I. What are the Meaning, Flow and Spirituality coping processes for anxiety treatment?

To live a life with meaning involves giving more of you. Doing more meaningful activities can give you opportunities for happiness, because your world has grown larger than your own immediate fulfillment and self- interests. By being fully engaged in selfless activities, you can increase your own sense of happiness through the happiness you bring to others. Just by acknowledging that there is a greater purpose and power in life means you have already tapped into a personal spiritual sense that can help shield you from anxiety and poor health - a sense of spirituality that money and materialistic things cannot give you.

The three processes of meaning, flow and spirituality can be defined as follows:

• Meaning: Meaning is simply the purpose or significance of something. Finding the meaning to your life means discovering your major motivation and purpose in life. Living a meaningful life means pursuing activities that are in harmony with your life’s purpose.
• Flow: Flow can be defined as ‘focused motivation, or a mental state where a person is fully immersed in an activity, and feels full of energised focus’. Achieving flow may help you find your own coping strengths and to become self-motivated, which will help you learn, change and advance. Finding your flow will help you move past anxiety and stress and into greater meaning in life. [2, 16].
• Spirituality: Spirituality is in essence an ‘internal pathway’ which enables a person to discover their purpose in life. There are many ways to define spirituality, just as there are many different individuals and many different paths.

You may already lead a selfless life and express your spirituality in ways that you are not even aware of. By simply taking the time to recognise and use your spirituality each day, you can increase your happiness one day at a time.

Researchers have found that choosing a greater purpose over material wealth can benefit our health and wellbeing in leaps and bounds and help us to cope with pain and suffering. Engagement in spiritual or selfless activities has been a factor in:

• lowering anxiety；
• preventing burn-out； and
• healing trauma, physical and mental illness.

By using some of the exercises in this lesson, you can develop your sense of spirituality and selflessness by helping others and protect yourself from anxiety.

Having a meaningful life through activities that engage your sense of flow and spirituality are a few of the positive interventions psychologists recommend to increase happiness and shield oneself from anxiety in day-to-day stress or traumatic events. To learn more about the emerging methods of positive psychology, you can visit the lessons on Positive Self-Talk, Gratitude and Savouring, or Good Sleep.

These positive methods can be used to help with anxiety and increase positive mood. The practices you will learn about in this lesson include:

• Looking back on your life: Reflecting on your life as if it has already passed can help you identify where you can develop your spiritual sense and do things that are truly meaningful now.
• Kindness Journal: Acknowledging your acts of kindness by keeping track of them in a journal can foster personal happiness and the snowball effect of selflessness.
• Recognising Flow: Flow is engaging in challenging work that is beyond routine or self-centered interests. It is helpful to identify that feeling of flow when it comes to you, so that you can better use your strengths in activities of greater meaning. You are in the state of flow when you find that you are using all of your skills and feel energised despite being challenged. Flow can help you:
• discover your own strengths in coping；
• enhance self-motivation for learning, change and advancement；
• move past anxiety and stress and into greater meaning in life.
• Volunteering: Since selflessness helps others and you at the same time, you can use your signature strengths to identify opportunities for voluntary work which will stimulate the flow and maximise the happiness that comes from working for a greater purpose.
• Prayer and Communal Worship: You can express your religious spirituality through prayer either on your own or together with others in worship in order to gain greater health and wellbeing as a result. Prayer and worship may also provide you with means of social support through a shared sense of meaning with others.
• Building Spirituality: Psychologists find that regular practice of spirituality can reap greater happiness and wellbeing. As such, they recommend practicing religious and non-religious techniques for expressing spirituality on a daily basis.
  
  Finding the best methods to develop meaning, flow and spirituality are based on your own personal experiences with anxiety, and lifestyle preferences. You may find your best option is to read up about the strategies and how to incorporate them in your daily life, but you may need to try some or all of them to find out which one works best for your level of anxiety. At the end of the day, you have choices about how you want to free your life from stress and anxiety. One such example is developing your ability to connect to your spirituality through meaningful activities.