Category: Research related to Mindfulness

The Mind Body Awareness Project is another example of the way Mindfulness meditation is being adapted to work with different populations and in different settings. It was set up in the year 2000 to work with at-risk and incarcerated youth. It was founded in the belief that these young people have the potential to take control of their actions and fully transform their lives. It focuses on empowering them with the tools and competencies to overcome trauma, transform negative behaviors, and find real freedom from the inside. It was recently described as a “new national model for the rehabilitation of incarcerated youth”.

The slogan of the MBA Project “We are literally one breath away from making better decisions” is based on the key role that breath awareness has in Mindfulness meditation and emotional intelligence exercises. Their programme aims to help helping teenagers to develop empathy, gain impulse control, and equip them with the tools they need to live meaningful lives. It tries to response to common issues seen in disaffected teenagers today – lack of contentment, meaning and motivation – which can lead to destructive behaviours and a disinterested “whatever” attitude.

This ‘whatever’ attitude has another side. It is the statement ‘whatever’ that can express their ambivalence towards everything they don’t like. ‘Whatever’ is how today’s youth express their extreme apathy towards teachers (and other adults) that cannot relate to them, and classrooms and institution that do not engage their interests. Breaking through this ‘whatever’ is the educator’s biggest challenge.

There is an article in today’s Times about the first school in England to teach mindfulness to pupils as a regular part of the curriculum. The Course has been designed in conjunction with Mark Williams, director of the Mindfulness Centre at Oxford, who collaborated with Jon Kabat Zinn on the book The Mindful way through Depression. The article summarizes the Course objectives as follows:

The course develops exercises to help to improve attention — rather than allowing the mind to be “hijacked” by emotional issues, regrets, worries about the past and future and other distractions. This can be done in a number of ways, such as by focusing on breathing, parts of the body or movement.

Mindfulness originated in Eastern meditation traditions such as Buddhism but is now an established secular discipline. A growing body of research supports wider use of the approach to address transient stress and deeper mental health problems, including recommendations from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence that it be offered on the NHS to patients suffering from depression.

The article is interesting. It can be found here : http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6984113.ece

Most people get nervous when asked to give a presentation or meet a new group of people. However, for those who suffer from Social Anxiety Disorder, also known as Social Phobia, the idea of addressing a crowd often triggers more than just jittery nerves. Headaches, sleep problems and persistent thoughts of failure or embarrassment are common. This anxiety may be provoked by a variety of social situations, not just public speaking, but also by challenges such as participating or presenting at meetings or talking with a group of people.

In a study at Stanford University, headed by psychology researcher Philippe Goldin, participants with Social Anxiety Disorder underwent the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Programme. Results of the study were published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy in early 2009. Goldin focused on the negative thoughts which dominate the anticipated future for those suffering from anxiety: “The idea is that if a person has the psychological flexibility to shift freely from one mode of thinking to another mode, then that is a sign of health, It’s when we get stuck in certain thinking patterns that our beliefs become maladaptive.“. The study found that mindfulness meditation helped patients develop this flexibility.

On a day-to-day level, Goldin encourages patients battling Social Anxiety Disorder to take “meaningful pauses” throughout the day as a way to monitor and take charge of their fears and self-doubts. “It breaks the circuit,” says one participant. “I always thought that anxiety had me in its grip, but I realized it’s the other way around. I have it in my grip. It’s a matter of learning to let it go.”

Mindfulness has been studied in the treatment of certain anxiety complaints, with some promising results. In meta-analyses carried out by Baer in 2003 and Bishop in 2002, it was found to reduce distress across a number of anxiety disorders, including Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). This is perhaps not surprising because neurobehavioural research has found that the orbital frontal cortex in the brain is involved in people making emotional assessments and judgements about danger in their environment. This part of the brain can be overactive in people with obsessive compulsive disorder, with the increases in metabolism giving a heightened feeling that something is wrong. Because mindfulness trains a person to observe inner experiences with calm and without immediately responding to them, it can assist people to learn different behaviours in response to their anxious feelings. For people with OCD, this means that they can notice what is happening at a certain moment rather than automatically engaging in a ritual or compulsive behaviour.

These finding were supported by a small study conducted on a student population by Hanstede, Gidron, and Nyklicek, published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in 2008, which found that mindfulness had a significant effect on OCD symptoms, letting go, and thought-action fusion.

There was an interesting article recently in the New York Times
saying that generosity and kindness may be innate:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01human.html?_r=2&emc=eta1

Innate or not they can certainly be cultivated. We are always practicing something, and in today’s rushed world it can often be impatience and fighting to get our own way. It is good to practice kindness and patience at times during the day because it strengthens our patterns of behaving in those ways.

It seems that reflecting on compassion may also help. Research at the University of Wisconsin used advanced brain imaging to show that meditation may increase the human capacity for empathy.

In the study, researchers compared brain activity in meditation experts with that of subjects just learning the technique (16 in each group). They measured brain activity, during meditation and at rest, in response to sounds—a woman in distress, a baby laughing, and a busy restaurant—designed to evoke a negative, positive, or neutral emotional response.

The researchers found that both the novice and the expert meditators showed an increased empathy reaction when in a meditative state. However, the expert meditators showed a much greater reaction, especially to the negative sound, which may indicate a greater capacity for empathy as a result of doing meditation.