Stressed at school? Art therapy reduces teenage girls' headaches

July 30, 2019

Science Daily/University of Washington

In a pilot study, researchers explored art-based mindfulness activities that schools could use to reduce headaches, a common side effect of stress in adolescent girls. After three weeks of twice-weekly mindfulness and art therapy sessions, 8 teenage girls reported experiencing significantly fewer headaches.

Teenagers report higher levels of stress than adults, and cite school as the highest contributing factor, according to the American Psychological Association's annual report. A summary from 2013 concluded that while stress among Americans was not new, "what's troubling is the stress outlook for teens in the United States."

In response, recently some schools have turned to mindfulness-based programs as a way to alleviate stress among their students. These programs could benefit from more research into what activities students find most useful.

In a pilot study led by the University of Washington, researchers explored art-based mindfulness activities that schools could use to reduce headaches, a common side effect of stress in adolescent girls. The test group of eight teenage girls gave feedback on which activities they preferred.

After three weeks of twice-weekly mindfulness and art therapy sessions, the girls reported experiencing significantly fewer headaches. At the beginning of the study, the girls reported 7.38 headaches, on average, within the previous two-week period. At the end of the study, that number had dropped to 4.63 -- almost a 40% decrease. This drop remained even seven weeks after the study had ended. The researchers published their findings May 22 in the journal Art Therapy.

"This study highlights one of my main research missions: We should be making interventions in cooperation with teenagers if we want these strategies to work," said corresponding author Elin Björling, a senior research scientist in the UW's human centered design and engineering department. "There's something powerful about saying 'I'm inviting you to start thinking about how you could get better. Come have a conversation with me about how we could do this.' I think that's why we saw such a strong response even in this tiny study."

The team recruited eight girls between the ages of 14 to 17 from a high school in Seattle. All of the participants reported experiencing three or more headaches not related to an injury within a two-week period, and five of the eight mentioned tension or stress as the main reason for headaches.

During the program, the students met twice a week for a 50-minute session with the research team. Each session began with an activity in which students would map where they were feeling stressed on a drawing of a body. Then the teens would participate in mindfulness and art activities before closing the session with another body map.

"After the study, we looked at all the before and after body maps side by side. It was so clear that something significant was going on," Björling said. "In the beginning everything was in pieces, and in the end everything was flowing through the whole body."

The teens tried different mindfulness techniques in each session so they could find which ones worked the best for them.

What teens liked: square breathing, a technique that encourages people to take slow breaths by concentrating and counting.

"I thought: 'No teen ever wants to do counted breathing, and they're never going to do it,'" Björling said. "But a few of them said 'That's my favorite. I do it all the time now.'"

What teens didn't like: mindful eating, a technique that asks people to focus on what and how they're eating.

"They hated it," Björling said. "This was a technique straight out of a lot of mindfulness programs for teens, but it didn't connect with them. It just annoyed them. It goes to show I need them to be experts in their own lives."

The researchers also asked the students to participate in different mindful art activities. During each session, the students tried a new art medium -- they particularly liked using oil pastels -- and different types of art therapy projects, including one where they worked together to create mandalas before and after a meditation exercise.

While the teens experienced fewer headaches after the study ended, their overall stress levels didn't change much. But the students reported feeling better in the moment, saying that they felt like they could handle whatever happened for the rest of the day.

The team was surprised to see any differences, given the small size of the group.

"It's not just about this study," Björling said. "This problem of teen mental health and headaches is so big that I'm worried about what happens if we don't take it on. Somistine Stevens, a nursing professor at UW Tacoma, and Narayan Singh, a psychology doctoral student at Seattle Pacific University, are also co-authors on this paper.e teens will want nothing to do with art mindfulness. So we need to come at this in lots of different ways. We're going to need an army of people and a cornucopia of options."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190730092626.htm

Mindfulness meditation can offset the worry of waiting

December 4, 2017

Science Daily/University of California - Riverside

Research has shown all the techniques we employ to reduce the stress of worry don't work. Now an expert has found something that can help: 'mindfulness' meditation. That is, focusing on the present using meditation. The research has found that mindfulness is a sort of antidote to the 'curse' of waiting.

Popular music and clichés aren't the only evidence that the waiting is the hardest part. Research backs it up as well; waiting for potentially bad news can be at least as difficult as receiving the news.

try lots of things to mitigate the suffering that comes with waiting for exam scores, hospital test results, or the outcome of a job interview. They try to distract themselves. They try to stay positive. They brace for the worst.

Past research by UC Riverside "worry and waiting" expert Kate Sweeny has studied the effectiveness of those techniques. None of it works, her research has found. Those tactics not only fail to reduce distress -- they can even backfire and make it worse.

But now, Sweeny's research finds something that can help: supplementing those ineffective strategies with "mindfulness" meditation. That is, focusing on the present using meditation.

In the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, research funded by the National Science Foundation asserts that mindfulness is a sort of antidote to the "curse" of waiting. That curse is a focus on the past or on the future, represented by questions such as "Why did I say that?" and "What if things don't go my way?"

"We try to predict our fate and regain a sense of certainty and control over our life," said Sweeny, who is an associate professor of psychology at UCR. "We know from lots of research that rumination (repetitive thoughts about the past) and worry (repetitive thoughts about the future) are quite unpleasant and even harmful to our health and well-being, so it's important to seek solutions to this painful form of mental time-travel."

Better to focus on the present, Sweeny said, and accept your thoughts and feelings as they arise rather than engage in tactics to avoid them. It means you'll process your emotions differently and -- Sweeny argues -- more effectively.

The study was performed using 150 California law students who had taken the bar exam and were awaiting the exam results. It takes four months after taking the exam before results are posted online. The students completed a series of questionnaires in that four-month waiting period.

There are few "waiting" scenarios more stressful than the potentially career-killing bar exam. The magnitude of the distress is represented in several sample statements Sweeny and her team collected. Among them:

I had a nightmare where I couldn't determine whether I had passed or failed the bar exam and I spent the entire dream trying to find out my results. I have these sort of bar exam nightmares once every couple weeks.

I got sick, like fever flu sick, and I think it's because my anxiety levels have slowly been building up to today!! I was constantly thinking and thinking about the results.

During the four-month waiting period, the students were asked to participate in a 15-minute audio-guided meditation session at least once a week.

Sweeny found the mindfulness meditation served to postpone the phenomenon of "bracing." Bracing is essentially preparing for the worst. Previous research by Sweeny and others shows bracing can be an effective technique for managing expectations, but its benefits erode when it occurs too early in the waiting process.

"Optimism feels good; it just does a poor job of preparing us for the blow of bad news," Sweeny said. "That's where bracing comes in. In a perfect world, we'd be optimistic as long as possible to get all the good feelings we can from assuming the best, and then we'd brace for the worst at the moment of truth to make sure we're prepared for bad news."

The benefits of mindfulness meditation have long been asserted, but Sweeny said this is the first research to demonstrate its effectiveness coping with waiting.

"We know that meditation is a great way to reduce everyday stress, but our study is the first to see if it also makes it easier to wait for personally significant news. This study is also one of the first to identify any strategy that helps people wait better, and it also shows that even brief and infrequent meditation can be helpful," Sweeny said.

Best of all, Sweeny said, the mindfulness tactic requires no training, no money, and minimal time and effort.

"Meditation isn't for everyone, but our study shows that you don't have to be a master meditater or go to a silent meditation retreat to benefit from mindfulness," she said. "Even 15 minutes once a week, which was the average amount of meditation practiced by our participants, was enough to ease the stress of waiting."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171204095011.htm