Relief from Anxiety Disorders through the Transcendental Meditation Technique

Dr. Belok: Twenty percent of Americans have an anxiety disorder. Stress arises when a person has trouble coping with the demands placed on them. When unable to cope, the resultant anxiety leads people to self-medicate in various ways: food, TV, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, and coffee are common examples. However, these methods are a short-sighted and maladaptive attempt to reduce the stresses in life, because they do not help one function any better; indeed, they worsen an individual’s adaptive efficiency with time. So we get into a vicious cycle of stress, where the less we are able to cope, the more we self-medicate, which worsens our ability to cope, and causes us to again self-medicate.

The Transcendental Meditation technique cuts short this vicious cycle of stress. When practicing the TM technique, a person sits comfortably in a chair for 20 minutes twice a day, closes the eyes, begins the process, and experiences the mind effortlessly settling down to quieter and quieter levels of the thinking process. Finally, the mind comes to the source of the thinking process, awareness itself. This experience is called restful alertness. In this state, the body is deeply rested and the mind is fully alert. Stress is dissolved by this experience—by the quiet and soothing experience of inner being.

Dr. Belok: The experience of restful alertness is pleasant and comfortable, and this allows you to continue to sit quietly for twenty minutes twice a day. When practiced regularly, this program dissolves stress cumulatively, and with time, you experience less and less stress and nervousness. As a natural result of this lessening of stress, the mind settles down when you’re meditating and you don’t feel the need to get up and move around. The direct experience of stillness and peace takes care of those feelings of restlessness.

With continued practice, anxiety plays less and less a role in a person’s life; the individual starts making better decisions about daily activities because he or she is better able to cope with stress. So, with time, one gains the possibility of becoming stress free. This means being motivated by the needs of the situation rather than one’s own stressful response to the situation. Instead of reacting to challenges as a threat, one sees challenges as an opportunity for personal and professional growth.

Dr. Belok: The Transcendental Meditation technique settles mind and body so that the nervous reaction to stress is reduced. Indeed, you can see how well TM works by looking at a meta-analysis of the current scientific literature on anxiety, which used one of the most accepted stress measures, the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, researchers compared Transcendental Meditation with various other relaxation techniques, including Progressive Muscle Relaxation, EMG Biofeedback, Herbert Benson’s Relaxation Response and other meditation techniques. They found that these programs functioned at placebo levels.

In the studies of the Transcendental Meditation technique, however, there was a dramatic decrease in anxiety—to levels roughly twice the effect size of placebo. So according to this meta-analysis of all the programs available at the time of the study, the Transcendental Meditation technique is the single-most effective program to reduce stress. With this information, physicians can feel very comfortable in offering the Transcendental Meditation program to patients, knowing that they are unlikely to find a more effective stress reduction program today.

What does this mean for anyone who gets nervous making presentations? With continued practice of the Transcendental Meditation program, you can become less and less anxious, developing a stable inner quietness than can be a buffer against otherwise stressful experiences.