Anxiety thoughts are like hornets. They are part of the landscape of the mind, not a personal flaw or weakness. Left alone, they drift in and out of awareness. Chased, swatted at, grasped, they turn into a swarm.
Night is often when they arrive. When the world stills and the body is ready for rest, the psyche finally has room to surface what is unresolved. The mind tries to “solve” anxiety by thinking harder, but with anxiety, thinking more is often kicking the nest harder. You become more awake, more tense, further from rest.
Mindfulness offers a different stance. It is not the elimination of thought or replacing “negative thoughts” with “positive” ones. It is changing your relationship to thinking itself. Instead of wrestling each worry to the ground, you notice: “A hornet has appeared.” You see it, feel its charge, and do not swing.
Mindfulness is often summarized as:
• Awareness
• Of the Present Moment
• With Acceptance and Non-judgment
In depth-psychology terms, it is the movement of the self from within the swarm to the observing vantage beside it. The hornets still fly. The nervous system still reacts. But you are no longer identical with the panic they carry. The identity shifts from I am the thought to I am the witness of the thought.
This is not passivity. It is discernment — a conscious choice about where attention rests and how you meet your own inner life.
Tips for Using Mindfulness with Anxiety Thoughts
1. Return to the Breath
Breath is the simplest doorway back to the body. Anxiety pulls attention into future catastrophes or past replays. Slow diaphragmatic breathing is not an escape from reality; it is a signal of safety to the nervous system. You are letting the body know: “I am here. The danger is not now.”
2. Anchor in the Senses
The mind can invent scenarios; the senses report truth.
Touch, temperature, taste, smell, sound anchor you in what is actually unfolding. A slow walk, the feel of warm water, one bite of food tasted rather than swallowed — these interrupt the trance of anxious projection and restore contact with what is real.
3. Name What Is Happening
Simple naming reduces fusion:
“There is a worry about my health.”
“My mind is forecasting.”
Naming does not solve the problem; it repositions you within it. You become meteorologist rather than storm.
4. Open the Hand of Thought
Anxiety demands you grip — to solve, predict, prevent.
Imagine your mind as a hand opening. See the thought as vapor drifting off.
You are not banishing the thought; you are declining to contract around it.
If it truly matters, it returns later in a clearer, less panicked form.
5. Practice in the Small Moments
Mindfulness strengthens from tiny repetitions.
You do not need monastery-level silence — you need repetition in the living of your actual life.
Washing a plate
Standing in line
Leashing the dog
Folding a shirt
These are spiritual weightlifting in disguise.
A Short Mindfulness Exercise
Sit comfortably and notice your breath. Picture yourself doing something absorbing — walking in the woods, repairing something, painting, fishing. Notice how attention becomes steady here.
Then choose one simple task right now: rinse a cup, feed a pet, fold one towel.
Feel the temperature, texture, weight.
This is what it is to return to the moment you are actually living.
Two Kinds of Thought
There is a difference between thought that loops and thought that leads.
Anxiety thought circles. It feeds itself. It exhausts.
Creative or meaning-making thought moves.
It may still be intense, but it generates direction, insight, symbolism, action.
Mindfulness is the recognition:
“This is a loop,”
“This is creation.”
One drains vitality; one unfolds psyche.
You cannot eliminate worry thoughts. You can stop climbing inside them as if they are the world. You can notice the nest, notice the hum, and choose conduct that does not increase the swarm.
You do not have to outrun the hornets. You only have to stop kicking the tree.