Emerging research suggests mental training based on mindfulness helps to reduce anxiety and depression among secondary education teachers.

Researchers analyzed the psycho-physiological mechanisms related to mindfulness, discovering the training program works as an emotional self-regulating tool.

Mindfulness is a type of mental training increasingly popular in the U.S. The technique is based on the experience of self-awareness and is described in terms such as attention, awareness and the reference to a specific moment. Mindfulness focuses on what we are doing, thinking about or feeling at every moment.

The work, developed by Luis Carlos Delgado Pastor at the University of Granada, has confirmed the effectiveness of mindfulness training, applying it to two different groups with defined features: a 20-girls sample with high-level concern and a group of 25 secondary education teachers.

As a consequence of the mental training, both the girls with chronic concern and the teachers improved their subjective rates of anxiety, depression, concern, complaints about health and emotional regulation. They also enhanced cardiac, muscular and respiratory markers.

Delgado Pastor says that, in the light of the results obtained, they have proved the “effectiveness of training mindfulness abilities and human values in the teaching sector as an emotional self-regulating tool, stress prevention for teachers and students, as well as to facilitate the teaching-learning process.”

Accordingly, says the UGR researchers, mindfulness is also useful for persons who are suffering from maladaptative emotional processes, such as chronic concern, anxiety and depression.

Source: University of Granada

A new report suggests training in mindfulness meditation and communication can improve the way physicians relate to patients and help reduce a doctor’s psychological distress.

The study, found in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), is viewed as a way physicians can improve their wellbeing and enhance patient-centered care.

“From the patient’s perspective, we hear all too often of dissatisfaction in the quality of presence from their physician. From the practitioner’s perspective, the opportunity for deeper connection is all too often missed in the stressful, complex, and chaotic reality of medical practice,” says Michael S. Krasner, M.D.

“Enhancing the already inherent capacity of the physician to experience fully the clinical encounter—not only its pleasant but also its most unpleasant aspects—without judgment but with a sense of curiosity and adventure seems to have had a profound effect on the experience of stress and burnout. It also seems to enhance the physician’s ability to connect with the patient as a unique human being and to center care around that uniqueness.

“Cultivating these qualities of mindful communication with colleagues, anecdotally, had an unexpected benefit of combating the practitioners’ sense of isolation and brought forth the very experiences that are such a rich source of meaning in the life of the clinician,” he said.

Edward A. Stehlik, M.D., governor of the Upstate New York branch of the American College of Physicians and an internist who practices near Buffalo, said the training was “the most useful thing I’ve done since my medical training to help me in my practice of medicine.”

“If you asked my patients, I think they would say I listen more carefully since the training and that they feel they can explain things to me more forthrightly and more easily,” Stehlik said. “Even the brief moments with patients are more productive. Are there doctors who desperately need this training? Yes, absolutely.”

Primary care physicians report high levels of distress. As many as 60 percent of practicing physicians report symptoms of burnout, which is defined as emotional exhaustion, treating patients as objects, and low sense of accomplishment, the authors of the JAMA article stated.

Physician burnout has been linked to poorer quality of care, including patient dissatisfaction, increased medical errors, and lawsuits, and decreased ability to express empathy. Substance abuse, automobile accidents, stress-related health problems, and marital and family discord are among the personal consequences reported.

Mindful communication utilizes the techniques of meditation to help people maintain an open and nonjudgmental outlook as they tackle everyday tasks. The training also included the use of narrative medicine, real stories from the clinicians’ practice of medicine.

Learning to increase one’s awareness of thoughts, feelings, and sensations while exploring these narratives, the physicians also engaged in “appreciative dialogues” that focus on the capacities and skills used to successfully manage even the most challenging of clinical situations.

For physicians, mindfulness and the exploration of clinical narratives helped them to be aware of how they are feeling, how events in their own lives might be influencing how they react to patients, and how they can better recognize the meaning and satisfaction derived from the practice of medicine, Krasner said.

Seventy physicians from the Rochester, N.Y., area were involved in the study and training. Before the training began, the physicians answered questions in a series of assessment surveys designed to measure burnout and empathy, characterize beliefs about patient care and profile personality and mood. The physicians answered similar questions during the course of the training.

The training involved eight intensive weekly sessions that were 2 ½ hours long, an all-day session and a maintenance phase of 10 monthly 2 ½-hour sessions.

A statistical analysis showed that the participating primary care physicians experienced improved well-being, including significant decreases in burnout and mood disturbance. They also experienced positive changes in empathy and psychosocial orientation to clinical care.

These indicators of a patient-centered behavior together with the improvements in personal wellbeing reflect the combined interpersonal and the intrapersonal approach of mindful communication, and the importance of both for an effective and satisfying physician-patient relationship.

John K. Chamberlain, M.D., an internist and pediatrician in the Rochester area who participated in the training, said he often left the sessions “refreshed and satisfied about being a physician.”

“I like to think it reinforced the need to continue to do what I was doing in the face of time pressures more than altered my approach,” Chamberlain said.

“That is a difficult self-appraisal question, and I suspect the answer again varied during the course of the program. It provided a framework and vocabulary to remain in the moment and diminish the proximate and remote experiences that might interfere with the therapeutic relationship, while stimulating awareness of the experiences that reinforced it.”

“The most salient element was the collegial effect of weathered physicians reflecting on mutual experience using a theme-based approach in a safe environment,” Chamberlain said.

“It is a unique opportunity to return to our roots as physicians, exploring in a workshop format abstract yet key emotionally charged or difficult issues that many of us had not visited so academically since medical school. Perception of the impact and approach to those issues is quite different once tempered by experience, particularly in a program that emphasizes awareness of the moment.

“It is a singular opportunity to do-over some of our medical school experience, and get much more out of it than the first time, as one reflects on how others in the group have grappled with and addressed the complex experiences of being a physician whose life touches and is touched by others constantly. The program is all about the experience of being a physician. Not what to do, or how to do it, but what it feels like. That is unique, and quite refreshing.”

The researchers concluded that a training program in mindfulness represents a model of medical education “that may help provide growth and sustenance to physicians in the service of promoting excellence in clinical care and professional satisfaction and wellbeing.”

Source: University of Rochester Medical Center

Many overweight and obese individuals use eating as a means to relieve stress, reduce boredom and improve mood.

However, as stated in the August issue of Mayo Clinic Women’s HealthSource, emotional eating often leads to eating too much.

Researchers have found that individuals have a tendency to eat especially high-calorie, sweet, salty and fatty foods.

Another finding is that women are especially prone to emotional eating — and then feel guiltier and less healthy than men do after snacking on “forbidden” foods.

According to the experts, the connection between stress and eating likely has roots in brain chemistry. Faced with a real threat, the fight-or-flight reaction kicks in and suppresses appetite temporarily.

But when faced with persistent stress — health problems, difficult relationships or too much work — many people turn to high-fat, high-calorie foods for comfort. Using food as a coping strategy doesn’t alleviate stress and will likely cause weight gain.

Mayo Clinic Women’s HealthSource offers these suggestions to understand and overcome emotional eating:

• Learn to recognize true hunger. A craving for chips or cookies soon after a meal is likely an emotional hunger, not real hunger.
• Identify the food triggers. Keeping a journal can help identify patterns in emotional eating, including emotions and feelings when eating; what and how much was eaten; and feelings after eating.
• Look elsewhere for comfort. Instead of grabbing a candy bar, take a walk, call a friend, listen to music, read or treat yourself to a movie.
• Manage stress in a healthy way. The goal is to lower stress with healthful strategies, including regular exercise, adequate rest and support from friends and family.
• Practice mindful eating. Mindfulness is a way of paying focused attention without judgment. Applied to eating, this technique can help increase awareness of the sensations, feelings and thoughts connected with food and eating.
• Toss out the unhealthy foods. Avoid stocking the cupboard or refrigerator with high-calorie comfort foods. Consider more healthful comfort foods such as a bowl of tomato soup or a cup of tea.
• Eat a balanced diet and healthy snacks. Between meals, opt for low-fat, low-calorie snacks such as fresh fruit and unbuttered popcorn.

Source: Mayo Clinic

Guided meditation and yoga can lower feelings of stress and improve sleep quality in sedentary office employees, suggests a pilot study.

Ohio State University researchers offered participants a modified version of what is known as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), a program established in 1979 to help hospital patients in Massachusetts assist in their own healing that is now in wide use around the world.

In this context, mindfulness refers in part to one’s heightened awareness of an external stressor as the first step toward relaxing in a way that can minimize the effects of that stress on the body.

While the traditional MBSR program practice takes up an hour per day for eight weeks supplemented by lengthy weekly sessions and a full-day retreat, the modified version developed at Ohio State University for this study was designed for office-based workers wearing professional attire.

Twenty minutes per day of guided workplace meditation and yoga combined with six weekly group sessions lowered feelings of stress by more than 10 percent and improved sleep quality among participants in the study.

The results of the pilot study are published in a recent issue of the journal Health Education & Behavior.

Participants attended one-hour weekly group meetings during lunch and practiced 20 minutes of meditation and yoga per day at their desks. After six weeks, program participants reported that they were more aware of external stressors, they felt less stressed by life events, and they fell asleep more easily than did a control group that did not experience the intervention.

“Because chronic stress is associated with chronic disease, I am focusing on how to reduce stress before it has a chance to contribute to disease,” said Maryanna Klatt, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of clinical allied medicine at Ohio State.

“My interest is to see whether or not we can get people to reduce their health care utilization because they’re less stressed. I want to deliver something low cost at the work site, something practical that can be sustained, that can help reduce health care costs,” Klatt said.

For the pilot study, the researchers recruited 48 adult office workers with body mass index scores lower than 30 who exercised less than 30 minutes on most days of the week. Half were randomized to the intervention and half were waitlisted to receive the intervention later. Forty-two people completed the study.

Those who received the intervention participated in weekly one-hour group sessions during which breathing, relaxation and gentle yoga movement were designed to coax participants toward a meditative state. Participants also discussed work-related stress. As part of the pursuit of mindfulness, they were coached to contemplate a specific topic in each session that explored their response to a specific type of stress over the past week.

“It doesn’t matter what the stress is, but how you change the way you perceive the stress,” Klatt noted.

“I like to describe mindfulness as changing the way you see what’s already there. It’s a tool that teaches people to become aware of their options. If they can’t change the external events in their life, they can instead change the way they view the stress, which can make a difference in how they experience their day-to-day life.”

The weekly sessions were supplemented by 20 minutes each day of movement and meditation guided by verbal cues and music provided on compact discs that Klatt designed and recorded. The entire intervention lasted six weeks.

The study analyzed participants’ responses to the intervention using data from established research questionnaires that measured perceived stress, or the degree to which situations in life are considered stressful; a number of components of sleep quality; and what is called mindful attention awareness, which refers to how often a person is paying attention to and is aware of what is occurring in the present.

All participants completed the questionnaires before and after the intervention. Twenty-two adults completed the intervention. Their pre- and post-test results were compared to those reported by the 20 control participants.

Mindful attention awareness increased significantly and perceived stress decreased significantly among the intervention group when compared to the control group’s responses. Overall sleep quality increased in both groups, but three of seven components of sleep were more affected in the intervention group.

On average, mindfulness increased by about 9.7 percent and perceived stress decreased by about 11 percent among the group that experienced the intervention. These participants also reported that it took them less time to fall asleep, they had fewer sleep disturbances and they experienced less daytime dysfunction than did members of the nonintervention group.

The researchers also took saliva samples to test for the presence of cortisol, a stress hormone, but found no significant changes in average daily levels of the hormone over time for participants in both groups. Klatt said the design of this part of the pilot study could have affected the result, and the sample collection technique will be changed in subsequent studies.

Klatt said mindfulness-based stress reduction, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, has been studied widely and determined to be useful in lowering symptoms ranging from depression and anxiety to chronic pain. But the time commitment required in the program makes it impractical for busy working professionals, and adding a stress reduction class outside of work could add stress to these people, she said.

So Klatt set out to develop what she calls a “low dose” of the program that is suitable for the workplace and still offers stress reduction benefits. She specifically scheduled weekly sessions during lunch to avoid interfering with work time or home time, and combined movement with verbal prompts and music that are cues for participants to relax.

“As I’ve been working on the program, I heard so many of the participants say they wish they had learned this earlier,” Klatt said.

Because the low-dose program remains a work in progress that is still under investigation, it is not available for public use, Klatt noted.

This work was supported by the National Institute of Health-Funded General Clinical Research Center at Ohio State.

Source: Ohio State University

A new study confirmed an earlier observation that regular yoga practice may help prevent middle-aged spread in normal-weight people and may promote weight loss in those who are overweight.

Researchers discovered regular yoga practice is associated with mindful eating, and people who eat mindfully are less likely to be obese.

Four years ago Alan Kristal, Dr.P.H., and colleagues suspected that the weight-loss effect had more to do with increased body awareness, specifically a sensitivity to hunger and satiety than the physical activity of yoga practice itself.

The followup study, published in the August issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, confirms their initial hunch.

“In our earlier study, we found that middle-age people who practice yoga gained less weight over a 10-year period than those who did not. This was independent of physical activity and dietary patterns. We hypothesized that mindfulness – a skill learned either directly or indirectly through yoga – could affect eating behavior,” said Kristal, associate head of the Cancer Prevention Program in the Public Health Sciences Division at the Hutchinson Center.

The researchers found that people who ate mindfully – those who were aware of why they ate and stopped eating when full – weighed less than those who ate mindlessly, who ate when not hungry or in response to anxiety or depression.

The researchers also found a strong association between yoga practice and mindful eating but found no association between other types of physical activity, such as walking or running, and mindful eating.

“These findings fit with our hypothesis that yoga increases mindfulness in eating and leads to less weight gain over time, independent of the physical activity aspect of yoga practice,” said Kristal, who is also a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health.

Kristal, a yoga enthusiast for the past 15 years, said that yoga cultivates mindfulness in a number of ways, such as being able to hold a challenging physical pose by observing the discomfort in a nonjudgmental way, with an accepting, calm mind and focus on the breath.

“This ability to be calm and observant during physical discomfort teaches how to maintain calm in other challenging situations, such as not eating more even when the food tastes good and not eating when you’re not hungry,” he said.

To test whether yoga in fact increases mindfulness and mindful eating, Kristal and colleagues developed a Mindful Eating Questionnaire, a 28-item survey that measured a variety of factors:

• disinhibition – eating even when full;
• awareness – being aware of how food looks, tastes and smells;
• external cues – eating in response to environmental cues, such as advertising;
• emotional response – eating in response to sadness or stress; and
• distraction – focusing on other things while eating.

Each question was graded on a scale of 1 to 4, in which higher scores signified more mindful eating. The questionnaire was administered to more than 300 people at Seattle-area yoga studios, fitness facilities and weight-loss programs, among other venues.

More than 80 percent of the study participants were women, well-educated and Caucasian, with an average age of 42. Participants provided self-reported information on a number of factors, including weight, height, yoga practice, walking for exercise or transportation and other forms of moderate and strenuous exercise.

More than 40 percent of the participants practiced yoga more than an hour per week, 46 percent walked for exercise or transportation for at least 90 minutes per week and more than 50 percent engaged in more than 90 minutes of moderate or strenuous physical activity per week.

The average weight of the study participants was within the normal range – not surprising considering that the study sample intentionally consisted of people more physically active than the U.S. population in general. Body mass index was lower among participants who practiced yoga as compared to those who did not (an average of 23.1 vs. 25.8, respectively).

Higher scores on the mindfulness questionnaire overall (and on each of the categories within the questionnaire) was associated with a lower BMI, which suggests that mindful eating may play an important role in long-term weight maintenance, Kristal said.

“Mindful eating is a skill that augments the usual approaches to weight loss, such as dieting, counting calories and limiting portion sizes. Adding yoga practice to a standard weight-loss program may make it more effective,” said Kristal, who himself scored high on the mindful-eating survey and has a BMI within the normal range.

Moving forward, Kristal and colleagues suggest that their Mindful Eating Questionnaire, the first tool of its kind to characterize and measure mindful eating, may be useful both in clinical practice and research to understand and promote healthy dietary behavior.

“Beyond calories and diets, mindful eating takes a more holistic approach that can empower individuals to build positive relationships with food and eating,” said first author Celia Framson, M.P.H., R.D., C.D.

“The Mindful Eating Questionnaire offers a new and relevant dimension for measuring the effectiveness of dietary behavior interventions. It also encourages nutrition and medical practitioners to consider the broad scope of behavior involved in healthy eating,” she said.

Source: Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Stressed-out people sleep better and take sleep medication less often when they learn to let go of intrusive thoughts.

The new study from researchers at Duke Integrative Medicine shows participants who took an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course reported less trouble sleeping through the night, and also less sleepiness during the day.

This is the first study to document several positive effects of mindfulness training on sleep quality in a group of generally healthy, but stressed, individuals.

“When we don’t know what to do with intrusive and persistent thoughts, the mind and body feel threatened,” says Jeff Greeson, PhD, MS, a clinical health psychologist at Duke who presented his preliminary results at the North American Research Conference on Complementary and Integrative Medicine.

“That signals the ‘fight or flight’ response which starts a cascade of sleep-robbing emotions like agitation and anxiety.”

Greeson’s study followed 151 adults, three-quarters of whom were women, who underwent eight weeks of MBSR training. He validated improvements in sleep quality using a nationally recognized sleep quality scale — The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI).

Statistically significant improvements were noted in overall sleep quality (26 percent), sleep disturbances, i.e., waking up at night and feeling uncomfortable (16 percent), frequency of using prescription or over-the-counter sleep medications (25 percent), and improvements in experiencing sleepiness during the day (28 percent).

“Before beginning the MSBR program, 70 percent of the study participants met the clinical cutoff for poor sleep quality,” Greeson said. “After MBSR, 50 percent of participants reported clinically significant sleep disturbances. That’s a 20 percent improvement rate.

“When people become more mindful,” he explained, “they learn to look at life through a new lens. They learn how to accept the presence of thoughts and feelings that may keep them up at night. They begin to understand that they don’t have to react to them. As a result, they experience greater emotional balance and less sleep disturbances.”

The findings are particularly relevant as they come at a time when stress in the general population is at an all-time high. More people are worrying about the economy, jobs, their financial situation and the strain of coping with it all in their daily lives.

“All that worrying, obsessing, and ruminating can increase risk of illness and disease,” says Greeson. “When the mind worries, the body responds.” The key, he says, is not to push those thoughts away, but to acknowledge them. “That helps people manage their reaction to stress and anxiety and help them remain calm.”

Greeson’s research is part of a larger study on mindfulness funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. His work will continue to research the effects of the MBSR program first developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts 30 years ago. That program is now taught by trained professionals throughout the country.

Source: Duke University

A majority of people experiencing chronic insomnia can experience a normalization of sleep parameters through the use of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) suggests a new study.

Results indicate that 50 percent to 60 percent of participants with chronic sleep onset insomnia, sleep maintenance insomnia or both experienced remission of their primary sleep difficulty.

Among the 64 participants who completed five or more treatment sessions, there were significant improvements on presenting complaints, as well as all other measures, including sleep efficiency, average nightly awakenings, total sleep time and average nights of sleep medication use per week.

According to lead author Ryan Wetzler, Psy.D, C.B.S.M. of Sleep Medicine Specialists in Louisville, Ky., results of the study indicate that multi-component CBT-I can be an effective approach for those experiencing chronic insomnia even when anxiety and depression are part of the clinical picture.

“CBT-I teaches strategies to ‘reset’ the bodily systems that regulate sleep,” said Wetzler.

“Since these systems also play a role in regulation of mood, pain and other bodily processes, skills developed through CBT-I may also have a positive impact on mood, anxiety, pain and other associated medical or psychiatric conditions.”

The study gathered data from 115 patients who had visited the Insomnia Treatment Program and Behavioral Sleep Medicine Clinic. Study participants included those with complaints of prolonged (more than 30 minutes) sleep onset latency (SOL), sleep maintenance insomnia (SMI), or both sleep onset and sleep maintenance insomnia (SOMI), and who had attended at least two treatment sessions.

Participants were between the ages of 14 and 81 years, and 65 percent of the sample was female.
The multi-component, CBT-I program included comprehensive evaluations of patients’ habits, attitudes and knowledge concerning sleep. The program was designed to involve six to seven treatment sessions.

Specific strategies included education on sleep regulating systems, sleep scheduling recommendations, sleep hygiene education, sleep consolidation therapy, stimulus control therapy, relaxation training, cognitive therapy and mindfulness training.

According to Wetzler, a related study found that of participants who completed at least four treatment sessions of CBT-I, 78 percent of those using sleep medication for three or more nights per week were able to completely discontinue use of sleep medications.

Findings from this study indicate that those who discontinued use of sleep medications not only stopped using drugs to sleep but also slept better than when they were taking sleep medications.

Source: American Academy of Sleep Medicine

British researchers have discovered individuals with high levels of anxiety due to chronic pain exhibit more emotional distress and disability.

However, the use of pain coping strategies can mediate this effect.

The purpose of the study was to examine the role of anxiety on everyday functioning of patients seeking treatment for chronic pain. It was assumed anxiety would be associated with higher levels of distress and impaired functioning.

The researchers also evaluated the role of three coping mechanisms to determine their impact as buffers nullifying the effects of anxiety. They are acceptance of pain, mindfulness and values-based action.

The study subjects were 125 consecutive adult patients who answered questionnaires designed to assess their anxiety about pain, measure their acceptance of it, identify the values they associated with interacting with family and friends and with working and learning, and to gauge the level of their mindfulness about pain ranging from almost always to almost never.

Results of the study showed that anxiety is associated with greater pain, emotional distress and disability in chronic pain patients. Anxiety was determined to be the strongest predictor of depression, disability and visits to physician offices.

When the three coping strategies were used, the authors concluded that acceptance of pain, mindfulness and values-based actions reduce but do not eliminate the extent to which anxiety influences patient functioning.

The authors concluded that in conjunction with cognitive-behavioral therapies, the coping mechanisms can undermine the role of anxiety in worsening suffering and disability in chronic pain patients.

The findings are published in The Journal of Pain, the peer-review publication of the American Pain Society.

Source: American Pain Society

A new research study suggests a group-based psychological treatment called Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) could be a viable alternative to prescription drugs for people suffering from long-term depression. In a study published today (1 December 2008) in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, MBCT proved as effective as maintenance anti-depressants in preventing a relapse and more effective in enhancing people’s quality of life.

The study also showed MBCT to be as cost-effective as prescription drugs in helping people with a history of depression stay well  long-term.

The randomized control trial involved 123 people from urban and rural locations who had suffered repeat depressions and were referred to the trial by their GPs.

The participants were split randomly into two groups. Half continued their ongoing antidepressant drug treatment and the rest participated in an MBCT course and were given the option of coming off antidepressants.

Over the 15 months after the trial, 47 percent of the group following the MBCT course experienced a relapse compared with 60 percent of those continuing their normal treatment, including antidepressant drugs.

In addition, the group on the MBCT program reported a higher quality of life, in terms of their overall enjoyment of daily living and physical well-being.

Members of the study team from the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London also compared the cost of providing MBCT programs with the cost of maintenance antidepressant treatment.

The findings suggest that MBCT provides a cost-effective alternative to antidepressant drugs.

Unlike most other psychological therapies, MBCT can be taught in groups by a single therapist, and patients then continue to practice the skills they have learned at home by themselves.

Therefore, MBCT is less costly than individual treatments and is not dependent on having the large number of trained therapists needed for one-to-one psychological treatment.  It could help the National Health Service shorten its waiting lists for psychological therapies.

During the eight-week trial, groups of between eight and fifteen people met with one therapist. They learned a range of meditation exercises that they could continue to practice on their own once the course ended.

Many of the exercises were based on Buddhist meditation techniques and helped the individual take time to focus on the present, rather than dwelling on past events, or planning for future tasks.

The exercises worked in a different way for each person, but many reported greater acceptance of, and more control over, negative thoughts and feelings.

Professor Willem Kuyken of the University of Exeter said: “Anti-depressants are widely used by people who suffer from depression and that’s because they tend to work.

“But, while they’re very effective in helping reduce the symptoms of depression, when people come off them they are particularly vulnerable to relapse. MBCT takes a different approach – it teaches people skills for life. What we have shown is that when people work at it, these skills for life help keep people well.”

Professor Kuyken continues: “Our results suggest MBCT may be a viable alternative for some of the 3.5 million people in the UK known to be suffering from this debilitating condition.

“People who suffer depression have long asked for psychological approaches to help them recover in the long-term and MBCT is a very promising approach. I think we have the basis for offering patients and GPs an alternative to long-term anti-depressant medication. We are planning to conduct a larger trial to put these results to the test and to examine how MBCT works.”

MBCT was developed by a team of psychologists from Toronto (Zindel Segal), Oxford (Mark Williams) and Cambridge (John Teasdale) in 2002 to help people who suffer repeated bouts of depression.

It focuses on targeting negative thinking and aims to help people who are very vulnerable to recurring depression stop depressed moods from spiraling out of control into a full episode of depression. MBCT is becoming more widely available as part of psychological treatment services in the NHS.

Source: University of Exeter

The technique known as compassion meditation can help individuals relieve stress that has been linked to depression and a number of medical illnesses.

Furthermore, scientist believe the technique may reduce inflammation and improve behavioral response to stress.

“While much attention has been paid to meditation practices that emphasize calming the mind, improving focused attention or developing mindfulness, less is known about meditation practices designed to specifically foster compassion,” says Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, PhD, who designed and taught the meditation program used in the study.

This study focused on the effect of compassion meditation on inflammatory, neuroendocrine and behavioral responses to psychosocial stress, and evaluated the degree to which engagement in meditation practice influenced stress reactivity.

“Our findings suggest that meditation practices designed to foster compassion may impact physiological pathways that are modulated by stress and are relevant to disease,” explains Charles L. Raison, MD, clinical director of the Mind-Body Program, at Emory School of Medicine, and a lead author on the study.

Sixty-one healthy college students between the ages of 17 and19 participated in the study. Half the participants were randomized to receive six weeks of compassion meditation training and half were randomized to a health discussion control group.

Although secular in presentation, the compassion meditation program was based on a thousand-year-old Tibetan Buddhist mind-training practice called “lojong” in Tibetan.

Lojong practices utilize a cognitive, analytic approach to challenge an individual’s unexamined thoughts and emotions toward other people, with the long-term goal of developing altruistic emotions and behavior towards all people. Each meditation class session combined teaching, discussion and meditation practice.

The control group attended classes designed by study investigators on topics relevant to the mental and physical health of college students such as stress management, drug abuse and eating disorders. In addition, a variety of student participation activities were employed such as mock debates and role-playing.

Both groups were required to participate in 12 hours of classes across the study period. Meditators were provided with a meditation compact disc for practice at home. Homework for the control group was a weekly self-improvement paper.

After the study interventions were finished, the students participated in a laboratory stress test designed to investigate how the body’s inflammatory and neuroendocrine systems respond to psychosocial stress.

No differences were seen between students randomized to compassion meditation and the control group, but within the meditation group there was a strong relationship between the time spent practicing meditation and reductions in inflammation and emotional distress in response to the stressor.

Consistent with this, when the meditation group was divided into high and low practice groups, participants in the high practice group showed reductions in inflammation and distress in response to the stressor when compared to the low practice group and the control group.

“It will require conducting stress tests before and after meditation training in order to conclusively show it was the practice of compassion meditation that resulted in reduced stress responses,” says study co-author Thaddeus W.W. Pace, PhD, assistant professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory.

“But these initial results are quite exciting,” says Pace.

“If practicing compassion meditation does reduce inflammatory responses to stress it might offer real promise as a means of preventing many conditions associated with stress and with inflammation including major depression, heart disease and diabetes.”

“Based on the promising findings from this study we are planning to offer compassion meditation classes to patients at Emory Winship Cancer Institute, and have partnered with the Emory Predictive Health Institute to study potential long term effects of compassion meditation on health and well-being,” says Raison.

The study’s findings are published in the medical journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Source: Emory University