Meditation for Stress and Anxiety
How much are stress and anxiety, or their exacerbation, barriers to spiritual practice?


Stress can be broken up into mental and physical phenomena such as thoughts, emotions, muscle tension, pain etc. They are just impersonal phenomena arising and ceasing on their own accord. 

Anxiety is a variation of the 4th Hindrance of restlessness and worry (uddhacca-kukkucca). The hindrances are barriers that block one from progressing on the Path, unless one practices to understand and overcome them.

In Vipassana meditation one treats all objects the same. No object is more or less important than the previous or next object.

Just note the phenomena a couple of times and return attention to the abdomen (Burmese Method).