Just For Today Meditations for Anxiety and Depression

Hey there everybody, and welcome to today's episode, Just for today, Meditations for Anxiety and Depression. I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. Meditation has a lot of benefits. Physically, it can help us become more in tune with our bodies and where our stress is. It can help us down regulate our stress response, which can help reduce muscle tension as well as upset stomachs and pain and inflammation. It can also help us improve our sleep affectively, the way we feel emotionally. Meditation can help us reflect on the bigger picture, not just what's going wrong, which is what we tend to focus on or what we're worried about. But meditation encourages us to open our mind and open our awareness so we can notice some of the good things as well as the other things that are happening and that can give us a sense of peace. Cognitively, meditation can help us focus our thoughts so they're not all over the place. Meditation can help us quiet our mind so we can identify what we want to think on. And meditation can help us learn to more effectively control our thoughts so we aren't distracted regularly by repeatedly revisiting negative input. Environmentally, meditation can help us be more relaxed. When we're more relaxed, environments can seem more tolerable. When we're tense, environments can seem very stressful. Noises, lights, temperatures, all of those things can seem more intense and annoying when we are stressed out. Environmentally, when we have practiced meditation, those things seem to be more tolerable. We are able to cope with environmental stimulus more. Additionally, meditation opens our awareness to the environment, so we are again, not only noticing the things that need to be addressed, but also noticing the things that are amazing in our environment and relationally, meditation not only helps us become more aware and develop a stronger relationship with ourself, it also helps us recognize and become more aware of of what's going on in other people and how we impact them and how they impact us. Just for today is a term that's used a lot for different meditations. What we're really talking about is living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace. So what does that mean? That means recognizing the beauty and the wonder of the moment, enjoying the moment that we have right now. The next moment's not guaranteed. Enjoying what we have right now, using our energy in the present to move towards our goals. Recognizing that rarely is everything going to be perfect. So accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, recognizing that there's good and bad going on in our lives most of the time, there's almost always A Yin and Yang. However, we recognize that we have the strength and ability to tolerate that. And that can give us a sense of peace because we don't feel anxious or worried that it's going to overwhelm us. We recognize as we go through hardships that hey, I'm really pretty strong. I am able to handle this. This is not going to overwhelm me. So there are 12 meditations in this presentation in Just for Today. Number one. Just for Today, I will be honest with myself and have the courage to accept life as it is without trying to force everything to adjust to my desires. So the first part, I will be honest with myself. So often we live on autopilot. We just get up, we put one foot in front of the other, we do what we need to do. We don't even check in with ourself. Or worse yet, we lie to ourselves. We tell ourselves we're fine when we're really not. So just for today, I'm going to be honest with myself. And if I'm having a bad day, I'm going to say, you know what, self, you're having a bad day and you need to take steps. When you are having an off day mentally, you know, you're negative, you're depressed, you're feeling guilty about something, whatever the case may be, that's okay. But the important part is recognizing that, acknowledging it, because you can't address it, you can't improve the next moment until you are honest with yourself about what's going on. Having the courage to accept life as it is. So if you wake up, or if you're feeling guilty or sick or depressed or you and your friend had an argument, all right, I'm going to accept life as it is. And some people will call this embracing the suck and recognizing non judgmentally what's going on in the moment. Non judgmental mindfulness is so important. It is what it is. Okay? I'm not going to try to force everything to adjust to my desires. I'm not going to try to do mental gymnastics to make this okay. I am going to accept life as it is and, and I'm going to be honest with myself about how I feel and what my thoughts are about it. Number two, just for today, I will not be afraid to be happy. My happiness does not depend on what others do or say or what happens around me. It's a result of being at peace with myself and having faith in my higher power. Many people are afraid to be happy because when we're happy, we. We are raised up, if you will. And a lot of people are afraid that if they allow themselves to feel happy, then the other shoe is going to drop, so to speak, and they're going to come crashing down. And they don't want to feel that pain. They would rather hold on to what they know, what is already sort of distressful. Focus on the things that are making them unhappy so they don't risk that fall. But being willing to be happy can be so liberating, even if it's just for a moment or just for 10 minutes. Being willing to allow yourself to be happy and appreciate the moment, it does wonderful things for your neurotransmitters. My happiness does not depend on what others do or say or what happens around me. Now that goes back to being honest with myself and accepting life as it is. Things are going to go on around us that we don't like. People are going to do or say things that we don't like, and that's okay. Recognizing that anger, anxiety, frustration, those are feelings. It's what we do with those feelings that can be helpful or harmful. So when people do or say things that we don't like, we can be mindful, we can acknowledge that and say, you know what? I really don't like that. But if I am at peace with myself and I have faith in my higher power, then I have the courage to sit with that feeling and say, okay, this is unpleasant. What do I have control over? How can I improve the next moment? And in what ways is my higher power? Is God? Is the universe able to help me through this? Number three, Just for today, I will reflect on good orderly direction and use it to guide my thoughts and actions to the best of my abilities. I love the phrase good orderly direction because it reminds us that our higher power wants us to move toward a rich and meaningful life. Good, orderly direction. If you read the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by covey can be equated, if you will, with beginning with the end in mind. Good, orderly direction is knowing defining what does my rich and meaningful life look like? And when we notice what's going on in the present, we can say, all right, do I want to continue using my energy to keep doing this, or is it a better use of my energy to do something different in order to continue to move me towards my goals of a rich and meaningful life? Number four, just for today, I will go out of my way to be considerate and compassionate and not engage in unnecessary criticism or fault finding myself or others, nor try to improve or regulate anybody except for myself. So there's a lot there. The first part is being considerate and compassionate to not engage in unnecessary criticism or fault finding in myself. And a lot of our distress comes from that negative inner voice, that inner critic that is shoulding us all day long, you should have done this, you shouldn't have done that. And becoming more considerate and compassionate in our self talk, encouraging ourselves when we start shoulding ourselves, stepping back and saying is this necessary? Am I engaging in necessary criticism, constructive feedback of myself or is this unnecessary? Is this really going to use my energy in a way that's productive? Then we want to move on and also reflect on being considerate and compassionate and not engaging in unnecessary criticism or fault finding in others. Not everybody has an a day, you know, if your co worker or your spouse or your child is in doing something you don't like or not doing something the way you want, is it necessary to criticize or fault find if you were compassionate and stepped back and said what are their behaviors communicating to me about their thoughts, their wants and their needs right now? Maybe somebody, your child isn't doing their chores very well today. You know, what is that behavior communicating and is it necessary to criticize or fault find or is this a one off because your child is distraught about something else and not try to improve or regulate anybody except for myself. Each person is responsible for their own feelings. Each person is responsible for what they do with their own feelings. Now if I do something that triggers anger in somebody, maybe I need to apologize, maybe I did something wrong. Okay, that's fair. But it is not my job to try to tell them how to feel. It is not my job to try to improve my friends or regulate my friends. I need to focus my energy on me. I need to model the behaviors I want to see in others. And in many cases, if they want to learn those behaviors, they will learn through observation number five. Just for today, I will make time for reflection to focus on my higher power, myself and others seeking to increase my patience, tolerance and understanding. A lot of times our higher power, God, the universe, whatever you call it, does not work at the pace we want it to. And we can get frustrated, we can become, you know, intolerant of what it is letting happen. But it's important to increase our patience, tolerance and understanding of the fact that there are a lot of things factors playing into whatever's going on and we may not understand the full depth and breadth of the situation. Focusing on ourself, increasing patience, tolerance and understanding of ourself that Inner critic, again, often comes out and is impatient. It wants you to be fixed now. It wants you to be done now. It wants you to be perfect now and or yesterday. We need to increase our patience with our self, recognizing that we're human, we're fallible, we're going to make mistakes. It doesn't mean we're unlovable. We are lovable as humans. We may make poor choices, but being patient and tolerant and understanding with ourself. If we start getting irritable with somebody or with something, stepping back and being patient, tolerant and understanding by examining what's going on right now, that is triggering my anger, my anxiety, my distress. Just for today, I will be vigilant in taking care of my physical health, exercising my mind so taking care of my cognitive health, being compassionately aware of my thoughts and feelings. When we take care of our body, when our body factory is operating well, it can create the hormones and neurotransmitters and everything that it needs in order to keep our neurotransmitters balanced. When we are not under physical stress, we are less likely to experience inflammation and other other conditions that contribute to mood distress. When we are focused on our thoughts and our feelings, we are aware of what's going on and we can be compassionate. We can accept how we feel in the moment and then again ask ourselves, what can I do to improve the next moment? Number seven. Just for today, I will seek support from my higher power and another person to help me embrace life in all of its richness, the good and the bad. Part of the richness comes from having the good and the bad. We wouldn't embrace and relish the good near as much if all we had all the time was good. And I know that sounds kind of weird, but. But we really appreciate the good when we've also experienced some challenges, some hardships. But it's important for us to seek support from our higher power, God, the universe, as well as another person. As humans, we need social support. We need that connection to, to another tangible human being. Our higher power is very amorphous and that can provide some comfort to a lot of people. But a lot of times it also benefits us to have a human cheerleader who we can actually hear, giving us feedback, giving us encouragement and support, and being responsive. Number eight. Just for today, I will stop saying if I had time, if I want time, I've got to make it. We can get so caught up in autopilot. Get up, take a shower, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, eat dinner, go to Bed, get up and repeat that. We don't embrace the things that are important in our life. We use our energy in that autopilot on that one thing, which is generally work and maybe, you know, laundry. But it's important to be able to step back and say, okay, I've only got a limited amount of energy, so how am I going to divvy up that energy in order to nurture all of the things that are important in my rich and meaningful life? I don't want to wake up one morning and look back and go, well, really the only thing I focused on was my job. I didn't spend any time or energy on my hobbies or on my health or on my relationships. So we need to make a conscious choice, to make time to set boundaries that work life balance that is so evasive for a lot of people. We need to be able to figure out how to do that and learn how to assertively set and maintain those boundaries. Number nine, just for today, I will do something to improve my environment and my relationships. That doesn't mean changing other people. That means doing what I can to be a better friend, doing what I can to be more empathetic, doing what I can to enhance my self esteem, my relationship with myself, improving my environment. You know, I said using our energy to control what we can. That can mean getting rid of clutter. If clutter bothers you. That can mean, you know, picking up trash in a local park because you don't want the little squirrels to get sick. Whatever it is that helps you improve your little corner of the universe. Because if everybody works on improving their little section of the universe, then the entire universe is going to benefit. You know, every single person does it. All of those corners start to overlap and we start to have a very abundant universe. Number 10, just for today, I will not compare myself with others. I will accept myself and live to the best of my ability. Now, this one is really hard, and a lot of these are really hard, don't get me wrong. But this one can be really challenging. Because in American culture at least, and probably in other cultures, we are taught to compare ourselves with others. We're trying to, as the old saying used to be, keep up with the Joneses. And it's important for us to consider having a paradigm shift. Instead of comparing myself with someone else, I want to compare myself today to myself yesterday. And I want to be better today than I was yesterday. I want to be a baby step closer to my rich and meaningful life today than I was yesterday. So instead of Worrying about comparing myself with how others are doing or what others are doing, accepting myself, recognizing that I am doing the best that I can with the tools that I have at this point in time, and then asking myself, okay, what next? Just for today, I will see through the eyes of a child, noticing and marveling at the beauty of life itself. Spend time, if you haven't, with a child and children are so curious and they notice things. I remember when my son was, you know, kindergarten age, he would notice the ants. He would notice different things and things that I hadn't noticed for many, many years. And I really embraced that. And today I still notice. I'll be coming in from work and, you know, get up to my doorstep and if there is a paper wasp, we have paper wasps. They're really docile and obviously I'm not allergic, but you know, I notice them and I actually greet them. I named the one that lives by our front door George. But recognizing the beauty and the fact that, George, this paper wasp has a role in my universe and considering, you know, what would happen if wasps disappeared, you know, what would be the ripple effects? And it's devastating, you know, so something as small as a wasp or even an ant, if it disappeared, could have such negative effects, but their presence brings such positive, amazing effects that it can be absolutely mind boggling. But paying attention when you're walking, noticing different things. And number 12, just for today, I will be grateful for what I have instead of focusing on what I've lost or what I want now. That doesn't mean avoiding grief. It means being grateful for what we have in the moment. When my mother passed away, you know, I could focus on the fact that she's not here anymore and I could be angry about that. I choose to focus on what she gave me. The knowledge that she gave me, the memories that she gave me, the things that she taught me and what I have as a result of her presence in my life as long as I had it. So being grateful can mean exploring even losses. You know, what did they bring to your life? How did they enrich your life? And noticing what you have instead of thinking, well, I can be happy when I have X number of dollars, I can be happy when I achieve this goal. I can be happy when instead of putting happiness off to the future, being happy recognizing all of the things that are in your current rich and meaningful life and being grateful for as much as you currently have, and the ability to move toward and enrich that rich and meaningful life in the coming moments.