Mindfulness and EMDR: Your Path to Peace of Mind




Anxiety can feel overwhelming. The more you try to control it, the worse it gets. You try to make it better by avoiding the things that are making you anxious. Then you realize your life is becoming smaller and more limited because of it. When you start to feel like a prisoner of anxiety, how do you find the way out?


The Path to Peace of Mind

Together, mindfulness tools and EMDR therapy can be used effectively to alleviate anxiety and create your individual path to peace of mind:

  1. Mindfulness tools help you manage anxiety in the present

  2. EMDR therapy (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) helps clear the roots of anxiety from the past


Part I - Mindfulness Tools to Alleviate Anxiety in the Present

There are three points where we can intervene to alleviate anxiety: thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. For example, let's say that getting negative feedback from your boss makes you terribly anxious. Your thoughts might be, "I'm totally incompetent," "They're all gonna figure out I'm a fraud," or "I'm not as good at this job as everyone else here." You might then have anxious feelings in your body, such as heightened heart rate, shallow breathing, or sweaty palms. You behavior might be to berate yourself for doing something so stupid. In this case, putting yourself down is your automatic reaction to your own anxious thoughts and feelings. and so it is called your “reactive behavior.”


A current situation may trigger anxious thoughts and anxious feelings in your body. Your "reactive behavior" is your automatic reaction to your own thoughts and feelings.


With mindfulness, you can learn to take a pause before the reactive behavior: