- Mindfulness really does work, study rules Daily Mail
- A Shield Against Anxiety and Depression: Mindfulness Courses Improve Mental Health SciTechDaily
- Systematic review and individual participant data meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials assessing mindfulness-based programs for mental health promotion Nature.com
- In-person mindfulness courses may help prevent mental health problems News-Medical.Net
- Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement reduces post-traumatic stress via reappraisal among patients with chronic pain and co-occurring opioid misuse Nature.com
- View Full Coverage on Google News
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Mindfulness exercises can be as effective as anxiety drugs, study shows
A seven-point scale was used to assess anxiety among 208 participants, with a score of seven representing extreme anxiety and a score of one being normal. In both the medication and the mindfulness groups, the average score after treatment dropped from a moderate level of anxiety to a mild level of anxiety.
Both groups began the study with similar baseline scores (4.44 in the mindfulness group and 4.51 in the medication group.) By the end of the study, anxiety scores in both groups had declined to an average of 3.09 on the anxiety scale, a statistically similar change that showed the treatments to be equally effective.
Mindfulness practices such as breathing exercises have been used to treat anxiety for a long time, but this is the first study showing how effective they can be in comparison with standard treatments for anxiety disorders, said the study’s lead author, Elizabeth Hoge, who is a psychiatrist and director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Program at Georgetown University.
She believes the findings help support the use of mindfulness as a viable intervention that may be better than traditional treatments for some people, such as those who aren’t comfortable seeing a psychiatrist or who experience negative side effects from medication.
“We can’t yet predict who will do better with which type of treatment,” Hoge said. “But there’s nothing that says you couldn’t do both at the same time.”
Breathing, body scans and mindful movement
Mindfulness treatments used in the study included breath awareness exercises, which involve paying attention to your breath as you allow thoughts to rise, then pass through your mind before letting them go. Importantly, the practice isn’t about trying to change your breath, Hoge said, but about focusing on your breath as a way to ground yourself if any anxious thoughts arise.
Participants also completed exercises such as a body scan, which involves paying attention to different parts of the body, and mindful movement, which includes stretching the body into different positions and noticing how each movement feels.
Those who received the eight-week mindfulness intervention attended a weekly 2.5-hour-long class with a mindfulness teacher, completed daily at-home exercises for 45 minutes, and attended a one-day mindfulness retreat five or six weeks into the course.
When anxiety becomes a habit
The reason mindfulness may help with anxiety is that it can interrupt a negative feedback loop in the brain, said Jud Brewer, director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center and chief medical officer at Sharecare, a digital health company. Brewer believes that anxiety is a habit driven by negative reinforcement in the brain.
When we have a situation or thought that triggers our anxiety, worrying about it can feel rewarding in the brain, he said. “It can give people a sense of control even though they don’t have any more control than if they didn’t worry,” Brewer said.
Trying to stop worrying using willpower doesn’t work, he said, because it doesn’t change the way your brain works. But mindfulness can help train your brain to have new habits because it helps you to recognize that worrying is not rewarding and provides an alternative sense of control that feels better than worrying, Brewer said. He helped develop an app for mindfulness training called Unwinding Anxiety and in a small, randomized study, showed that using the app significantly reduced people’s anxiety.
How mindfulness can change the brain
Other studies have shown that practicing mindfulness can rewire the brain, leading to long-term changes in behavior and thinking, said Sara Lazar, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
In people who worry a lot, a part of the brain called the default mode network can become overactive, causing their minds to wander toward negative or anxious thoughts more often, Lazar said. But research shows that meditation and mindfulness exercises can help turn off this part of the brain and make it less active by training people to refocus, she explained.
Mindfulness training also has been shown to reduce activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that helps regulate fear, stress and other emotions, she said. And, her research suggests that these types of changes can be long lasting.
“People who go through these programs, even if they discontinue, continue to report benefits months later,” Lazar said. “It’s like learning to ride a bike, even if you stop, you can do it again.”
Gripped by anxious thoughts
Julie Rose, 48, of Provo, Utah, decided to try mindfulness in 2018 when she realized that while medications helped with her anxiety, she needed additional coping strategies. She was finding it hard to focus at her job as a podcast host and had trouble sleeping. Her anxious thoughts “gripped” her, she said, and trying to control them by ignoring them or redirecting her anxious energy wasn’t helping.
She signed up for eight weeks of mindfulness classes. At first, she didn’t feel like the breathing or bodily awareness exercises were working — she still had anxious thoughts and felt like she couldn’t quiet them.
Then after a few weeks, she realized that though she couldn’t stop her anxious thoughts, with meditation, she could acknowledge them in a way that they passed more easily and quickly. On days that she meditated, she slept better and felt better overall, she said.
“I used to think this was stupid but it really works,” she said. “It allows the anxiety to keep on moving right on through me.”
How to practice mindfulness for anxiety
The more someone practices mindfulness, the more they will benefit, but even doing a few short exercises a few times a week can lessen anxiety, said Katherine Cullen, a licensed psychotherapist at Juniper Therapeutic Services in New York. While many studies on mindfulness involve a more significant time investment of over eight weeks, Cullen often suggests her patients start small with a simple breathing exercise for two minutes a few times a week.
She said that, at first, mindfulness exercises may feel uncomfortable, because people aren’t used to dealing with their emotions or anxious thoughts.
“Think of it like exercise. You might go for a walk after being inactive for a while and it might feel uncomfortable,” she said. “The key, like with exercise, is to be consistent about it.”
If someone is interested in trying mindfulness exercises, she advised they shouldn’t change their medications without consulting their prescribing physician or psychiatrist, and they should look for a practitioner or coach who is certified in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, which is an evidence-based form of mindfulness training. People can also try searching for centers affiliated with the nonprofit, Buddhist organization Insight Meditation Society, many of which offer donation-based mindfulness classes.
“If you’re new to mindfulness and have never done it before, I would strongly encourage you to do it with someone else,” Cullen said. “It’s really helpful to have someone there to actively guide you through it and answer any questions you might have.”
Exercise and Mindfulness Don’t Appear to Boost Cognitive Function in Older Adults
Summary: While exercise and mindfulness help older adults stay physically fit and mentally well, they may not have such a strong beneficial impact on cognition as previously believed.
Source: WUSTL
A large study that focused on whether exercise and mindfulness training could boost cognitive function in older adults found no such improvement following either intervention.
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of California, San Diego, studied the cognitive effects of exercise, mindfulness training or both for up to 18 months in older adults who reported age-related changes in memory but had not been diagnosed with any form of dementia.
The findings are published in JAMA.
“We know beyond any doubt that exercise is good for older adults, that it can lower risk for cardiac problems, strengthen bones, improve mood and have other beneficial effects—and there has been some thought that it also might improve cognitive function,” said the study’s first author, Eric J. Lenze, MD, the Wallace and Lucille Renard Professor and head of the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University.
“Likewise, mindfulness training is beneficial because it reduces stress, and stress can be bad for your brain. Therefore, we hypothesized that if older adults exercised regularly, practiced mindfulness or did both there might be cognitive benefits—but that’s not what we found.”
Lenze and his colleagues still want to see whether there may be some cognitive effects over a longer time period, so they plan to continue studying this group of older adults to learn whether exercise and mindfulness might help prevent future cognitive declines. In this study, however, the practices did not boost cognitive function.
“So many older adults are concerned about memory,” said senior author Julie Wetherell, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego.
“It’s important for studies like ours to develop and test behavioral interventions to try to provide them with neuroprotection and stress reduction as well as general health benefits.”
The researchers studied 585 adults ages 65 through 84. None had been diagnosed with dementia, but all had concerns about minor memory problems and other age-related cognitive declines.
“Minor memory problems often are considered a normal part of aging, but it’s also normal for people to become concerned when they notice these issues,” said Lenze, who also directs Washington University’s Healthy Mind Lab.
“Our lab’s principal aim is to help older people remain healthy by focusing on maintaining their mental and cognitive health as they age, and we were eager to see whether exercise and mindfulness might offer a cognitive boost in the same way that they boost other aspects of health.”
All study participants were considered cognitively normal for their ages. The researchers tested them when they enrolled in the study, measuring memory and other aspects of thinking. They also conducted brain-imaging scans.
The participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups: a group in which subjects worked with trained exercise instructors; a group supervised by trained experts in the practice of mindfulness; a group that participated in regular exercise and mindfulness training; and a group that did neither, but met for occasional sessions focused on general health education topics. The researchers conducted memory tests and follow-up brain scans after six months and again after 18 months.
At six months and again at 18 months, all of the groups looked similar. All four groups performed slightly better in testing, but the researchers believe that was due to practice effects as study subjects retook tests similar to what they had taken previously. Likewise, the brain scans revealed no differences between the groups that would suggest a brain benefit of the training.
Lenze said the study’s findings don’t mean exercise or mindfulness training won’t help improve cognitive function in any older adults, only that those practices don’t appear to boost cognitive performance in healthy people without impairments.
“We aren’t saying, ‘Don’t exercise’ or, ‘Don’t practice mindfulness’,” Lenze explained.
“But we had thought we might find a cognitive benefit in these older adults. We didn’t. On the other hand, we didn’t study whether exercise or mindfulness might benefit older adults who are impaired, due to dementia or to disorders such as depression. I don’t think we can extrapolate from the data that these practices don’t help improve cognitive function in anyone.”
Lenze said the researchers plan to continue following the group of adults who participated in this study.
“They are still engaging in exercise and mindfulness,” he said. “We didn’t see improvements, but cognitive performance didn’t decline either. In the study’s next phase, we’ll continue following the same people for five more years to learn whether exercise and mindfulness training might help slow or prevent future cognitive declines.”
About this aging and cognition research news
Author: Jim Dryden
Source: WUSTL
Contact: Jim Dryden – WUSTL
Image: The image is credited to WUSTL
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Original Research: Closed access.
“Effects of Mindfulness Training and Exercise on Cognitive Function in Older Adults: A Randomized Clinical Trial” by Eric J. Lenze et al. JAMA
Abstract
Effects of Mindfulness Training and Exercise on Cognitive Function in Older Adults: A Randomized Clinical Trial
Importance Episodic memory and executive function are essential aspects of cognitive functioning that decline with aging. This decline may be ameliorable with lifestyle interventions.
Objective To determine whether mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), exercise, or a combination of both improve cognitive function in older adults.
Design, Setting, and Participants This 2 × 2 factorial randomized clinical trial was conducted at 2 US sites (Washington University in St Louis and University of California, San Diego). A total of 585 older adults (aged 65-84 y) with subjective cognitive concerns, but not dementia, were randomized (enrollment from November 19, 2015, to January 23, 2019; final follow-up on March 16, 2020).
Interventions Participants were randomized to undergo the following interventions: MBSR with a target of 60 minutes daily of meditation (n = 150); exercise with aerobic, strength, and functional components with a target of at least 300 minutes weekly (n = 138); combined MBSR and exercise (n = 144); or a health education control group (n = 153). Interventions lasted 18 months and consisted of group-based classes and home practice.
Main Outcomes and Measures The 2 primary outcomes were composites of episodic memory and executive function (standardized to a mean [SD] of 0 [1]; higher composite scores indicate better cognitive performance) from neuropsychological testing; the primary end point was 6 months and the secondary end point was 18 months. There were 5 reported secondary outcomes: hippocampal volume and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex thickness and surface area from structural magnetic resonance imaging and functional cognitive capacity and self-reported cognitive concerns.
Results Among 585 randomized participants (mean age, 71.5 years; 424 [72.5%] women), 568 (97.1%) completed 6 months in the trial and 475 (81.2%) completed 18 months. At 6 months, there was no significant effect of mindfulness training or exercise on episodic memory (MBSR vs no MBSR: 0.44 vs 0.48; mean difference, –0.04 points [95% CI, –0.15 to 0.07]; P = .50; exercise vs no exercise: 0.49 vs 0.42; difference, 0.07 [95% CI, –0.04 to 0.17]; P = .23) or executive function (MBSR vs no MBSR: 0.39 vs 0.31; mean difference, 0.08 points [95% CI, –0.02 to 0.19]; P = .12; exercise vs no exercise: 0.39 vs 0.32; difference, 0.07 [95% CI, –0.03 to 0.18]; P = .17) and there were no intervention effects at the secondary end point of 18 months. There was no significant interaction between mindfulness training and exercise (P = .93 for memory and P = .29 for executive function) at 6 months. Of the 5 prespecified secondary outcomes, none showed a significant improvement with either intervention compared with those not receiving the intervention.
Conclusions and Relevance Among older adults with subjective cognitive concerns, mindfulness training, exercise, or both did not result in significant differences in improvement in episodic memory or executive function at 6 months. The findings do not support the use of these interventions for improving cognition in older adults with subjective cognitive concerns.
Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02665481
Mindfulness and medication work equally well to curb anxiety, a new study found
CNN
—
A mindfulness meditation course may be as effective at reducing anxiety as a common medication, according to a new study.
The research, published on November 9 in JAMA Psychiatry, involved a group of 276 adults with untreated anxiety disorders. Half of the patients were randomly selected to take 10 to 20 mg of escitalopram, the generic form of Lexapro, a common medication used to treat anxiety and depression. The other half were assigned to an eight-week course in mindfulness-based stress reduction.
The results were stunning: Both groups experienced about a 20% reduction in their anxiety symptoms over the eight-week period.
Elizabeth Hoge, the lead author on the study and the director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Program at Georgetown University Medical Center, told CNN that she hopes the research can open up more treatment options for patients with anxiety.
“Lexapro is a great drug; I prescribe it a lot,” she said. “But it’s not for everyone.”
Meditation could be prescribed in lieu of medication for patients who experience severe side effects or have allergies to anti-anxiety medications, for instance, Hoge says. And starting meditation could also be a first step for people who have untreated anxiety and are wary of medication.
But the research shouldn’t be a trigger for patients to stop taking their medication without consulting a doctor. “If someone’s already taking a medication, they can try meditation at the same time,” Hoge said. “If they wanna come off the medication, they should talk to their doctor.”
There may be undetermined factors that make some patients respond better to meditation. Hoge says that after data collection had ended, participants were given the option to try the treatment option that they hadn’t been assigned. Some patients who had been assigned to the meditation group found that the medication was actually much more effective for them, and vice versa, according to Hoge.
Hoge says that further research could explore “what are the predictors of response in the different treatments,” studying which patients benefit more from meditation versus medication. Then clinicians could prescribe different treatment regimens based on their patient profiles.
And she hopes that the research leads to more insurance companies covering meditation courses as anxiety treatment.
“Usually, insurance companies are willing to pay for something when there’s research supporting its use,” she said. “If they know it’s just as effective as the drug which they do pay for, why don’t they pay for this too?”
The patients assigned to the meditation group were asked to attend a mindfulness meditation group class in-person once a week. Each class was around two-and-a-half hours long and held at a local clinic. They were also asked to meditate on their own for around 40 minutes per day.
Hoge compared the time commitment to “taking an exercise class or an art class.”
But according to Joseph Arpaia, an Oregon-based psychiatrist specializing in mindfulness and meditation, the daily time commitment is likely too much for many patients dealing with anxiety.
“Telling people who are that overworked they should spend 45 minutes a day meditating is the ‘Let them eat cake’ of psychotherapy,” he wrote in a response to Hoge’s publication, also published in JAMA Psychiatry.
Arpaia says that he has worked to find less time-intensive mindfulness methods to help patients manage their anxiety. One technique he teaches is called a “one-breath reset” that helps patients calm themselves over the course of a single breath.
But despite his reservations, “It’s always interesting to see meditation work, and it works as well as medication,” he said. “My hope would be that people realize that there are things other than medication that can work.”
“My other hope would be they realize that if sitting and following your breath makes you feel relaxed, great, but it doesn’t make everyone feel relaxed. Find something that does. Read a book, go for a walk, spend time gardening,” he said.
The patients assigned to the meditation group participated in a specific program called mindfulness-based stress reduction, first developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the 1970s. The program is secular but based on some Buddhist teachings.
“It’s like a skill you practice,” Hoge said. “People learn to have a different relationship with their thoughts. In the practice, we train people to just let go of the thoughts, be patient and gentle with the thoughts, just let them pass.”
The “practice of doing that over and over lets people put a little distance between themselves and their thoughts,” she said.
Patients shouldn’t expect meditation – or medication – to completely eliminate their anxiety, according to Hoge. “It’s normal to have anxiety,” she said. “But we can make it quiet down a little bit.”
“People think meditation is hard, that you have to keep your mind clear of thoughts,” she said. “That is not the case. You’re still meditating even if you’re having thoughts. Just having the intention to meditate counts.”
And Arpaia says that meditation can help disrupt the feedback loops that foster anxiety.
“Anxiety tends to be something that feeds on itself,” he said. “What happens is a person becomes anxious, which impairs their cognitive and social skills. As the person starts to feel more impaired, that builds anxiety.”
Anxiety isn’t the only challenge that meditation might help patients address.
A study published in the American Journal of Nursing in 2011 found that an eight-week mindfulness program was just as effective as antidepressants for preventing a relapse of depression.
Hoge said that different meditation programs might be appropriate for helping treat depression and ADHD, among other conditions.
“I think there’s great promise there,” she said.
Mindfulness meditation reduces anxiety as much as common antidepressant drug: study
Mindfulness meditation is as effective at reducing anxiety as a commonly prescribed antidepressant, according to a study published in a major journal on Wednesday.
The study, led by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center, is the first randomized clinical trial to compare the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation with the antidepressant escitalopram. The results were published in JAMA Psychiatry, a peer-reviewed journal.
The adult participants in the mindfulness group practiced 45-minute daily meditations using a few different techniques they learned at weekly classes. They also went on daylong weekend retreats.
The meditation techniques included breath awareness; body scanning, in which attention is directed to one body part at a time; and mindful movement, in which stretching and movements bring attention to the body.
Participants in the antidepressant group received 10mg of escitalopram daily the first week, and then took 20mg daily for the rest of the study if the pill was well tolerated. There were 102 patients in the mindfulness group and 106 in the antidepressant group. Escitalopram is sold under the brand names Lexapro and Cipralex, among others.
After monitoring the two groups for eight weeks, researchers found that people using mindfulness meditation saw their anxiety improve nearly as much as people who were taking the antidepressant.
Dr. Elizabeth Hoge, lead author on the study, said the findings support physicians recommending mindfulness meditation as an alternative to antidepressants for some patients. Many people worry that antidepressants will interfere with their daily lives and others start taking medications but stop.
Hoge, who is director of Georgetown University’s Anxiety Disorders Research Program, said the study also provides evidence for insurers to cover mindfulness meditation as a treatment for anxiety.
Anxiety disorders are the most common type of mental illness, affecting about 301 million people around the world, according to a February study published in Lancet Psychiatry.
What’s the truth about mindfulness and our health?
It has been the craze among celebrities and CEOs for years.
Oprah Winfrey says meditation helped to build her $2.5billion fortune, while singer Katy Perry suggests that without mindfulness practices she would have given up on the music industry years ago.
It was written off as a fad for decades, but now a growing body of research suggests achieving calm states in the mind has measurable mental and physical benefits.
In Silicone Valley, a few quiet minutes with your thoughts long ago replaced the mantra of ‘I’ll sleep when I die’ and ‘Meditation rooms’ are becoming increasingly common at tech companies like Salesforce.
And it seems for good reason. Just this week, a study found that mindfulness meditation, breathing techniques and yoga were just as effective at lowering blood sugar among diabetics as standard drugs.
That followed research last week which suggested just five minutes of breathing exercises a day could lower blood pressure. The researchers said the big dumps of oxygen in the body helps dilate blood vessels and allow blood to flow through more easily.
Research has also indicated trendy mindfulness techniques can relieve pain as effectively as traditional painkillers, and even stimulate more intense orgasms.
However, the jury’s still out on exactly how well they work. Some scientists suggest it may just be the ‘placebo’ effect — when someone experiences a positive effect because they were expecting it.
Many studies rely on surveys and fail to use control groups which are the gold-standard for scientific research, meaning evidence from them is not water-tight.
HERE, DAILYMAIL.COM LOOKS AT WHAT THE SCIENCE SAYS ABOUT MINDFULNESS
Meditation is credited by many celebrities and CEOs for helping them reach their success. And now a growing body of scientific research suggests there are several measurable benefits to the practice. The key one scientists have found it that the practice eases stress, possibly because it leads to a reduction in the stress hormone cortisol. Just last week a study also suggested 20 minutes of breathing a day could lower blood pressure by causing vessels to dilate, allowing more space for blood to flow. A number of studies have even linked meditation to better orgasms, and some say it can boost the levels of melatonin – or sleep hormone – to help people get more shut-eye
Stress, anxiety and depression
Most Americans turn to meditation to help them handle stress — triggered by work, family life or financial troubles.
An ever-growing body of scientific research suggests it actually does help people relax and dispel feelings of anger, irritability or impatience.
A meta-analysis from 2014 reviewed 47 trials involving meditation among 3,515 people. The practice was associated with ‘moderate evidence’ of lowered stress, anxiety and depression in eight weeks.
Many were practicing transcendental meditation — where participants repeated a mantra in their minds for 15 to 20 minutes twice a day.
The researchers theorized it lowers levels of the hormone cortisol — nature’s built-in alarm system — in turn lowering inflammation in the body.
There are also suggestions it may be able to change structures in the brain linked to attention and emotion regulation — such as the amygdala which looks out for fearful and threatening situations.
Psychologists add that sitting still with your eyes closed for long periods raises awareness of negative thoughts, and how to counter-act them — also helping calm stress.
But some experts are warning that meditation does not always ease these feelings, and can actually have the reverse effect.
Another meta-analysis from 2020 suggested as many as one in 12 people who take up meditation actually experience the reverse effect — with it leading to panic attacks, suicidal thoughts and more anxiety.
Dr Miguel Farias, a psychologist at Coventry University in the UK who has done several studies on mindfulness, suggested the negative effects may be down to the intensity of practice and a potentially incompetent teacher.
But he also suggested it could be down to participants previously being unaware of the state of their mental health.
There is also evidence that in rare cases meditation could be linked to schizophrenia — where people struggle to interpret reality and experience hallucinations — according to a 2019 study in the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine.
More than 40 million American adults are thought to suffer from stress or anxiety, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Lower blood pressure
There are some suggestions that mindfulness could help lower blood pressure.
Just last week a study found doing five minutes of breathing exercises every day had the effect after patients breathed through a device that created resistance.
And even the American Heart Association says it could have a ‘beneficial effect’, although they warn it should not be used in the place of other treatments.
Scientists suggested it may be due to the practice dilating blood vessels, allowing more to flow through them.
Another paper from 2012 involved 101 adults who did 20 minutes of meditation a day for several months while their blood pressure was monitored.
The group that did the meditation had a 48 per cent lower risk of death from heart disease and strokes up to seven years later. Blood pressure is a key risk factor for these conditions.
Some papers have, however, found ‘no significant difference’ in blood pressure after meditation including one from 2013 in the American Journal of Hypertension where participants meditated 45 minutes a day for two months.
Another study from 2009 that looked at 298 university students with moderate blood pressure also found little drop in it after 40 minutes of meditation per day with their eyes closed for three months.
Both papers note that their results may be down to the small sample size they used, or because participants did not have severely high blood pressure.
In a statement last year, the AHA said: ‘Meditation was a reasonable adjunct to other cardiovascular risk reduction methods given its low cost and risk and its potential benefits.’
Nearly half of American adults — or more than 110million people — have high blood pressure, the CDC says.
Improved Orgasms
Mindful meditation may be able to improve orgasms and sex lives, studies suggest.
One of the most well-known is a paper from 2018 that interviewed 450 women between 17 to 70 years old including 198 participants who already practiced meditation.
The researchers found that these women had higher scores for sexual arousal, lubrication, orgasm and desire than those who did not use the method.
Experts suggest this may be because meditation can reduce stress.
They also say it could help raise levels of dopamine and serotonin — reward chemicals in the brain —, which may in turn raise sexual desire and appetite.
Another study from 2014, 26 women were asked to do three 90-minute mindfulness sessions over two weeks. Their sexual arousal was scored before and after the sessions via surveys, with results showing there was a ‘significant benefit’ to undertaking the arousal.
There have also been studies on men experiencing erectile dysfunction showing the method can raise their sexual enjoyment.
Little research has been carried out on this area, however, and more papers are needed.
Better sleep
Mindfulness meditation may be able to help people struggling to settle down at night sleep longer.
But little evidence is available suggesting it improves the quality of sleep for those who get enough shut-eye.
Studies suggesting a link include a 2015 paper where 49 people who were about 66 years old and struggled to get to sleep were asked to either meditate for up to 20 minutes a day or take part in a ‘sleep hygiene’ course over a 10-week period.
Sleep hygiene is a Food and Drug Administration-approved treatment for trouble sleeping where participants are asked to try room changes — such as black-out curtains and having only dimmed lights — to improve their sleep.
Surveys showed that while both groups got better sleep and were less fatigued, improvements were significantly larger in the meditation group.
This may be because meditation reduces stress.
But could also be linked to the fact that it boosts melatonin levels — the sleep chemical — in the brain, helping someone to relax.
Of the studies to look at how sleep improved in non-insomnia patients was a 2013 paper involving 336 women who had received operations for breast cancer.
It found that meditation only improved sleep among those who were already struggling to get some shut-eye, while there was no improvement for the rest.
Scientists suggest mindfulness can improve sleep because it may reduce stress in the brain and increase relaxation for users.
It can also lower levels of inflammation, which has similarly being linked to feelings of being more relaxed.
As many as 50 to 70 million Americans are thought to struggle to get the recommended eight hours, leaving them open to a host of health risks including heart disease, struggle focusing and even high blood pressure.
Utah researchers see ‘exciting’ results treating opioid addiction with ‘mindfulness’
A new University of Utah clinical trial shows that something called mindfulness therapy can decrease misuse of opioids and decrease chronic pain symptoms, opioid cravings and symptoms of depression. (Mark Lennihan, Associated Press)
Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — A University of Utah clinical trial suggests that “mindfulness” is useful in decreasing opioid misuse and reducing symptoms of chronic pain.
The trial evaluated an eight-week mindfulness-based therapy program known as MORE — Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement.
This was the first large-scale clinical trial to demonstrate that psychological interventions can reduce opioid misuse among those who are prescribed opioids to manage chronic pain.
“MORE demonstrated one of the most powerful treatment effects I’ve seen,” said Eric Garland, lead author of the study. “There’s nothing else out there that works this well in alleviating pain and curbing opioid misuse.”
The therapy teaches participants to break down their pain experience and opioid craving into different components — like heat, tightness and tingling — and notice how these change over time. It also teaches them to savor positive everyday experiences and to reframe stressful events to recognize learning.
“Rather than getting caught up in the pain or craving,” Garland explained, “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.”
Garland is the associate dean for research at the University of Utah College of Social Work and directs the Center on Mindfulness and Integrative Health Intervention Development. He is a leader in the academic field of mindfulness research.
He said that the data from the study definitively shows that this therapy is effective for chronic pain and opioid misuse. They expected the therapy to prove helpful, but Garland said he was surprised by how powerful the effect of the therapy was on the individuals in the trial.
Garland said that the effects of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement appear to get stronger over time, which could be attributed to people integrating the mindfulness skills they learn into their lives or their brains restructuring how they process rewards so they value healthy rewards more.
The trial saw the effects of the program grow for nine months after the study. Garland said that was as far as the funding allowed them to track progress, but he expects the trend will continue.
The study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, followed 250 adults with chronic pain who were on opioid therapy, primarily taking oxycodone or hydrocodone. Over half of them had a diagnosable opioid use disorder.
After the therapy, which included weekly two-hour group therapy sessions and 15 minutes of homework each day, 45% of participants reported they were no longer misusing opioids, 36% reported they had cut opioid use in half or more.
“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,” the University of Utah press release states.
One reason this approach has been successful is it addresses pain and opioid use simultaneously, which is significant because opioid misuse has been shown to increase pain sensitivity, causing further misuse.
According to Garland, the therapy reduces physical pain, emotional pain from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, along with the addictive behavior. He said at the beginning of the study, almost 70% of participants met the criteria for major depression. But on average, they did not show the same symptoms after treatment.
“You can use one single intervention to simultaneously help with all of these problems, that’s what’s really exciting to me,” Garland said.
He said that Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement has primarily been used to study opioid misuse and chronic pain, but that they have also done smaller-scale studies on its use in treating other addictive behaviors, including alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and video games. They have also considered using it for helping with weight loss.
This five-year clinical study was funded by a $2.8 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Garland said now that it has been proven that the mindfulness program is effective, he hopes that they are able to help more people access the therapy, which will involve training for therapists, social workers, psychologists, nurses, doctors and health care systems.
He said he hopes money that Utah will soon be receiving from a settlement with opioid companies will help fund this effort, as it is one of the most effective therapies for treating opioid addiction.
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Thich Nhat Hanh, poetic peace activist and master of mindfulness, dies at 95
Jan 22 (Reuters) – Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk, poet and peace activist who in the 1960s came to prominence as an opponent of the Vietnam War, died on Saturday aged 95 surrounded by his followers in the temple where his spiritual journey began.
“The International Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism announces that our beloved teacher Thich Nhat Hanh passed away peacefully at Tu Hieu Temple in Hue, Vietnam, at 00:00hrs on 22nd January, 2022, at the age of 95,” said his official Twitter account.
His week-long funeral will be held at the temple in a quiet and peaceful manner, according to his followers.
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“Thich Nhat Hanh will be remembered as arguably one of the most influential and prominent religious leaders in the world,” Chargé d’Affaires Marie C. Damour of U.S. Mission to Vietnam said in a statement.
“Through his teachings and literary work, his legacy will remain for generations to come,” she said, adding that his teachings, in particular on bringing mindfulness into daily life, have enriched the lives of innumerable Americans.
In a majestic body of works and public appearances spanning decades, Thich Nhat Hanh spoke in gentle yet powerful tones of the need to “walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet”.
He suffered a stroke in 2014 which left him unable to speak and returned to Vietnam to live out his final days in the central city of Hue, the ancient capital and his place of birth, after spending much of his adult life in exile.
As a pioneer of Buddhism in the West, he formed the “Plum Village” monastery in France and spoke regularly on the practice of mindfulness – identifying and distancing oneself from certain thoughts without judgement – to the corporate world and his international followers.
“You learn how to suffer. If you know how to suffer, you suffer much, much less. And then you know how to make good use of suffering to create joy and happiness,” he said in a 2013 lecture.
“The art of happiness and the art of suffering always go together”.
Born Nguyen Xuan Bao in 1926, Thich Nhat Hanh was ordained as a monk as modern Vietnam’s founding revolutionary Ho Chi Minh led efforts to liberate the Southeast Asian country from its French colonial rulers.
Thich Nhat Hanh, who spoke seven languages, lectured at Princeton and Columbia universities in the United States in the early 1960s. He returned to Vietnam in 1963 to join a growing Buddhist opposition to the U.S.-Vietnam War, demonstrated by self-immolation protests by several monks.
“I saw communists and anti-communists killing and destroying each other because each side believed they had a monopoly on the truth,” he wrote in 1975.
“My voice was drowned out by the bombs, mortars and shouting”.
‘LIKE A PINE TREE’
Towards the height of the Vietnam War in the 1960s he met civil rights leader Martin Luther King, whom he persuaded to speak out against the conflict.
King called Thich Nhat Hanh “an apostle of peace and non-violence” and nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam,” King wrote in his nomination letter.
While in the United States to meet King a year earlier, the South Vietnamese government banned Thich Nhat Hanh from returning home.
Fellow monk Haenim Sunim, who once acted as Thich Nhat Hanh’s translator during a trip to South Korea, said the Zen master was calm, attentive and loving.
“He was like a large pine tree, allowing many people to rest under his branches with his wonderful teaching of mindfulness and compassion,” Haemin Sunim told Reuters.
“He was one of the most amazing people I have ever met.”
Thich Nhat Hanh’s works and promotion of the idea of mindfulness and meditation have enjoyed a renewed popularity as the world reels from the effects of a coronavirus pandemic that has killed over a million people and upended daily life.
“Hope is important, because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear,” Thich Nhat Hanh wrote. “If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.
“If you can refrain from hoping, you can bring yourself entirely into the present moment and discover the joy that is already here.”
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Reporting by James Pearson; Additional reporting by Tom Heneghan in Paris; Editing by Nick Macfie, Rosalba O’Brien and Jacqueline Wong
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
How mindfulness can help reduce your fears
“If I had to go into a hearing and I can feel my face was getting red, my palms are sweaty … I would think, ‘Oh, my gosh, everyone in the courtroom is going to know that you’re super anxious. And you’re going to freeze and you’re going to forget what you’re going to say,'” Cho said. “Of course, all of those thoughts would then retrigger all the physiological reactions, then my heart would race even faster.”
After being diagnosed with social anxiety in 2011, Cho learned that researchers had been studying the potential for mindfulness practices, such as meditation, to help reduce fear responses like hers. According to studies from 2015 and 2020, some students have successfully used mindfulness-based stress reduction programs to lessen their fears of academic evaluation, which interfered with their abilities to study. People who struggled with social phobias or fears related to post-traumatic stress also benefited from mindfulness training, according to research published in 2010 and 2017, respectively.
A new outlook on fear
With the help of two hours’ worth of mindfulness classes weekly, daily 45-minute meditations and homework that challenged rigid beliefs, Cho learned how to distance herself from fearful thoughts and to be kinder to herself.
“My mind says, ‘You have a hearing tomorrow, and you’re going to be terrible at the hearing and you’re going to lose, and if you lose, your clients are going to sue you for malpractice. And then you’re going to become disbarred, and you’re going to become homeless,'” Cho said. “I was able to look at that thought and be like, ‘Oh, you know what, that’s just mental conditioning. That’s just some thoughts that my mind made up somewhere along the line, but there’s no evidence for it.'”
It’s not that she doesn’t experience fear or anxiety anymore, but her response to them has changed.
“I can recognize those thoughts as just random thoughts that my mind was making up,” Cho added. “I would go, ‘Oh, yeah, my mind is doing that catastrophic thinking again. What’s the more helpful thought that I can have?'”
Adults who did four weeks of guided mindfulness meditation training using the smartphone app Headspace saw similar results. They had an easier time overcoming their fear reactions in comparison to a control group that didn’t go through mindfulness training, according to a small 2019 study.
Headspace let the participants use the app’s 10- to 20-minute daily guided meditations for free and provided adherence data to the researchers, but otherwise didn’t have any further involvement in the study, according to the study’s authors.
The findings suggested that “mindfulness training appears to improve the retention of fear extinction memories,” said the study’s first author Johannes Björkstrand, a researcher in psychology at Lund University in Sweden. In other words, fear extinction is the brain’s ability to form and save memories that tell it a once-feared situation is now safe.
How mindfulness changes minds
Cho’s experience, backed up by all these studies, was that practicing mindfulness helped her to restructure a negative mindset or to stop expecting the worst possible outcome in every situation.
Most find the practice of intentionally focusing one’s awareness on their breathing, bodily sensations and emotions helpful for regulating overthinking, fear and shame, according to the 2015 study on college students with fears of academic evaluation.
The eight-week mindfulness course the students took gave them calm “and made them feel more accepting towards themselves and their anxiety problems,” said Aslak Hjeltnes, the study’s first author, via email. “The participants started using mindfulness when they were distracted by anxious feelings in academic performance situations. Some participants described a gradual shift in their everyday life, where they experienced less fear and more curiosity in their own academic studies.”
“I have a way to bring myself back down to earth and just tell myself that ‘It’s no big deal, now I can just go and do the exercises, and then it will be fine afterwards,'” one study participant told the researchers.
For people who still feel fear in response to certain situations, mindfulness can help them stay or sit with these experiences and learn they can cope through them, said Auretta Sonia Kummar, a clinical psychology doctoral student at Murdoch University in Australia, via email. “It is the regulation of emotions, and hence, also the regulation of behaviour (i.e., how I intentionally respond to the fear stimulus as opposed to automatically react to it).”
And the effects of this type of training can be long-lasting. “Neuroscientific studies indicate that eight weeks of (mindfulness-based stress reduction) training can lead to changes in the brain, for example in reduced activity in the amygdala, one of the neural systems that processes fear,” Hjeltnes, an associate professor in clinical psychology at the University of Bergen in Norway, said.
Consistently confronting fears with mindfulness on a regular basis is important for the practice to work, Hjeltnes said.
Several years after Cho’s first experience with mindfulness training, the practice is still critical for her. “I realized that these tools and techniques are really things that I think everyone can benefit from,” Cho said. “I started teaching it to other lawyers, and then I wrote the book ‘The Anxious Lawyer.’
“Every time I have to give a talk, I definitely still feel anxious. I still notice the little butterflies in my stomach, my heart races a little bit faster,” she added. “But I’m able to recognize those physiological reactions as my body’s way of letting me know that I’m about to do something important.”
Now that intense anxiety is in her rearview mirror, Cho said she experiences the world differently. “I will definitely stop and smell the roses when I see them, look up at the sky, look at the clouds go by,” she said. “I’m able to just enjoy the day-to-day, momentary experiences of joy.”