Buddhist Wisdom for Anxiety: 3 Levels of Healing
If you're someone who struggles with anxiety on a regular basis, you're not alone. In our modern world, chronic anxiety has become an increasingly common experience—that persistent, day-by-day challenge that can feel overwhelming and difficult to navigate. While there are countless approaches to understanding and working with anxiety, I want to share a comprehensive framework that has been transformative in my own practice and in working with others.
We'll explore anxiety through three distinct but interconnected layers: the outer layer of lifestyle factors that either support or undermine our well-being, the inner layer of energy and the subtle body drawn from traditional Tibetan and Buddhist medicine, and the innermost layer of how our relationship to self and identity fundamentally shapes our experience of anxiety. Whether you're a seasoned meditation practitioner, someone curious about Buddhist approaches to mental health, or simply looking for practical ways to work with anxiety more skillfully, this three-layered understanding offers both immediate tools and deeper wisdom for the journey ahead.
The Outer Layer: Lifestyle Foundations
The outer layer is sometimes overlooked when we're applying meditation, Buddhist philosophy, or other psychological and spiritual techniques. We tend to think of these approaches as superior, but actually, if we're not working with the outer layer of chronic anxiety, it's very difficult for the inner layer or the innermost layer to create meaningful shifts.
The outer layer is our lifestyle—what we do day-to-day. It encompasses our sleep patterns, caffeine intake, and how we relate to body, thinking mind, and emotions. Let me start with some factors that may seem obvious but remain challenging to implement.
Sleep Patterns
Regular, consistent sleep is crucial yet difficult to maintain. Whether we have children, screens, lights, or activities keeping us up late, establishing a consistent sleep pattern can be challenging. When we sleep, our body repairs itself, we work through problems in our dreams, and we reset to a certain degree. I've noticed that the energies of my body become more disturbed when I don't get enough sleep, especially when it's consistently inadequate—perhaps one night of good sleep followed by two or three nights of poor sleep. This really affects my anxiety levels.
Caffeine Consumption
Caffeine, while beloved for its energy boost, can disrupt sleep patterns and throw our nervous system off balance. While some people have found success stopping caffeine by a certain hour or eliminating it altogether, it's worth noting that caffeine provides artificial energy that can worsen chronic anxiety or even create it, depending on our lifestyle.
Relationship with the Thinking Mind
As we move toward the inner layers, we encounter how we work with our thinking mind throughout the day. Many of us rely primarily on the thinking mind to solve all our problems—a pattern often reinforced by education systems and modern culture. We become heavily dependent on the logical, analytical, problem-solving mind, sometimes to the exclusion of other ways of knowing.
Beyond the thinking mind, there's the body—how we relate to physical sensations, emotions, and the more subtle energies moving through the body. This is essentially the feeling world. One practice I implemented while living in New York was integrating walking meditation into my day. Instead of always being in problem-solving mode, I would deliberately practice mindfulness of steps—feeling each foot touching the ground and orienting toward physical sensation rather than constant mental analysis.
This pattern of always asking "What's next? What needs to be solved next?" connects to deeper issues around how we feel safe in the world. On the outer layer, it's about recognizing this pattern and giving ourselves permission to step out of the solving mind and into bodily awareness.
For some people, physical activities like yoga, dance, or rigorous exercise naturally facilitate this shift. During challenging physical exertion, we often can't think as much and must connect to bodily sensations and present-moment awareness.
Diet and Food
Diet begins to bridge into the innermost layer. From the Tibetan medical tradition, we understand that certain foods create coldness in the body, which for some people can create energy imbalances that result in chronic anxiety.
Cold foods include obviously cold items like ice cream, but also less obvious ones that create internal coldness: sugar, white breads, artificial flour products, and excessive raw foods. I once experienced this firsthand during a salad-based diet—while I felt physically healthy and was losing weight, my anxiety went through the roof.
This isn't universal; some people thrive on raw foods. The key is paying attention to how different foods affect your individual system. Generally, raw foods, cold foods, excessive sugar, processed flour-based foods, and artificial foods—which form the foundation of many modern diets—can be hidden factors in increasing chronic anxiety or making it more difficult to work with.
I encourage you to explore what kinds of behaviors and ways of living—sleeping, eating, movement—help or hurt you. Approach this with healthy awareness rather than seeking perfection.
The Inner Layer: The Subtle Body and Energy
The inner layer draws from traditional medicines like Tibetan medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, and Chinese medicine, which all understand a layer of the body that sits between the physical body and mind: the subtle body.
In Buddhist traditions, the mind is not material—it's not the brain, though the brain plays an important role in helping our mind connect to the human world. The mind, which is immaterial, is primary. The subtle body or energy body serves as the bridge connecting mind and body.
This is why strong emotions involve not only thoughts and mental states but also physical feelings—because the subtle body connects to emotion and influences how it's expressed in the physical body as either healthy or unhealthy patterns. These aren't linear processes but rather circular or spiral relationships of interconnected influence.
Three Qualities of the Energy Body
When we examine what influences anxiety on this inner layer, we look at three qualities of the energy body that can be in balance or out of balance:
Wind energy (loong) - the energy of movement
Channels (tsa) - the pathways through which energy moves
Essential drops (tigle) - more related to the mind on the energetic level
Traditional doctors trained in these systems can read the subtle body through pulse diagnosis, feeling the pulse of wind energy and channels to understand what's happening with different organs and their surrounding energies.
In the modern world, we tend to develop an imbalance of upward-moving wind—the wind responsible for movement in the upper body. This imbalance results in too much wind energy pushing the mind and emotions around in that area. The energy itself can become blocked and stagnant, potentially creating disease in our minds, emotions, and eventually our physical body.
We become aware of this through traditional medical diagnosis or by noticing patterns of chronic nervousness, anxiety, or sleep problems. There's nothing wrong with having these issues—welcome to the modern world. Most of us have some kind of energy imbalance.
Working with the Energy Body
The good news is we can seek help from Tibetan medical clinics, Ayurveda practitioners, or traditional Chinese doctors who use acupuncture and herbs to treat similar disorders. These traditional medical practices are now available in most places.
From a meditation perspective, we work with breath. Not all breath practices help, but most do, because when we consciously connect to the breath and gently manipulate it—especially slowing it down—we can affect the wind energy and help correct imbalances.
Belly breathing is particularly helpful: breathing in and out through the nose, into the lower belly, and out. Just ten minutes daily can begin changing habit patterns in the energy body. Some people need more than ten minutes and may benefit from working with traditional doctors alongside lifestyle changes.
General awareness practice—shamatha or calm-abiding meditation—also helps because we learn to train attention and mind to rest in the present moment. Some people think they need to eliminate thoughts, but thinking is helpful when used appropriately. The issue is knowing when to use the thinking mind and when to let it rest, and whether our habit patterns control us or we can direct them skillfully.
If we notice our patterns controlling us, we need more shamatha practice. In Buddhism, this serves as preparation for deeper practices while naturally settling both mind and wind energy.
For me, breathing techniques were key when I was struggling with meditation as a monk. My body was activated and anxious, my thinking mind scattered. When I learned breathing techniques and began settling the wind energy, I didn't have to fight anything—I could naturally rest in awareness more easily and actually begin training in shamatha.
For people struggling with meditation, the solution often isn't more meditation but working with the energy body—rebalancing and settling wind energy through meditation, traditional medicine, or breathing techniques.
The Innermost Layer: Self and Identity
The innermost layer connects to core Buddhist teachings. When we cling to a permanent, independent self, we experience anxiety because that self will have aversion to certain things and attachment to others. This self primarily functions in two modes: fear (a form of aversion) and expectation (a form of attachment).
This represents the deeper dharma understanding. While the concepts of shunyata, not-self, or emptiness might seem foreign to those unfamiliar with Buddhist study, they become accessible through familiarity, study, and practice—and they're profoundly helpful. Working with this fundamental layer not only helps anxiety but eventually leads to liberation and awakening in Buddhism.
In Buddhism, our motivation isn't primarily personal relief but benefiting others. We want to become more awake to our experience of dissatisfaction, gain understanding and insight into it, and become free so we can serve others more clearly and fully. We learn to remedy dissatisfaction and suffering. These teachings have the beneficial side effect of helping anxiety.
The Buddha's Peace
Consider why the Buddha serves as such a universal symbol of peace. Most people see Buddha statues as peaceful. But why is the Buddha peaceful? Not because he found some ultimate state, took some pill, or discovered the perfect meditation technique. In Buddhism, we'd say the Buddha is peaceful because he stopped clinging to an independent self and stopped clinging to ideas, beliefs, opinions, and thoughts as absolutely real.
This doesn't mean nothing is real—this topic is quite nuanced in Buddhism. I call this the "Buddhist non-duality department," and it's challenging because it's not saying things don't exist. Rather, things don't necessarily exist as they appear, or we overlay our individual reality onto interdependent reality. When we cling to that individual reality, we create fear and expectation, attachment and aversion—which creates anxiety. We also act out harmful conduct that can hurt ourselves and others.
Buddhist teachings on non-duality are quite simple when we understand their purpose. The goal isn't reaching some nothingness where everything disappears—that's fairly useless. Instead, it's developing fluidity and openness where compassion can unfold. On a practical level, we don't take ourselves so seriously—we don't take our thoughts and emotions so seriously, and we can work with them skillfully.
Practical Flexibility
Imagine working with your thoughts and emotions with more playfulness, ease, and flexibility. Just that possibility—not even talking about enlightenment—creates so much more peace. While I'm generally more activated by my emotions and thoughts, my Buddhist training provides moments of flexibility within them, which is incredibly liberating. I notice this really affects my anxiety because there's nothing to protect, nothing to fear, nothing to grasp for or expect. The goal is discovering deeper layers of what causes dissatisfaction. Human life presents countless reasons for anxiety—even the basic truth that we're all going to die creates fundamental anxiety that no material solution can eliminate. But the dharma offers frameworks for finding different ways to understand these realities and discover a peace that isn't a state or way of being, but emerges from knowing something essential about life's nature.
Working with anxiety is ultimately about developing a more flexible, compassionate relationship with our experience—one that acknowledges the real challenges of human life while offering practical pathways toward greater peace and freedom. Through attending to our lifestyle choices, understanding the subtle energetics of our nervous system, and examining our deepest patterns of clinging and identity, we create multiple entry points for transformation.
This isn't about eliminating anxiety entirely or finding some perfect state of calm, but rather developing the skills and wisdom to meet whatever arises with greater ease and understanding. The dharma teaches us that our struggles can become our greatest teachers, and anxiety—challenging as it is—can actually point us toward the very flexibility and openness that lead to lasting well-being.
I encourage you to experiment with these approaches, be patient with yourself in the process, and remember that every moment of awareness, every conscious breath, every small step toward understanding is valuable progress on this path of awakening.
