I’m sure we've all noticed mindfulness, meditation and yoga
becoming trendier and trendier. It feels like celebrities have been lauding these
“eastern” practices as the new cure-alls for health and happiness since I was
in high school, yet here I stand, a college senior, with the Huffington Post
telling me “Why 2014 Will Be the Year of Mindful Living.” But lately it seems
the endorsements are getting more and more legit.
Earlier this semester we heard from Tom Lyons about how
mindfulness and mediation are being used to help with drug and alcohol
addiction and relapse. Mindfulness is hard to define broadly, with Lyons
calling it “a mental state that varies from moment to moment in an individual.”
Basically, it’s living in the moment. For our purposes, mindfulness can be more
specifically broken down to dispositional mindfulness, which occurs when
mindfulness comes more naturally to an individual and helps them function more
adaptively. This adaptive functioning can be characterized by lower levels of
anxiety and depression, or simply by taking better care of oneself. In the case
of drug and alcohol abuse, levels of mindfulness are inversely related to an
individual’s level of dependence, that is to say, the more addicted you are the
less mindfully you are living your life.
Thus, it follows that mindfulness therapy would be a good idea in the
treatment of addictions. With mindfulness treatment targeting change in the cortex,
among other brain structures, it may help addicts improve control as well as
objective awareness. If maintained, these qualities of mindfulness may also
help recovering addicts avoid relapse. Although it is not a substitute for
traditional treatment, and still lacks evidence for effectiveness, it appears
to be emerging as a viable option for drug addiction.
A new mindfulness trial has also recently been announced at
the University Of Cincinnati College Of Medicine to test the effectiveness of
mindfulness-based cognitive therapy on children and adolescents with mood
disorders, specifically those with at least one bipolar parent. The hope for
the treatment, that fuses meditation techniques with cognitive behavioral therapy,
is that it will teach “children to pay attention to anxiety-related thoughts,
emotions and physical sensations with openness and non-judgment, helping them
to consciously choose the most appropriate behaviors for the situation.” The
study is funded by a grant from the Depression and Bipolar Disorder Alternative
Treatment Foundation, in the face of findings that the usage of antidepressants
by youth can often worsen or accelerate the mania and hypomania that are
characteristic of bipolar mood disorders. If researchers at UC succeed in
finding a non-pharmaceutical approach, and increasing control and agency in
these youth, as hoped, it could be another step on mindfulness’s journey from
trend to therapy.
Even if it takes a while for mindfulness to move from the celebrity
gossip mill onto the pages of scientific journals, these new findings are
certainly telling us something. Maybe mindfulness isn’t just among the trendy,
pseudo-scientific fodder usually peddled by Huffington Post. It seems to have
the power to positively affect drug and alcohol addicts and the anxiety and
mood disordered among others, probably even your average stressed out college
student. Move aside celebs, we’re here to make your mindfulness and meditation
a little less (or more?) cool.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-04-trial-mindfulness-based-cognitive-therapy-effect.html
