Last year while visiting a friend down in Tampa, Florida I had an incident where I was standing on his outside porch and suddenly without warning passed out. This was my first time ever passing out and normally I’m a pretty healthy person so naturally it scared me a bit.I started having what I thought was issues with my heart immediately after thus causing even more anxiety over the situation. I went to my doctor who started ordering a bunch of heart tests including a table test, stress test and ordering a heart monitor to be surgically placed in my chest.I’ve never been a person that has struggled with anxiety and I’ve never really had a panic attack or anything of the nature but of course after all this and thinking it was my heart I kept getting worse. Looking back, it’s amazing what anxiety can do to you physically.After realizing there was nothing wrong with my heart and that I was having panic attacks my doctor prescribed me Paxil and Xanax to help deal with the issue. I’m not a huge fan of medication and try to take it as rarely possible. The anxiety was kicking my ass though so I figured I had to give something a shot. I wasn’t eating, sleeping, etc!After starting to take the Paxil it only made things worse as the medication caused me to hallucinate and see things which only freaked me out more!Finally after some time I decided to give meditation and yoga a try. I’ll do a separate post about my 30 day yoga challenge, however, this post is going to focus strictly on the 30 day meditation challenge.I really didn’t know much about meditation or how it works so I decided to look for a book to help me understand it. I couldn’t really find a book that interested me but I was listening to a Facebook live video Tim Ferris was doing and he mentioned to mobile apps that he was using and testing.The applications are called Headspace and Calm and both take you through guided meditation designed to teach you exactly how to meditate.After trying out the two different apps I eventually started using Headspace exclusively. The first couple days of meditating I actually enjoyed Calm better strictly because I liked the voice of the person guiding you better than that of Headspace’s app. However, I quickly realized that the guide for the Headspace app did a better job (in my opinion) at explaining exactly what meditation did, how it worked and how to do it properly!I ended up paying for a subscription for the Headspace app, unfortunately both cost money after taking the small free course of 10 days, but I decided it was worth it because for the first time I was no longer experiencing anxiety at all!So now for the main question…How do I feel after meditating everyday for 15 minutes?Fantastic! Again, I also have been doing yoga during the same time period so I’m sure that’s helped also, but I feel the meditation has simply helped me gain control over my thoughts. It has allowed me to slow down, realize how I’m feeling and deal with those emotions and thoughts.It’s been a great experience and after 30 days I’m only more committed to daily meditation and I’ve become a huge advocate of it now! At first I thought it was going to be some super spiritual thing that I wasn’t really feeling, but then I realized it simply doing a daily assessment of the mind and learning to slow it down when things get crazy.As I stated since I’ve started doing it, I’ve not had any issues with anxiety anymore and to be completely honest I believe meditation cured it better than any drug could have. Even if you don’t suffer with any type of anxiety I’d highly recommend giving it a try for 30 days as I believe the practice could help anyone!Stay tuned and make sure you follow me on Facebook and Twitter so you’ll see when my 30 day yoga challenge post goes live!
