A meditation teacher's 4 tips for calming down and refocusing in just 30 seconds.

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Mindful pauses are great 'spot treatments' for times when you feel stressed but have lots to do.

Anxiety really sucks.

It was early 2015, and I was fresh off a seven-month silent meditation retreat in the Arizona desert. After months of meditating for nine hours a day, I was in a state of deep peace, and I felt like I could stay that way forever.

This is me (right) doing a Buddhist ceremony with my teacher, Culadasa, in a yurt. Photos provided by Jon Krop, unless noted, and used with permission.
Then I moved to New York City.
Maybe you can guess what happened next: The city kicked the hell out of my zen tranquility almost immediately.
My retreat had provided me with perfect, artificial conditions — silence, solitude, no real responsibilities — and life in the city was the polar opposite. I needed to find a job. I needed to find an apartment. I'd started a relationship with someone, and it was falling apart. It was just too much. I felt overwhelmed, and then the anxiety hit me hard: a feeling of being doomed, trapped in an intolerable situation.

Was I really doomed? Of course not, but that's why anxiety can be so difficult.

Anxiety takes a tough but manageable situation and convinces you that it's unbearable and unfixable, a disaster.
I tried to use my new-found meditation skills to relieve my anxiety, but it didn’t work. Instead, I felt betrayed by my own meditation practice; after all that training, I couldn't handle basic, everyday life?
Then I remembered two pieces of advice:
“Discomfort avoidance is the common thread that binds all anxiety problems together.” — John Forsyth, Ph.D., and Georg Eifert, Ph.D., psychologists specializing in anxiety
"Short moments, many times.” — My meditation teacher, the Tibetan master Tsoknyi Rinpoche (and a zillion other Tibetan masters; this is very old advice)

These two insights combined revealed my solution: I needed to turn toward my difficulties and not flinch away from them. (Yeah, I know, easier said than done.) I also needed a bite-sized way to do that so I could deal with my anxiety right away in the moments it arose.

That was when I started using this thing called a "mindful pause."

A mindful pause is meditation but not in a scary, "oh my god, how can I wipe my mind clear for 30 minutes" kind of way. Studies show that meditation can reduce stress and anxiety, and even in 30 seconds, the mindful pause lets you experience that firsthand. One study even found that meditation shrinks the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for stress, anxiety, and fear. Hell yeah.

Basically, the mindful pause is a great "spot treatment" for times when you feel stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed but have lots to do.
It involves taking 30 seconds to tune into your own body, and you can do it anywhere. You can be sitting, standing, lying down, whatever. Plus, no one will even know that you're meditating. When you're spinning out into an anxiety loop, sometimes you just need to interrupt the process. Inserting a pause gives you the opportunity to collect yourself.
Here’s how it works:

1. Take a deep breath.

Take a slow inhale, filling your lungs from bottom to top. Inhale into your lower belly and then fill upward through your mid-torso and chest.
This will help you take advantage of the well-documented connection between breath and mood. By slowing and deepening your breathing, you can actually create feelings of relaxation and calm.

2. Turn toward your body.

Open your attention to the sensations in your body. Let yourself notice whatever comes up: warmth, coolness, tingling, pressure, or the touch of clothing. There's no need to evaluate the sensations as "good" or "bad." Itching is simply itching. Coolness is simply coolness.

If you notice a complex array of sensations: perfect. If all you notice is the feeling of your butt on the chair: also perfect.

 Next Tips: A meditation teacher's 4 tips for calming down and refocusing in just 30 seconds. (2)

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