeling stressed?
And with that information, you can do something about really is
that important?
And like, we just sat there now and we've come out of the meditation
now, but meditation's around all the time.
You know, it doesn't stop when you stand up off the cushion.
Just, you know, if you're stressed out during the day, take
a breath.
Why am I stressed?
What's going on right now?
What can I take out of my life right now?
What can I do to just help this current situation?
It doesn't have to be complicated.
You don't have to have a.
You know, it would help if you meditated one hour every morning
and you had brilliant techniques.
Yes, of course it would help.
You can get a lot of the benefit just by spending 15, 20 minutes
once a day and then just learning the technique of observing
what's going on inside, observing how you respond and how
you are seeing things and feeling things in your life.
And very often, a lot of these things you don't have to do anything
with.
They're just screaming out to go, hey, pay attention to me.
You should be really worried about this one thing.
And then you just go, oh, okay.
Thank you for bringing that to my attention.
And then it goes, that's okay.
And it disappears.
It disappears.
After weeks of like, oh, he listened to me.
It's like a child that wants to be listened to.
And that's the reality.
So I'm Stephen Webb, and this is Stillness in the Storms.
And you can head over to my website, stephenweb.com spelled with
a V. I'll repeat that so you can picture it in your head.
Picture it right now, the word Stephen with a V.1 webb.com head
over my website.
You can go and listen to all my meditations online completely
free, just clicking the meditations.
And if you're really awesome, it's not for everybody, but if it's
for someone that really wants some more inner peace, and if you
really want to transcend your anxiety and stress, consider becoming
a patron.
There's a link on my my website at the top, right next to
the meditations on that website that you visualize so brilliantly
