For thousands of years people have been meditating, often as part of a spiritual practice, but recently, mindfulness has become an extremely effective and popular way to help people manage their stress, support improved mental health and elevate their overall well-being.
A lot, and we mean a LOT, of research shows it’s effective. Psychologists have found that mindfulness meditation changes our brain and biology in positive ways leading to both improved mental and physical health.
What is mindfulness meditation?
Meditation can be defined in many ways and a simple way to think of it is training of your mind to achieve a mental state of calm concentration and positive emotions and uses two main techniques; attention and acceptance
Attention is about tuning into your experiences to focus on what’s happening in the present moment. It typically involves directing your awareness to your breath, your thoughts, the physical sensations in your body and the feelings you are experiencing.
Acceptance involves observing those feelings and sensations without judgment and instead of responding or reacting to those thoughts or feelings, you aim to note them and let them go.
Mindfulness-based therapies provide the tools to put those concepts into practice and might include breathing exercises, yoga, and guided lessons to help you become aware of your body sensations, thoughts, and feelings.
Much of the research on mindfulness has focused on Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR)
This technique was started by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center to help people manage stress, chronic pain, and illness using mindfulness meditation, body awareness, and yoga in an 8-week program. He adapted secular mindfulness practices from Buddhist traditions for clinical, non-religious use, creating a widely researched and adopted program for well-being
This intervention involves weekly group classes and daily mindfulness exercises to practice at home, over an 8-week period. MBSR teaches people how to increase mindfulness through yoga and meditation.
Researchers reviewed more than 200 studies of mindfulness among healthy people and found mindfulness-based therapy was especially effective for reducing stress, anxiety and depression. Mindfulness can also help treat people with specific problems including pain, smoking cessation and addictions.
Some of the most promising research has looked at people with depression and several studies have found that these techniques can significantly reduce relapse in people who have had previous episodes of major depression.
And it is not just mental health that reaps the rewards, physical health improvemetns are often seen. Studies have shown that mindfulness can help reduce pain, fatigue and stress levels in people with chronic pain. Other studies have found preliminary evidence that mindfulness can help boost the immune system, improve cancer outcomes and help people recover from viral illnesses.
How mindfulness works
You may ask, how could simply tuning into your thoughts and feelings lead to so many positive outcomes throughout the body? The benefits of mindfulness are believed to be related to its ability to reduce the body’s response to stress.
Chronic stress has been shown to impair the body’s immune system and make many other health problems worse, therefore by lowering the stress response, mindfulness may have downstream effects throughout the body.
Mindfulness has been shown to influence various stress pathways in the brain, therefore changing brain structures and activity in regions associated with both attention and emotional regulation.
There is also strong evidence that people who received MBSR training were less likely to react negatively or with unhelpful emotional reactions in times of stress. They also found moderate evidence that people who participated in MBSR programs were better able to focus on the present, and reduce rumination about negative thoughts or experiences.
How to get started
A number of mindfulness-based interventions are now available, as well as online or through smartphone apps such as Insight Timer and Calm. Although addiction to smart phones is becoming problematic, early studies have found that online mindfulness based interventions can have a positive effect on mental health.
One thing to keep in mind, that like any new skill, practice is important to improved results. It can take some time for mindfulness meditation to feel natural and become a regular part of your life. Patience and practice is important and will prove its efficacy with reduced stress and improved well-being.