Practicing mindfulness with an app may improve children's mental health
New research suggests daily mindfulness training at home helped reduce kids' stress levels and negative emotions.
October 11, 2023
Science Daily/Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Many studies have found that practicing mindfulness -- defined as cultivating an open-minded attention to the present moment -- has benefits for children. Children who receive mindfulness training at school have demonstrated improvements in attention and behavior, as well as greater mental health.
When the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020, sending millions of students home from school, a group of MIT researchers wondered if remote, app-based mindfulness practices could offer similar benefits. In a study conducted during 2020 and 2021, they report that children who used a mindfulness app at home for 40 days showed improvements in several aspects of mental health, including reductions in stress and negative emotions such as loneliness and fear.
The findings suggest that remote, app-based mindfulness interventions, which could potentially reach a larger number of children than school-based approaches, could offer mental health benefits, the researchers say.
"There is growing and compelling scientific evidence that mindfulness can support mental well-being and promote mental health in diverse children and adults," says John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and the senior author of the study, which appears this week in the journal Mindfulness.
Researchers in Gabrieli's lab also recently reported that children who showed higher levels of mindfulness were more emotionally resilient to the negative impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"To some extent, the impact of Covid is out of your control as an individual, but your ability to respond to it and to interpret it may be something that mindfulness can help with," says MIT graduate student Isaac Treves, who is the lead author of both studies.
Pandemic resilience
After the pandemic began in early 2020, Gabrieli's lab decided to investigate the effects of mindfulness on children who had to leave school and isolate from friends. In a study that appeared in the journal PLOS One in July, the researchers explored whether mindfulness could boost children's resilience to negative emotions that the pandemic generated, such as frustration and loneliness.
Working with students between 8 and 10 years old, the researchers measured the children's mindfulness using a standardized assessment that captures their tendency to blame themselves, ruminate on negative thoughts, and suppress their feelings.
The researchers also asked the children questions about how much the pandemic had affected different aspects of their lives, as well as questions designed to assess their levels of anxiety, depression, stress, and negative emotions such as worry or fear.
Among children who showed the highest levels of mindfulness, there was no correlation between how much the pandemic impacted them and negative feelings. However, in children with lower levels of mindfulness, there was a strong correlation between Covid-19 impact and negative emotions.
The children in this study did not receive any kind of mindfulness training, so their responses reflect their tendency to be mindful at the time they answered the researchers' questions. The findings suggest that children with higher levels of mindfulness were less likely to get caught up in negative emotions or blame themselves for the negative things they experienced during the pandemic.
"This paper was our best attempt to look at mindfulness specifically in the context of Covid and to think about what are the factors that may help children adapt to the changing circumstances," Treves says. "The takeaway is not that we shouldn't worry about pandemics because we can just help the kids with mindfulness. People are able to be resilient when they're in systems that support them, and in families that support them."
Remote interventions
The researchers then built on that study by exploring whether a remote, app-based intervention could effectively increase mindfulness and improve mental health. Researchers in Gabrieli's lab have previously shown that students who received mindfulness training in middle school showed better academic performance, received fewer suspensions, and reported less stress than those who did not receive the training.
For the new study, reported today in Mindfulness, the researchers worked with the same children they had recruited for the PLOS One study and divided them into three groups of about 80 students each.
One group received mindfulness training through an app created by Inner Explorer, a nonprofit that also develops school-based meditation programs. Those children were instructed to engage in mindfulness training five days a week, including relaxation exercises, breathing exercises, and other forms of meditation.
For comparison purposes, the other two groups were asked to use an app for listening to audiobooks (not related to mindfulness). One group was simply given the audiobook app and encouraged to listen at their own pace, while the other group also had weekly one-on-one virtual meetings with a facilitator.
At the beginning and end of the study, the researchers evaluated each participant's levels of mindfulness, along with measures of mental health such as anxiety, stress, and depression. They found that in all three groups, mental health improved over the course of the eight-week study, and each group also showed increases in mindfulness and prosociality (engaging in helpful behavior).
Additionally, children in the mindfulness group showed some improvements that the other groups didn't, including a more significant decrease in stress. They also found that parents in the mindfulness group reported that their children experienced more significant decreases in negative emotions such as anger and sadness. Students who practiced the mindfulness exercises the most days showed the greatest benefits.
The researchers were surprised to see that there were no significant differences in measures of anxiety and depression between the mindfulness group and audiobook groups; they hypothesize that may be because students who interacted with a facilitator in one of the audiobook groups also experienced beneficial effects on their mental health.
Overall, the findings suggest that there is value in remote, app-based mindfulness training, especially if children engage with the exercises consistently and receive encouragement from parents, the researchers say. Apps also offer the ability to reach a larger number of children than school-based programs, which require more training and resources.
"There are a lot of great ways to incorporate mindfulness training into schools, but in general, it's more resource-intensive than having people download an app. So, in terms of pure scalability and cost-effectiveness, apps are useful," Treves says. "Another good thing about apps is that the kids can go at their own pace and repeat practices that they like, so there's more freedom of choice."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/10/231011182140.htm
In-person mindfulness courses help improve mental health for at least six months
July 10, 2023
Science Daily/University of Cambridge
In-person mindfulness courses help improve mental health for at least six months, study shows. Adults who voluntarily take part in mindfulness courses are less likely to experience symptoms of anxiety and depression for at least six months after completing the programs, compared to adults who do not take part, a new analysis pooling data from 13 studies has confirmed.
Adults who voluntarily take part in mindfulness courses are less likely to experience symptoms of anxiety and depression for at least six months after completing the programmes, compared to adults who do not take part, a new analysis pooling data from 13 studies has confirmed.
University of Cambridge researchers looked at participants of group-based and teacher-led mindfulness courses, conducted in person and offered in community settings.
They say the results, published in the journal Nature Mental Health, should encourage uptake of similar teacher-led programmes in workplaces and educational institutions keen to help prevent mental health problems developing in members of their community.
"In our previous work it was still not clear whether these mindfulness courses could promote mental health across different community settings," said lead researcher, Dr Julieta Galante, who conducted the research while at the University of Cambridge. "This study is the highest quality confirmation so far that the in-person mindfulness courses typically offered in the community do actually work for the average person."
Mindfulness in these courses is typically defined as "the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment."
These courses, formally known as mindfulness-based programmes (MBPs), often combine elements of meditation, body awareness and modern psychology, and are designed to help reduce stress, improve wellbeing, and enhance mental and emotional "resilience." They consist of groups of participants led by mindfulness teachers, who promote reflection and sharing over several one-to-two hour sessions.
The body of research into the effectiveness of MBPs to date has been mixed. Cambridge researchers sought to confirm the effect of MBPs on psychological distress -- which encompasses disturbing or unpleasant mental or emotional experiences including symptoms of anxiety and depression.
They pooled and analysed data from 2,371 adults who had taken part in trials to assess the effectiveness of MBPs. Roughly half the participants had been randomly allocated places on mindfulness programmes that lasted for eight weeks, with a one- to two-and-a-half hour session per week and compared them to those that were not through self-reported questionnaires.
The study found that MBPs generated a small to moderate reduction in adults' psychological distress, with 13% more participants seeing a benefit than those who did not attend an MBP.
The researchers found that existing psychological distress, age, gender, educational level and a disposition towards mindfulness did not change the effectiveness of MBPs.
Galante said: "We've confirmed that if adults choose to do a mindfulness course in person, with a teacher and offered in a group setting, this will, on average, be beneficial in terms of helping to reduce their psychological distress which will improve their mental health. However, we are not saying that it should be done by every single person; research shows that it just doesn't work for some people.
"We're also not saying you should absolutely choose a mindfulness class instead of something else you might benefit from, for example a football club -- we have no evidence that mindfulness is better than other feel-good practices but if you're not doing anything, these types of mindfulness courses are certainly among the options that can be helpful."
The researchers conducted a systematic review to select previous studies for inclusion in their large-scale analysis. They obtained complete but anonymised data from 13 trials representing eight countries. The median age was 34 years-old, while 71% of participants were women.
While mindfulness apps are on the rise, researchers remain unsure whether it is the practice of mindfulness that reduces psychological distress, or the fact that courses involve in-person group-work with a teacher present.
"Apps may be cheaper, but there is nowhere near the same evidence base for their effectiveness," said Galante. "Some apps may say they are evidenced based, but they are often referring to trials that are in-person with a teacher and a group."
The effectiveness of smartphone apps, as well as what happens when people continue to practice mindfulness meditation by themselves, will be investigated by Galante, who has recently taken up a new position as Deputy Director of the Contemplative Studies Centre, at the University of Melbourne.
"If you are offered an in-person four- or eight-week mindfulness course in a group setting with a teacher, and you are curious about it, I'd say based on this study, just go ahead and try it," said Galante. "And for organisations wondering about offering these types of mindfulness courses to members of their community -- this research suggests it may be a good investment if their communities express an interest."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/07/230710113911.htm
Adding yoga to regular exercise improves cardiovascular health and wellbeing
December 8, 2022
Science Daily/Elsevier
A three-month pilot study of patients with hypertension appearing in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, published by Elsevier, demonstrates that adding yoga to a regular exercise training https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/12/221208123538.htmregimen supports cardiovascular health and wellbeing and is more effective than stretching exercises. Incorporation of yoga reduced systolic blood pressure and resting heart rate and improved 10-year cardiovascular risk.
Yoga is part of spiritual and exercise practices for millions of people worldwide. With yoga practice becoming a widely accepted form of exercise, the body of yoga research is growing. It is a multifaceted lifestyle activity that can positively enhance cardiovascular health and wellbeing. Physical exercises such as stretching exercises and the physical components of yoga practices have several similarities, but also important differences.
"The aim of this pilot study was to determine whether the addition of yoga to a regular exercise training regimen reduces cardiovascular risk," explained lead investigator Paul Poirier, MD, PhD, Quebec Heart and Lung Institute -- Laval University, and Faculty of Pharmacy, Laval University, Quebec, Canada. "While there is some evidence that yoga interventions and exercise have equal and/or superior cardiovascular outcomes, there is considerable variability in yoga types, components, frequency, session length, duration, and intensity. We sought to apply a rigorous scientific approach to identify cardiovascular risk factors for which yoga is beneficial for at-risk patients and ways it could be applied in a healthcare setting such as a primary prevention program."
Investigators recruited 60 individuals with previously diagnosed high blood pressure and metabolic syndrome for an exercise training program. Over the 3-month intervention regimen, participants were divided into 2 groups, which performed 15 minutes of either structured yoga or stretching in addition to 30 minutes of aerobic exercise training 5 times weekly. Blood pressure, anthropometry, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP), glucose and lipids levels as well as the Framingham and Reynolds Risk Scores were measured. At baseline, there was no difference between groups in age, sex, smoking rates, body mass index (BMI), resting systolic and diastolic blood pressure, resting heart rate and pulse pressure.
After 3 months, there was a decrease in resting systolic and diastolic blood pressure, mean arterial blood pressure and heart rate in both groups. However, systolic blood pressure was reduced by 10 mmHg with yoga vs 4 mmHg with stretching. The yoga approach also reduced resting heart rate and 10-year cardiovascular risk assessed using Reynold's Risk score.
While yoga has been shown to benefit hypertensive patients, the exact mechanism underlying this positive effect is not fully understood. This pilot randomized study shows that its benefits cannot be simply attributed to stretching alone.
"This study provides evidence for an additional non-pharmacologic therapy option for cardiovascular risk reduction and blood pressure control in patients with high blood pressure, in the setting of a primary prevention exercise program," noted Dr. Poirier. "As observed in several studies, we recommend that patients try to find exercise and stress relief for the management of hypertension and cardiovascular disease in whatever form they find most appealing. Our study shows that structured yoga practices can be a healthier addition to aerobic exercise than simply muscle stretching."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/12/221208085826.htm
Mindfulness-based stress reduction is as effective as an antidepressant drug for treating anxiety disorders
November 9, 2022
Science Daily/Georgetown University Medical Center
A guided mindfulness-based stress reduction program was as effective as use of the gold-standard drug -- the common antidepressant drug escitalopram -- for patients with anxiety disorders, according to results of a first-of-its-kind, randomized clinical trial led by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center.
The findings appear in JAMA Psychiatry on November 9, 2022, and follow the October 11, 2022, announcement by the United States Preventive Services Task Force that, for the first time, recommended screening for anxiety disorders due to the high prevalence of these disorders.
"Our study provides evidence for clinicians, insurers, and healthcare systems to recommend, include and provide reimbursement for mindfulness-based stress reduction as an effective treatment for anxiety disorders because mindfulness meditation currently is reimbursed by very few providers," says Elizabeth Hoge, MD, director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Program and associate professor of psychiatry at Georgetown and first author. "A big advantage of mindfulness meditation is that it doesn't require a clinical degree to train someone to become a mindfulness facilitator. Additionally, sessions can be done outside of a medical setting, such as at a school or community center."
Anxiety disorders can be highly distressing; they include generalized anxiety, social anxiety, panic disorder and fear of certain places or situations, including crowds and public transportation, all of which can lead to an increased risk for suicide, disability and distress and therefore are commonly treated in psychiatric clinics. Drugs that are currently prescribed for the disorders can be very effective, but many patients either have difficulty getting them, do not respond to them, or find the side effects (e.g., nausea, sexual dysfunction and drowsiness) as a barrier to consistent treatment. Standardized mindfulness-based interventions, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), can decrease anxiety, but prior to this study, the interventions had not been studied in comparison to effective anti-anxiety drugs. Of note, approximately 15% of the U.S. population tried some form of meditation in 2017.
The clinicians recruited 276 patients between June 2018 and February 2020 from three hospitals in Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C., and randomly assigned people to either MBSR or escitalopram. MBSR was offered weekly for eight weeks via two and a half-hour in-person classes, a day-long retreat weekend class during the 5th or 6th week, and 45-minute daily home practice exercises. Patients' anxiety symptoms were assessed upon enrollment and again at completion of the intervention at 8 weeks, along with post-treatment assessments at 12 and 24 weeks after enrollment. The assessments were conducted in a blinded manner -- the trained clinical evaluators did not know whether the patients they were assessing received the drug or MBSR.
At the end of the trial, 102 patients had completed MBSR and 106 had completed their medication course. The patients were relatively young, with a mean age of 33 and included 156 women, which comprised 75% of the enrollees, mirroring the disease prevalence in the U.S.
The researchers used a validated assessment measure to rate the severity of symptoms of anxiety across all of the disorders using a scale of 1 to 7 (with 7 being severe anxiety). Both groups saw a reduction in their anxiety symptoms (a 1.35 point mean reduction for MBSR and 1.43 point mean reduction for the drug, which was a statistically equivalent outcome), dropping from a mean of about 4.5 for both, which translates to a significant 30% or so drop in the severity of peoples' anxiety.
Olga Cannistraro, 52, says she utilizes her MBSR techniques as needed, but more than a decade ago, the practice transformed her life. She was selected for an MBSR study after responding to advertisement asking, "Do you worry?"
"I didn't think of myself as anxious -- I just thought my life was stressful because I had taken on too much," she recalls. "But I thought 'yeah, I do worry.' There was something excessive about the way I responded to my environment."
After participating in an earlier study led by Hoge, she learned two key MBSR techniques. "It gave me the tools to spy on myself. Once you have awareness of an anxious reaction, then you can make a choice for how to deal with it. It's not like a magic cure, but it was a life-long kind of training. Instead of my anxiety progressing, it went in the other direction and I'm very grateful for that."
"It is important to note that although mindfulness meditation works, not everyone is willing to invest the time and effort to successfully complete all of the necessary sessions and do regular home practice which enhances the effect," Hoge said. "Also, virtual delivery via videoconference is likely to be effective, so long as the 'live' components are retained, such as question-and-answer periods and group discussion."
Hoge points out that there are many phone apps that offer guided meditation, however researchers don't know how apps compare with the full in-person, weekly group class experience.
Trial enrollment was wrapping up as the COVID pandemic started in early 2020 but most enrollees completed their eight-week course of treatment before the pandemic started. Additionally, the researchers conducted a second phase of the study during the pandemic that involved moving the treatments to an online, videoconference, and that will be the focus of future analyses. The researchers also hope to explore the effects of MBSR on sleep and depression.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/11/221109124354.htm
Study with military suggests 'blended' individual and team mindfulness is at least as effective as standard mindfulness training
Team mindfulness training combining collective stress management skills with elements of the individually-focused mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course could offer more benefit than MBSR alone, study suggests.
August 23, 2022
Science Daily/City University London
A new study suggests that a 'blended' eight-week mindfulness programme that adds Team Mindfulness Training (TMT) to a shortened version of the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course for individual mindfulness is just as effective as the standard MBSR course alone. It may even offer further benefit by increasing collective stress management skills.
Led by Dr Jutta Tobias Mortlock, Co-director of the Centre for Excellence in Mindfulness Research (CEMR) at City, University of London, in collaboration with Dr Alison Carter, Principal Research Fellow at the Institute of Employment Studies (IES), the study bridges the gap between the well-established body of research supporting the benefits of individual mindfulness practice, epitomised by the eight-week MBSR course, and the burgeoning science on team and collective mindfulness. MBSR has been shown to reduce stress, anxiety, depression, and pain. Collective mindfulness is strongly linked to organisational resilience.
The study was conducted in a high-stress military context: military officers in training in the British Army and in the Royal Navy, and was funded by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). A mixed method approach was used that consisted of two research phases.
Twenty-three junior officers-to-be from the British Army participated in a pre-pilot study which trialled the newly designed Team Mindfulness Training (TMT) intervention: half the time was dedicated to training participants in individual stress management skills using the MBSR curriculum, with the remainder focusing on training collective stress management skills using the principles of collective mindfulness.
A larger pilot study, in which 105 Royal Navy officer cadets took part, then compared the TMT intervention against the standard eight-week MBSR course. The effect of participating in either intervention group was measured by assessing individual resilience, collective mindfulness, and individual performance. While the two former measures were self-reported, the last was assessed using an objective computer-test of working memory, as a proxy for performance at work. All measures were taken at three time points: directly before, directly after and two months after the intervention. Participants also took part in semi-structured interviews.
The study found that participating in both intervention groups led to significantly increased individual resilience and working memory, with no significant difference between the two groups.
Whilst neither group showed statistically significant improvements in collective mindfulness over time, the TMT group experienced a near-significant collective mindfulness increase after participating in the training.
In addition, results from analyses of the interviews suggest that participants in the TMT group seem more able to report that they had learned to manage difficult work stress collectively. Most notably, however, only individuals from the TMT group (and none from the MBSR group) indicated they were able to apply their newly learned MBSR skills to stressful work challenges. This suggests that a collectively mindful team atmosphere supported the application of individual stress management skills when it really mattered.
The authors suggest that the study opens up ground for follow-up research that may help address recently reported counterintuitive effects of individually-focused workplace mindfulness, such as lower work motivation after brief periods of mindful meditation.
They also stress that this study brings back the prosocial orientation to mindfulness practice that may have been eclipsed by the more recent mindfulness-as-self-help movement. This prosocial aspiration is a core tenet of mindfulness traditions: to generate transformative capacity to overcome stress and suffering in oneself as well as for all.
First author of the study, Dr Jutta Tobias Mortlock, says:
Our intervention considers mindfulness as a team sport. Combining individual with collective mindfulness makes mindfulness training more powerful. And offering mindfulness practices to organisations that stretch beyond individually-focused meditation helps extend the transformative potential of mindfulness for organisations.
Dr Alison Carter, Principal Investigator of the study and co-author of its publication, adds:
This work shifts the needle from self-focused mindfulness towards creating a mindful culture in workplaces. This is both helpful and practical because when people at work look out for each other, then stress at work becomes a collective responsibility rather than something that needs to be shouldered by individuals in isolation of others. And we know that managing stress collectively is more effective than managing stress alone.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220823095440.htm
Brain imaging reveals how mindfulness program boosts pain regulation
July 28, 2022
Science Daily/University of Wisconsin-Madison
Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Healthy Minds has isolated the changes in pain-related brain activity that follow mindfulness training -- pointing a way toward more targeted and precise pain treatment.
The study, published today (July 27) in The American Journal of Psychiatry, identified pathways in the brain specific to pain regulation on which activity is altered by the center's eight-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course.
These changes were not seen in participants who took a similar course without the mindfulness instruction -- important new evidence that the brain changes are due to the mindfulness training itself, according to Joseph Wielgosz, who led the work while he was a graduate student at UW-Madison and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. The study is the first to demonstrate pain-related brain changes from a standardized mindfulness course that is widely offered in clinical settings.
Around one-third of Americans experience pain-related problems, but common treatments -- like medications and invasive procedures -- don't work for everyone and, according to Wielgosz, have contributed to an epidemic of addiction to prescription and illicit drugs.
Popular with patients and promising in its clinical outcomes, mindfulness training courses like MBSR have taken a central place in the drive for a more effective approach to pain management. By practicing nonjudgmental, "present-centered" awareness of mind and body, participants can learn to respond to pain with less distress and more psychological flexibility -- which can ultimately lead to reductions in pain itself.
To measure neural pain response, study participants had their brains scanned while receiving a carefully controlled heat-based stimulus on their forearm. The researchers recorded two brain-wide signatures of pain-related activity, developed by collaborator Tor Wager, a professor of neuroscience at Dartmouth College. This innovative technique dramatically improves the ability to detect pain-related signals in the brain's complex activity. Changes in signatures can also be more easily interpreted in psychological terms.
Participants in the MBSR course showed reduction in a signature associated with the sensory intensity of pain.
"Our finding supports the idea that for new practitioners, mindfulness training directly affects how sensory signals from the body are converted into a brain response," says Wielgosz, whose work was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
The study also looked at longer-term mindfulness training. Intriguingly, practice on intensive meditation retreats was associated with changes in the neural signature for influences that shape pain indirectly -- for example, differences in attention, beliefs and expectations, factors that often increase the perceived levels of distress in non-meditators.
"Just like an experienced athlete plays a sport differently than a first-timer, experienced mindfulness practitioners seem to use their mental 'muscles' differently in response to pain than first-time meditators," Wielgosz says.
These findings help show the potential for mindfulness practice as a lifestyle behavior.
The study is also significant for the field of pain research in its use of brain-based measures of pain alongside the subjective ratings of the participants in a randomized trial. Pain researchers have long sought ways to biologically measure the effect of treatment.
"Looking at neural signatures together with patient experiences revealed insights about mindfulness that we could never have detected through either one alone," Wielgosz says.
Thus, in addition to the insights it provides about mindfulness, the researchers believe that their study can also provide a model for future research, helping to untangle the complexity of pain and ultimately reduce the burden it places on our lives.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220728134104.htm
Mindfulness meditation reduces pain by separating it from the self
UC San Diego study reveals neural circuitry supporting mindfulness-induced pain relief
July 8, 2022
Science Daily/University of California - San Diego
For centuries, people have been using mindfulness meditation to try to relieve their pain, but neuroscientists have only recently been able to test if and how this actually works. In the latest of these efforts, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine measured the effects of mindfulness on pain perception and brain activity.
The study, published July 7, 2022 in PAIN, showed that mindfulness meditation interrupted the communication between brain areas involved in pain sensation and those that produce the sense of self. In the proposed mechanism, pain signals still move from the body to the brain, but the individual does not feel as much ownership over those pain sensations, so their pain and suffering are reduced.
"One of the central tenets of mindfulness is the principle that you are not your experiences," said senior author Fadel Zeidan, PhD, associate professor of anesthesiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine. "You train yourself to experience thoughts and sensations without attaching your ego or sense of self to them, and we're now finally seeing how this plays out in the brain during the experience of acute pain."
On the first day of the study, 40 participants had their brains scanned while painful heat was applied to their leg. After experiencing a series of these heat stimuli, participants had to rate their average pain levels during the experiment.
Participants were then split into two groups. Members of the mindfulness group completed four separate 20-minute mindfulness training sessions. During these visits, they were instructed to focus on their breath and reduce self-referential processing by first acknowledging their thoughts, sensations and emotions but then letting them go without judging or reacting to them. Members of the control group spent their four sessions listening to an audio book.
On the final day of the study, both groups had their brain activity measured again, but participants in the mindfulness group were now instructed to meditate during the painful heat, while the control group rested with their eyes closed.
Researchers found that participants who were actively meditating reported a 32 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 33 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness.
"We were really excited to confirm that you don't have to be an expert meditator to experience these analgesic effects," said Zeidan. "This is a really important finding for the millions of people looking for a fast-acting and non-pharmacological treatment for pain."
When the team analyzed participants' brain activity during the task, they found that mindfulness-induced pain relief was associated with reduced synchronization between the thalamus (a brain area that relays incoming sensory information to the rest of the brain) and parts of the default mode network (a collection of brain areas most active while a person is mind-wandering or processing their own thoughts and feelings as opposed to the outside world).
One of these default mode regions is the precuneus, a brain area involved in fundamental features of self-awareness, and one of the first regions to go offline when a person loses consciousness. Another is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which includes several sub regions that work together to process how you relate to or place value on your experiences. The more these areas were decoupled or deactivated, the more pain relief the participant reported.
"For many people struggling with chronic pain, what often affects their quality of life most is not the pain itself, but the mental suffering and frustration that comes along with it," said Zeidan. "Their pain becomes a part of who they are as individuals -- something they can't escape -- and this exacerbates their suffering."
By relinquishing the self-referential appraisal of pain, mindfulness meditation may provide a new method for pain treatment. Mindfulness meditation is also free and can be practiced anywhere. Still, Zeidan said he hopes trainings can be made even more accessible and integrated into standard outpatient procedures.
"We feel like we are on the verge of discovering a novel non-opioid-based pain mechanism in which the default mode network plays a critical role in producing analgesia. We are excited to continue exploring the neurobiology of mindfulness and its clinical potential across various disorders."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220708162754.htm
Being mindful can improve your interactions with co-workers
Mindful interactions and relationships can bring about a more harmonious and healthy workplace
June 29, 2022
Science Daily/Virginia Commonwealth University
Although mindfulness originates within an individual, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher has found the benefits do not end with this person. The real payoffs emerge when an individual's mindfulness is translated into mindful interactions and relationships. Such interactions -- infused with intentionality, compassion and presence -- can bring about more harmonious and healthy organizations.
"An understanding of how individuals bring mindfulness with them to work, and how these practices may contribute to interaction and relationship quality, is especially relevant as work landscapes are ever changing and interdependence is increasingly becoming the norm," said Christopher S. Reina, Ph.D., an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship in the VCU School of Business.
In the study "Your Presence is Requested: Mindfulness Infusion in Workplace Interactions and Relationships," which was published in Organization Science, Reina and management professors Glen E. Kreiner, Ph.D., of the University of Utah; Alexandra Rheinhardt, Ph.D., of the University of Connecticut; and Christine A. Mihelcic of the University of Richmond explore how individuals bring mindfulness to work and how it infuses their workplace interactions.
These practices may be formal, such as engaging in a mindful pause before beginning a meeting, or informal, such as listening to someone with a high level of attention.
The qualitative study draws on the experiences of actual leaders to explain how they bring mindfulness into the workplace. Primary data sources included interviews and on-site participant observation. The researchers conducted 30 formal interviews with managers, professionals and consultants who practice mindfulness in the workplace, and more than 50 informal interviews with a wide variety of individuals who apply mindfulness principles at work.
"Interestingly, interviewees noted how other individuals around them had noticed the emotional effects of their mindful behaviors on interactions and relationships," Reina said. "We found initial evidence that our interviewees' efforts toward bringing their mindfulness into the workplace were seen by their colleagues as having a positive effect."
High-quality connections are shown to improve individual functioning, and positively affect group outcomes, such as psychological safety and trust.
In addition to mindfulness arising within an interaction, the study also found that mindfulness practices could be used to set individuals up for success in future interactions, such as when preparing for a difficult or important conversation.
"Mindfulness reminds us that our thoughts and emotions are complex," Reina said. "They are contextualized by prior events experienced within a social environment, and within this social environment, individuals must be aware of both their own and others' thoughts and emotions in order to navigate these complexities with skill and compassion."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220629121145.htm
New research shows no evidence of structural brain change with short-term mindfulness training
May 20, 2022
Science Daily/University of Wisconsin-Madison
In the mid-20th century, new evidence showed that the brain could be "plastic," and that experience could create changes in the brain. Plasticity has been linked to learning new skills, including spatial navigation, aerobic exercise and balance training.
Yet it has remained an open question whether mindfulness interventions, like meditation, can alter the brain's structure. Some research using the well-known eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course suggested so. However, that study was limited in scope and technology, and perhaps skewed by elective participant pools.
In new research, a team from the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led by Richard J. Davidson, found no evidence of structural brain changes with short-term mindfulness training.
Published May 20 in Science Advances, the team's study is the largest and most rigorously controlled to date. In two novel trials, over 200 healthy participants with no meditation experience or mental health concerns were given MRI exams to measure their brains prior to being randomly assigned to one of three study groups: the eight-week MBSR course, a non-mindfulness-based well-being intervention called the Health Enhancement Program, or a control group that didn't receive any type of training.
The MBSR course was taught by certified instructors and included mindfulness practices such as yoga, meditation and body awareness. The HEP course was developed as an activity that is similar to MBSR but without mindfulness training. Instead, HEP engaged participants in exercise, music therapy and nutrition practices. Both groups spent additional time in practice at home.
Following each eight-week trial, all participants were given a final MRI exam to measure changes in brain structure. Data from the two trials were pooled to create a large sample size. No significant differences in structural brain changes were detected between MBSR and either control group.
Participants were also asked to self-report on mindfulness following the study. Those in both the MBSR and HEP groups reported increased mindfulness compared with the control group, providing evidence that improvements in self-reported mindfulness may be related to benefits of any type of wellness intervention more broadly, rather than being specific to mindfulness meditation practice.
So, what about the prior study that found evidence of structural changes? Since participants in that study had sought out a course for stress reduction, they may have had more room for improvement than the healthy population studied here. In other words, according to the lead author of the new study, behavioral scientist and first author Tammi Kral, "the simple act of choosing to enroll in MBSR may be associated with increased benefit." The current study also had a much larger sample size, increasing confidence in the findings.
However, as the team writes in the new paper, "it may be that only with much longer duration of training, or training explicitly focused on a single form of practice, that structural alterations will be identified." Whereas structural brain changes are found with physical and spatial training, mindfulness training spans a variety of psychological areas like attention, compassion and emotion. This training engages a complex network of brain regions, each of which may be changing to different degrees in different people -- making overall changes at the group level difficult to observe.
These surprising results ultimately underscore the importance of scrutiny for positive findings and the need for verification through replication. In addition, studies of longer-term interventions as well as ones singularly focused on meditation practices may lead to different results. "We are still in the early stages of research on the effects of meditation training on the brain and there is much to be discovered," says Davidson.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220520144651.htm
How is it possible to remember selfless experiences?
May 17, 2022
Science Daily/Ruhr-University Bochum
People who practice intensive meditation report memories of states in which their sense of self dissolves. Is this at all possible?
Psychoactive substances or meditation can trigger an experience that the self dissolves and is no longer present. The philosophers Dr. Raphael Millière from Columbia University New York and Professor Albert Newen from Ruhr-Universität Bochum have analysed whether accounts of memories of such experiences should be taken seriously. They conclude that selfless memories are possible. Their reasoning is outlined in the journal Erkenntnis, published online on 12 May 2022.
"Without such experiences, we can't imagine what it means when the self dissolves," says Albert Newen. The question he asked together with Raphael Millière was: "Aren't memories better interpreted as a reconstruction in retrospect, which misjudges the the original experience?" In our everyday consciousness, the self is always present. When you reach for a car key, you implicitly feel that you are the agent and that it is your own arm that makes the movement. When you look at something, you experience yourself at the centre of the visual perspective.
Indications of the existence of selfless experiences
Individuals with neurological impairments, for example as a result of strokes, are known to have impaired facets of this self-perception. "Also, neural processing is known to change considerably during meditation," say Newen and Millière. "Accordingly, we should acknowledge that experiences do exist that lack any facet of the self." But even so, it remains doubtful whether people can remember them, as Newen explains: "If a person describes a memory of a selfless experience, they are in a state of self-consciousness while remembering -- and how can they remember an episode if they weren't aware of themselves during the original experience?"
Explanation based on the Bochum model of memory
The Bochum model of memory, which is being developed in research group 2812, is based on the assumption that people construct a scenario when they remember. The process starts with the activation of a memory trace in which core parts of the experience are stored. The memory trace is then enriched with background knowledge, resulting in the construction of a vivid memory of an experienced event. Moreover, people usually add two self-facets in the construction: They register that it is themselves who are involved in the scene and that the memory is their own. Researchers speak of self-involvement and mineness of memory.
Newen and Millière argue that self-involvement and mineness must, however, be separate aspects. This is because some patients describe having been involved in an episode ("I remember the scene where I did something") without feeling the memory as belonging to themselves -- the mineness of the memory is lacking. The two self-facets added in the construction can be missing from the original memory and only emerge during the construction process. Even if the original experience didn't contain any facets of the self and is deposited in the memory trace without any such facets, facets of the self can still be included in the construction. Consequently, a memory of selfless experiences and the accounts of such experiences should be taken seriously.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220517112236.htm
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy benefits people with depression through promoting self-kindness
March 9, 2022
Science Daily/University of Exeter
New research shows that Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) can help promote self-kindness in people with a history of depression, thereby putting their bodies in a state of safety and relaxation.
The research, led by the University of Exeter with collaboration from the universities of Oxford and Magdeburg, indicates that MBCT may help break the cycle of highly critical thoughts and feelings of worthlessness, which often lead people with depression to relapse.
Participants treated with MBCT showed a pattern of being kind to themselves, along with body responses of reduced threat response, a state of safety and relaxation that is important for regeneration and healing.
The authors believe the study helps to better understand how MBCT prevents relapse.
MBCT is an effective group-based psychological treatment that helps people change the way they think and feel about their experiences and learn skills that reduce the likelihood of further episodes of depression.
Previous research has shown that individuals with recurrent depression benefit particularly from MBCT when they learn to become more compassionate towards themselves.
This increased self-compassion has been defined as the ability to be kind to ourselves in stressful times.
The researchers studied 50 people who were in remission from depression and at risk for depressive relapse.
25 of this group were tested before and after an eight-week MBCT treatment and compared with an untreated control sample of 25 people with recurrent depression.
Dr Hans Kirschner, of the University of Magdeburg, the first author of the study, said: "It's encouraging to see that an evidence-based treatment like MBCT can help individuals with recurrent depression to move to a kinder self view and a related body state of safety. We hope that this can strengthen individuals' resilience and prevent depressive relapse. Though, this idea must be tested formally in future research."
In contrast, the untreated control group showed body responses indicative of a more adverse response to the self-compassion meditation when they engaged in it a second time.
The study builds on the team's previous research that found that a brief self-compassion exercise can temporarily activate a pattern of self-kindness and feeling safe in healthy individuals.
The researchers wanted to explore this effect in people with depression, and found that the self-compassion exercise alone was not sufficient to bring about the feeling of safety, but that MCBT did so effectively.
Professor Anke Karl, from the University of Exeter, lead author of the study, said: "This study extends our previous research that found that a brief self-compassion exercise can temporarily activate a pattern of self-kindness and feeling safe in healthy individuals but in individuals with recurrent depression this is unlikely to happen without going through an effective psychological therapy that we know addresses vulnerability to relapse."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220309104429.htm
Mindfulness meditation can reduce guilt, leading to unintended negative social consequences
March 4, 2022
Science Daily/University of Washington
Mindfulness meditation is a stress-management practice with ancient lineage that cultivates nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment, often by directing attention to the physical sensations of breathing. Initially inspired by centuries-old Buddhist practices consisting of philosophies and meditations together, today a secular version of mindfulness -- consisting of meditations alone -- is becoming increasingly popular.
There are phone apps that help generate self-awareness and many big corporations are folding mindfulness training programs into their curriculums. But there may be an unanticipated downside to secular mindfulness meditation practices, according to new research led by the University of Washington's Foster School of Business, and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"Meditating can reduce feelings of guilt, thus limiting reactions like generosity that are important to human relationships," said lead author Andrew Hafenbrack, an assistant professor in the Foster School who studies mindfulness.
Researchers wanted to know how mindfulness meditation reduces negative emotions, like anger and guilt.
"Negative emotions may not be pleasant, but they can help us navigate social situations and maintain relationships," Hafenbrack said.
"If someone gets really angry and they yell at their boss, or something, and they get fired or make people feel unsafe, then you know that's a bad thing," Hafenbrack said. "Not all negative emotions are the same in terms of the kinds of behaviors that they queue up, though."
When people feel guilty, it tends to make them focus outward, on other people, which can promote reparative actions.
"Meditating for short periods of time is a tool that can make people feel better, like popping an aspirin when they have a headache," Hafenbrack said. "We have a responsibility as researchers to share not only the many positive effects of meditation, but also the inadvertent side effects, such as the potential for it to occasionally relax one's moral compass."
To better understand meditation practices, the researchers conducted eight experiments with more than 1,400 participants in the U.S. and Portugal. Participants varied for each experiment -- some were U.S. adults recruited online, some were graduate students attending a university in Portugal, while another group was mostly undergraduates at the Wharton School of Business.
In their first study, the researchers demonstrated that mindfulness does reduce feelings of guilt. Participants were randomly assigned to either write about a past situation that made them feel guilty or write about their previous day. Then, they listened to either an eight-minute guided mindfulness meditation recording that instructed them to focus on the physical sensations of breathing or an eight-minute control condition recording in which they were instructed to let their minds wander. Participants who listened to the mindfulness recording reported feeling less guilt compared to those in the mind-wandering control group. This was true whether they had written about a guilty situation or their previous day.
The team then ran six other experiments to test whether mindfulness meditation would influence prosocial reparative behaviors, like making up with a friend after doing something that caused harm.
For example, in two experiments all participants were asked to recall and write about a time they wronged someone and felt guilty, before being randomly assigned to meditate or not. After that, they were asked to allocate a hypothetical $100 between a birthday gift for the person they had wronged, a charity for African flood victims, and themselves. Participants who had meditated allocated approximately 17% less to the person they had wronged compared to those who had not meditated.
The psychological process behind these allocation differences was reduced guilt. These and three other, similar experiments established that mindfulness meditation reduces the tendency to make amends for harming others.
"This research serves as a caution to people who might be tempted to use mindfulness meditation to reduce emotions that are unpleasant, but necessary to support moral thoughts and behavior," said co-author Isabelle Solal, an assistant professor at ESSEC Business School in Cergy-Pointoise, France.
While focused breathing meditation is the most popular form of meditation, used in mindfulness programs such as the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction approach and Google's Search Inside Yourself, the study also explored loving kindness meditation, which appears in those programs as well. Loving kindness meditation consists of imagery exercises in which one evokes other people and sends wishes that each is happy, well and free from suffering.
In the final experiment, participants once again wrote about a time they wronged someone and felt guilty, before listening to either a focused breathing mindfulness meditation recording or a loving kindness meditation recording. Participants in the loving kindness group reported higher intentions to contact, apologize to, and make up with people they had harmed compared to participants in the focused breathing meditation group. The difference was explained by participants' increased focus on others and feelings of love.
"Our research suggests that loving kindness meditation may allow people to have the stress-reduction benefits of meditation without the cost of reducing repair, because it increases focus on others and feelings of love," said co-author Matthew LaPalme, who was a research scientist at Yale University and now works at Amazon.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220304101008.htm
Mindfulness therapy reduces opioid misuse and chronic pain in primary care, according to new research
March 1, 2022
Science Daily/University of Utah
Results from a new clinical trial demonstrate that an eight-week mindfulness-based therapy -- Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) -- decreased opioid use and misuse while reducing chronic pain symptoms, with effects lasting as long as nine months. This is the first large-scale clinical trial to demonstrate that a psychological intervention can simultaneously reduce opioid misuse and chronic pain among people who were prescribed opioid pain relievers.
The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Internal Medicine, followed 250 adults with chronic pain on long-term opioid therapy who met the criteria of misusing opioids. Most participants took oxycodone or hydrocodone, reported two or more painful conditions and met the clinical criteria for major depression. More than half of participants also had a diagnosable opioid use disorder.
Study participants were randomly assigned to either a standard supportive psychotherapy group, or a MORE group, both engaging in eight weekly two-hour group sessions, as well as 15 minutes of daily homework. The study treatment groups were delivered in doctor's offices, in the same clinical care setting where patients received their opioid pain management. Researchers measured the participants' opioid misuse behaviors; symptoms of pain; depression, anxiety and stress; and opioid dose through a nine-month follow-up. Opioid craving was measured at three random times a day, prompted by a text message sent to the participants' smartphones.
Nine months after the treatment period ended, 45% of participants in the MORE group were no longer misusing opioids, and 36% had cut their opioid use in half or greater. Patients in MORE had more than twice the odds of those in standard psychotherapy to stop misusing opioids by the end of the study. Additionally, participants in the MORE group reported clinically significant improvements in chronic pain symptoms, decreased opioid craving and reduced symptoms of depression to levels below the threshold for major depressive disorder.
"MORE demonstrated one of the most powerful treatment effects I've seen," said Eric Garland, lead author of the study, director of the Center on Mindfulness and Integrative Health Intervention Development at the University of Utah and the most prolific author of mindfulness research in the world. "There's nothing else out there that works this well in alleviating pain and curbing opioid misuse."
"Remarkably, the effects of MORE seem to get stronger over time," said Garland, who developed MORE and has been studying it for over a decade. "One possible explanation is that these individuals are integrating the skills they've learned through MORE into their everyday lives." Garland also hypothesized that, based on previous research, the sustained benefits might be related to MORE's ability to restructure the way the brain processes rewards, helping the participants' brains shift from valuing drug-related rewards to valuing natural, healthy rewards like a beautiful sunset, the bloom of springtime flowers or the smile on the face of a loved one.
MORE combines meditation, cognitive-behavioral therapy and principles from positive psychology into sequenced training in mindfulness, savoring and reappraisal skills.
Participants are taught to break down the experience of pain or opioid craving into their sensory components, "zooming in" on what they are feeling and breaking it down into different sensations like heat, tightness or tingling. They are trained to notice how those experiences change over time, and to adopt the perspective of an observer. They are also taught to savor pleasant, healthful and life-affirming experiences, amplifying the sense of joy, reward and meaning that can come from positive, everyday events. Finally, participants are taught to reframe stressful events to find a sense of meaning in the face of adversity, to recognize what can be learned from difficult events and how dealing with those experiences might make a person stronger.
Garland explained, "Rather than getting caught up in the pain or craving, we teach people how to step back and observe that experience from the perspective of an objective witness. When they can do that, people begin to recognize that who they truly are is bigger than any one thought or sensation. They are not defined by their experiences of pain or craving; their true nature is something more."
People experiencing both chronic pain and opioid misuse present a significant treatment challenge, since opioid use disorder has been shown to increase pain sensitivity, which in turn promotes further opioid misuse. By simultaneously reducing pain and opioid use, MORE may offer an effective, economical and lifesaving intervention to help halt the ongoing opioid crisis.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220301192410.htm
Prenatal mindfulness program improves stress response in infants
March 10, 2022
Science Daily/University of California - San Francisco
Infants whose mothers participated in a mindfulness-based program during pregnancy had healthier stress responses at 6 months old, a new UC San Francisco study found.
This is the first known study to show that a prenatal social intervention may improve health outcomes in offspring, as measured by autonomic nervous system responses, said Amanda Noroña-Zhou, PhD, first author of the study in Psychosomatic Medicine.
"It is really well established that maternal stress in pregnancy increases the risk for health problems in the children," said Noroña-Zhou, PhD, a clinical psychologist affiliated with UCSF's Center for Health and Community. "But we haven't had a good understanding of how this process unfolds and of the biological mechanisms underlying it, or whether we can buffer the effects of stress on negative health outcomes."
The researchers studied 135 mother-infant dyads from low-income, racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds who were experiencing high stress in their lives. Infants whose mothers underwent an eight-week mindfulness-based program had a faster cardiovascular recovery from stressful interactions, as well as more self-soothing behavior, than those who didn't.
An ability to "bounce back" from stress is tied to better health outcomes later in life, said Nicki Bush, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and pediatrics in the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences and the senior author on the study.
"There has been so little research on what we can do in the positive lane; it's been mostly about showing the negative effects of prenatal stress," Bush said. "This is the next frontier -- interventions for moms that have positive effects on both mom and baby."
Quick Recovery from a Stressful Event
The study follows one from 2019 showing the same mindfulness intervention reduced stress and depression in mothers, as well as improved their glucose tolerance and physical activity levels.
To elicit the infants' stress response, mothers were trained in the "still face paradigm," whereby the mothers played with their children for two minutes, then held a completely neutral facial expression for two minutes and ignored the babies' bids for attention. They repeated the play-ignore cycle and ended with two minutes of play.
Using electrodes, the researchers collected measurements of the infants' autonomic nervous system activity -- the fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest responses -- during the exercise. Trained observers, who were unaware of treatment status, also coded the infants' behavior responses.
The fight-or-flight response of babies whose mothers had undergone the mindfulness program was more acute when they were being ignored by their mothers and also receded more quickly after the stressor went away than babies in the control group. The treatment-group babies engaged in more self-soothing behavior, such as sucking their thumbs and looking at their hands, as well.
"A strong reaction and quick recovery are healthy, because we want our bodies to be ready for action when something is wrong, then go back to normal easily," Bush said. "The babies whose mothers did not receive the intervention had a more delayed response. They didn't respond strongly until the threat had passed, and then they didn't calm down easily after the threat was over."
Support for a Two-Generation Approach
The team intentionally chose mothers for their research who had a high level of stress due to their life situations, including financial strain and health challenges, to ensure the intervention worked for those who might benefit from it the most, said Bush.
"We hope this kind of data can embolden policymakers and advocates to say, hey, this was an inexpensive, group-based intervention that reduced mothers' depression and stress, and may improve babies' long-term wellbeing at the same time" Bush said.
Such "two-generation" programs that address caregivers and children at the same time are becoming more popular in California. Last year's state budget dedicated $800 million to creating a dyadic care benefit for Medi-Cal patients, which will allow caregivers and babies to be treated for behavioral health needs together. Home visiting programs, in which pregnant and new mothers receive visits from early childhood professionals who provide parenting guidance, is up for a proposed $50 million increase in the 2022-23 state budget.
"Pregnancy is an incredible window of opportunity for both mothers and babies," said Bush. "We could, as a society, save a lot of money while doing the right thing for the next generation."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220310143732.htm
Mindfulness can get wandering thoughts back on track
Psychology research investigates collective views on how to abate mind wandering with mindfulness
December 15, 2021
Science Daily/University of Cincinnati
Everyone has times where their mind won't stay on task. For example, you might be listening to someone talk in a meeting or class and your mind wanders to your dinner plans. Notably, research suggests that 30% to 50% of our daily thoughts are spent on this kind of mind wandering, and that excessive mind wandering can lead to many negative outcomes like poorer performance on standardized tests and poorer recall of information.
"While zoning out for a few minutes during a meeting may not hurt, it can impact you negatively if it goes on for long periods of time," says Lynley Turkelson, a University of Cincinnati doctoral student and lead author of a new study on mindfulness and mind wandering published in the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement.
"When distracting thoughts or feelings come up, mindfulness helps us gently set them aside and refocus on what is right in front of us," says Turkelson.
Methods of practicing mindfulness vary but include practices such as breath-work and meditation.
For example, Turkelson says, one can practice mindfulness by paying attention to the experience of eating a favorite food: "You may start by noticing the smell of the food before you eat it, what it feels like as you bite into it, how it feels in your mouth, and the taste. Or perhaps you pay attention to the flow of breath in and out of your lungs or on the sensations you experience in various parts of the body."
For the study, Turkelson, a doctoral student and fellow in UC's Department of Psychology, and co-author Quintino Mano, PhD, a UC associate professor of psychology, conducted a systematic review of research that looks at the relationship between mindfulness and mind wandering.
What they found is that while mindfulness -- the ability to intentionally focus attention on the present moment -- can be effective for reducing mind wandering, results do differ depending on the research methodology. For instance, people are sometimes unaware when they are distracted, so asking them to report their own mind wandering is not reliable. The study results show it's better to measure mind wandering in other ways, such as using computer-based testing.
"During COVID, people are facing even more distractions than normal, so it is important to find research-based ways to decrease mind wandering and improve attention," says Turkelson.
Turkelson says that their systematic review looks at the research on this topic and synthesizes the results so that researchers know how consistent these findings are, as well as what still needs to be studied to improve our understanding of how mindfulness helps with mind wandering.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211215204057.htm
Despite understanding the concept of mindfulness, people are applying it incorrectly
November 8, 2021
Science Daily/University of Waterloo
Mindful awareness is about both accepting and engaging with life's challenges, and that's what popularized concepts of mindfulness tend to miss, new research has found.
Studying popular concepts of mindfulness, the researchers found most laypeople are confusing the practice with passive acceptance of problem -- a misconception scientists say ignores the important work of engaging with them.
Originating in Buddhist religious practice, much of the mindfulness movement's popularity grew from clinical research affirming its potential for reducing stress and related health disorders.
"Scientific understanding of mindfulness goes beyond mere stress-relief and requires a willingness to engage with stressors," said Igor Grossmann, corresponding author of the project and a professor of social psychology at Waterloo. "It is, in fact, the engagement with stressors that ultimately results in stress relief. More specifically, mindfulness includes two main dimensions: awareness and acceptance."
Grossmann and colleagues compared critics' claims to popular interpretations of mindfulness to evaluate how people understand and apply the concept in their daily lives. They found that in practice, most people conflate acceptance with passivity or avoidance.
The research team conducted an extensive empirical project that examined the meaning of mindfulness in three parts: analyses of the semantic meaning of the term mindfulness in the English language, meta-analysis of the results from a widely used mindfulness measure, and empirical tests of association with markers of wisdom and effective emotion regulation.
"While we found that people seem to conceptually understand that mindfulness involves engagement, the general public is not walking the talk. Our results suggest that laypeople may understand what awareness is, but the next step of acceptance may not be well understood -- limiting potential for engaging with problems," said Ellen Choi, lead author on the paper and an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at Ryerson University.
Using social media as a topical example, Grossmann says that with algorithms curating increasingly hateful content, the ability to be mindful of others' perspectives has never been more critical. "Mindfulness might not provide an easy answer to the divisiveness that surrounds us, but an accurate understanding that includes the practice of acceptance may herald the re-emergence of sincere discussion and authentic connection."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211108081645.htm