You know... I feel wholly unqualified to speak up on this but... I too have been practicing between 15 and 20 minutes of sitting meditation every day for a couple of months now and I too suffer from almost crippling anxiety. I too often wonder if it's helping whatsoever.

I haven't made a heck of a lot of progress. I guess what I am practicing is called Samatha. I am still just sitting and feeling the breath come in the rim of my nose and fill my lungs and counting 1,1,1,1 in and 2,2,2,2 out and so forth. When my mind wanders I notice the thoughts and bring my attention back without judgement.

I am a small time carpenter/woodworker and I usually have everything I need in my own shop but I recently built a cherry cabinet with an 18" wide panel that I needed planed down and I don't have a planer that big. Long story short, I called a random millwork shop in the area and asked them if they could do this tiny job for me if I popped in.

So on my way I am getting anxious thinking "oh man these guys are going to be judgmental dicks with no time for me." "I am just wasting their time. I don't know what I am doing." The weird thing is I do know what I am doing. Anyway I figured I would stop this fruitless line of thought and concentrate on my breath as I drove there. But it worried me that I should prepare to meet these guys. I should go over potential scenarios of what they might say to me or questions they might ask etc. I focused on my breath anyway and pulled into their parking lot with a mostly empty mind.

And you know what? They didn't ask me anything other than what thickness do I want the cherry planed to? We are killing ourselves over nothing...