Meditation - The beginning and some science

 

Once you start to experience mindfulness you soon discover there are hundreds of books that will explain to you what it is and how to do it.

One thing they will all agree on is the start point and so here it is.

Mindfulness has its origins in Buddhism, but it is a secular practice and is taught without any religious connotations. Mindfulness is the 7^th step of the Noble Eightfold path taught by the Buddha.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is considered the father of mindfulness in the west. When he attended a retreat led by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, he realised that there was a use for mindfulness in the treatment of chronic medical conditions.

In 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn adapted Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings into an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course (MBSR) which he then developed over the next ten years at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre.

The MBSR course was set up because Jon Kabat-Zinn felt that the patients he was seeing who suffered from chronic pain were falling through the cracks of traditional treatment pathways.

Vidyamala Birch is a chronic pain sufferer and set up Breathworks in order to work with people all over the world to help them live with chronic pain using mindfulness.

Research published in November 2010 at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre (Wake Forest Baptist  Medical Centre, 2015)  (1) took 75 healthy, pain free participants and placed them in four groups. These groups were, mindfulness meditation, placebo meditation, placebo analgesic cream or control. The mindfulness meditation group reported greater pain relief than placebo and brain scans showed that mindfulness meditation activated different areas of the brain when managing pain. The MRI showed that mindfulness meditation reduced pain by activating areas of the brain associated with self-control of pain whereas the placebo group showed reduction in the area of the brain concerned with pain processing. While placebo meditation did reduce pain, this was more associated with relaxation that pain management.

Mindfulness is not about relieving the pain but about how to feel into the pain. As Vidyamala says, ‘I still have pain, but the pain of fighting that pain has eased and my quality of life has improved beyond recognition’ (Burch, 2008) (2).

In 2004 Jon Kabat-Zinn worked with Mark Williams, a psychologist based a Bangor University in Wales. Mark Williams went on to develop a Mindfulness Based Cognitive Teaching programme which added a mindful element to Cognitive Behavioural Treatments used to treat some stress related disorders.

For people who have suffered depression there is a 30% chance of recurrence within 10 years and and 80% chance after two episodes. Only one in four people achieve remission after a six-month treatment of antidepressant medication. Mindfulness based cognitive therapy is recommended as a treatment for depression by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). NICE has based this recommendation upon the fact that a large study, often referred to as the PREVENT trial, showed that MBCT is as effective as anti-depressants against preventing relapses for depression. There has also been research into using mindfulness on people who have been resilient to pharmaceutical intervention, but this is still in the early stages of research. There are a number of people who do not want to take antidepressants due to the side effects associated with them and therefore knowing that mindfulness based cognitive therapy is at least as effective will be very attractive to a large number of patients.

Since 2002 Monash University in Australia have included a six-week mindfulness course in their teaching to assist students with the stresses of university life.

Mindfulness being developed in schools and as part of workplace wellness.

In 2015 the Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group (MAPPG) published the Mindful Institute UK report (Mindfulness Institute UK, October 2016) (3) which investigated the potential benefits to the workplace of mindfulness. The report showed that since 2009 the number of sick days lost to stress, depression and anxiety had increased by 245% and the number lost to serious mental illness had doubled.

In 2014 meta-analysis of 209 clinical trials encompassing over 12,000 participants showed that mindfulness had significant effects in treating depression and anxiety.

The report also showed that mindfulness can help with leadership qualities, such as the ability to listen mindfully, and to respond rather than react when decision making. With decision making in particular there is the reduction of the ‘sunk-cost’ bias which means decisions can be made based upon current evidence rather than staying with previous decisions.

 

These and many other benefits are highlighted in the report and it therefore seems highly likely that any management development courses of the future will be looking to include mindfulness.

 

Currently Professor Amit Bernstein of Haifa University is working with Syrian refugees in a camp in Jordan. The team have developed a mindful based intervention that is geared towards the social and economic needs of the refugees and that they have called Mindfulness-Based Trauma Recovery for Refugees. They have discovered that the training is safe and has transformed the lives of the refugees who took part in the trial. This means that there is the potential for further mindfulness-based support to refugees and displaced citizens throughout the world.

The benefits of practising mindfulness are in the being present in the here and now and not ruminating on the past or catastrophising about the future. Mindfulness give the body time to respond to the threat by stopping and checking that the threat is real.

 

How do you feel about mindfulness?

Do you think the science currently helping to highlight the benefits or do you think the science is only looking to find the benefits?

I would love to know your thoughts so comment below

 

Bibliography

(1)   Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. "Mindfulness meditation trumps placebo in pain reduction." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 10 November 2015.

(2)   Burch, V., 2008. Living Well With Pain & Illness. London: Piatkus, p.P20.

(3)   The Mindfulness Initiative, “Building the case for mindfulness in the workplace”, MAPPG, October 2016