Extensive practice involving sustained attention can lead to changes in brain structure. Here, we report evidence of structural differences in the lower brainstem of participants engaged in the long-term practice of meditation. Using magnetic resonance imaging, we observed higher gray matter density in lower brain stem regions of experienced meditators compared with age-matched nonmeditators....
The average wavelet coefficient method is applied to investigate the scaling features of heart rate variability during meditation, a state of induced mental relaxation. While periodicity dominates the behavior of the heart rate time series at short intervals, the meditation induced correlations in the signal become significantly weaker at longer time scales. Further study of these correlations...
Although it has been given qualified approval by a number of philosophers of education, the so-called ‘therapeutic turn’ in education has been the subject of criticism by several commentators on post-compulsory and adult learning over the last few years. A key feature of this alleged development in recent educational policy is said to be the replacement of the traditional goals of knowledge and...
A 6-month study with crossover at 3 months was designed to evaluate the possible beneficial effects of transcendental meditation upon bronchial asthma. 21 patients kept daily diaries of symptoms and medications and answered questionnaires at the end of the study and 6 months later. Other measurements included physician evaluation, pulmonary function testing, and galvanic skin resistance. The...
The purpose of this article is to describe the rationale and protocol for a pilot study in women with breast cancer that integrates the two complementary therapies of mindfulness and exercise. A sample of 30 women diagnosed with breast cancer within the previous 12 months who have completed initial treatment for their disease will be recruited from oncology physicians' offices. The pilot will...
Theory suggests that mindful individuals exhibit enhanced attentional processing (e.g., attentional control) and that they maintain a detached perspective to problematic stimuli. For smokers, smoking and affective stimuli are problematic stimuli when they try to quit. In this cross-sectional study, smokers (n = 158) completed 3 modified Stroop tasks (to assess attentional control), 3 Implicit...
In Brief Diabetes poses a major life stress that requires considerable physical, emotional, and psychological accommodation and coping. Mind-body therapies have drawn significant interest for their potential to assist in managing stress and adaptation to chronic illness. This review highlights the literature and research on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to improve the health and well-being...
Explore2009John D Agee, Sharon Danoff-Burg, Christoffer A. Grant
This study sought to compare a five-week mindfulness meditation (MM) course to a five-week course that taught progressive muscle relaxation (PMR). Forty-three adults from the community were randomly assigned to either MM (n = 19) or PMR (n = 24) courses after responding to flyers and other advertisements for a free stress management course. Mindfulness meditation participants practiced...
Mindfulness is a trained or dispositional state of "being" that has been linked to positive mental and physical health effects. Although preliminary findings on cortical activation have shown mindfulness to be associated with increased frontal activation and reduced limbic activity, very little is known regarding the influence of mindfulness on autonomic nervous system activity. The present...
A growing body of research indicates that mindfulness-based therapies may be useful for treating substance abuse. However, the incorporation of mindfulness into substance abuse treatment is limited by a lack of basic research in this area. For example, instruments designed to measure mindfulness vary widely in content and validity and the fundamental relationships among mindfulness, alcohol...
The present article describes data from pilot studies with the Swedish versions of the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) and the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (KIMS). The MAAS and two of the KIMS scales, Act with Awareness and Accept without Judgment, were found to correlate in the predicted direction with measures of well-being and emotional distress. The KIMS scales Observe...
Ecospirituality provides a framework for exploring the spiritual dimension of person and environment and the dynamic interplay between this sacred dyad and human health. The aim of this phenomenological study was to explore and describe the experience of environmental meditation by using a new, spirituality-based meditation intervention that focused on ecospirituality with patients with...
Effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy as an adjuvant to pharmacotherapy in patients with panic disorder or generalized anxiety disorder.
To examine the feasibility and level of acceptability of a mindful yoga intervention provided during pregnancy and to gather preliminary data on the efficacy of the intervention in reducing distress. Baseline and post-treatment measures examined state and trait anxiety, perceived stress, pain, and morning salivary cortisol in a single treatment group. Postintervention data also included...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR; Kabat-Zinn, 1982, 1990) training on a self-selected adult community sample in the areas of mindfulness, rumination, depressive symptomatology and overall well-being. Targeting rumination was considered particularly important because a tendency toward rumination in nondepressed populations has...
The Support, Education, and Research in Chronic Heart Failure (SEARCH) study was designed to assess the impact of a mindfulness-based psychoeducational intervention on clinical outcomes, depression, and quality of life in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF). Although research has shown that psychosocial factors including depression are important risk factors for adverse events in patients...
A unique intervention combining mindfulness meditation with cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) has been shown to have acute benefits at posttreatment in an open label study. The aim of the present study was to examine the long-term effects of this integrated intervention on measures of sleep and sleep-related distress in an attempt to characterize the natural course of insomnia...
Psychological distress is common in patients with diabetes. Little is known about the impact of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), a non-traditional, cognitive behavioural intervention designed to improve stress management skills, in patients with diabetes. The purpose of this retrospective analysis was to evaluate the impact of MBSR training on mood states in 25 individuals with...
OBJECTIVE: To briefly review the effects of mindfulness on the mind, the brain, the body, and behavior. METHODS: Selective review of MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar databases (2003-2008) using the terms "mindfulness", "meditation", "mental health", "physical health", "quality of life", and "stress reduction." A total of 52 exemplars of empirical and theoretical work were selected for...