Dropping the Pills: Yoga and Meditation for Anxiety
Of all the things that can take over a person's life, fear and anxiety sit near the top of my list. A friend of mine lived inside both of them for four or five years before she found her way out. I'll call her Sara. For a long stretch she had no real tools to work with, just the weight of it, until she finally landed on something that worked and found her way back to feeling free. The anxiety was with her from the second she opened her eyes each morning to the moment she fell asleep. What drove most of it was rumination, the loop of thoughts that kept dropping her into fear. The question that hung over everything: could she ever treat this without pills?
She told me once that she and her husband had been doing well. They were newlyweds, both of them happy, him a sales executive at a well-regarded car company pulling in good money. On their honeymoon she asked him for one thing, that he leave work alone while they were away together. He couldn't do it. The man was a workaholic, and he kept sneaking off to his phone to check on deals. Because of that habit, he was the one who picked up the call from Sara's mother. With a single day left on the trip, he had to pass along the news: Sara's father had died two hours earlier of a heart attack. The shock hit her so hard that she broke down sobbing and then fainted.
She came to in a hospital bed. That, she said, was when she felt more helpless than at any other point in her life, because she never got the chance to speak to her father before he was gone. The next day piled more onto an already shaky situation. Her husband learned he was being let go for missing a project deadline, the deadline he'd blown while they were, of course, on their honeymoon. Sara tried to reach his boss and lay out what had happened, but it went nowhere. All of it together tipped her into what you'd probably describe as generalized anxiety disorder, along with a full nervous collapse.
She couldn't hold her focus on the part-time jobs she needed to keep the household going. Her thoughts kept stacking up, most of them fixed on what tomorrow might do to her. Watching her husband unravel made it worse, and she didn't feel she could tell him any of it, so she turned further and further inward. Eventually one of her closer friends saw where she was heading and took her to meet a respected psychiatrist who'd already been briefed on the situation. For Sara that meeting became the opening she needed, the start of an inner shift that would pull her out of the anxious state and back toward some kind of balance.
What surprised her was the direction the psychiatrist chose: treatment without medication. The first prescription was a daily practice of yoga and meditation, meant to give Sara room to rebuild herself. It took nearly a month of steady practice before she returned to anything like equilibrium. The sessions taught her how to give her body the rest it had been denied and how to let her concentration climb back to where it needed to be. Her body felt renewed, which made it possible to pick her ordinary tasks back up, and along the way her thinking grew clearer. The psychiatrist kept returning to one idea, that she had to heal herself, that no pill was going to put her mind and body back in tune. For Sara, going without medication was the road out.
He also told her to take long, slow walks in nature, along the beaches nearby, with her husband beside her for company. The open air felt calm and clean and pretty to her, and those walks were her first real steps toward noticing that the outdoors offered relief whenever stress crept in. That small habit helped bring her thoughts back into step with her work and her feelings. Then came a piece of advice that sounded backward: instead of running from her fears, she was told to go toward them, to walk into them and look for a way to turn them into something useful. Avoidance had failed her over and over, so she figured she had nothing to lose. What she noticed was that dodging the fear only pulled her lower, while meeting it head-on showed her who she actually was and how well she could handle her own emotions. She got more done, and the hard calls started coming easier.
The medication didn't vanish overnight. She was still on anxiety pills and realized they had a grip on her, because she couldn't make it through a single day without one. The yoga and meditation let her ease the dose down bit by bit, and after about a month she felt she was finished with them entirely. That's the short version of how Sara got past her fear and her anxiety. Life runs smoothly for her now. She runs a salon and spa, and her husband is back at work, these days as a bank executive. Watching what a regular routine did for her, I've come to believe almost anyone can get through this kind of thing.
-Anonymous Contributor