MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction)

Don’t believe the hype

October 9, 2014

Linda Heuman, Tricycle: Neuroscientist Catherine Kerr is concerned about how mindfulness meditation research is being portrayed in the media.

Last May, an article about mindfulness on a popular mainstream news website finally spurred neuroscientist and meditation researcher Catherine Kerr to act. The article cited 20 benefits of meditation, from “reducing loneliness” to “increasing grey matter” to “helping sleep,” and painted a picture of meditation as a kind of golden elixir for modern life. Kerr posted the article on her Facebook page. “It is not like any of this is grossly inaccurate,” she wrote in her post. “It is just that the studies are too …

Mindfulness-based techniques aim to help patients reduce stress, manage pain

September 23, 2014

AJMC: If you have taken a yoga class, there was something familiar when Steven D. Hickman, PsyD, associate clinical professor at the University of California, San Diego, invited a roomful of conference attendees to put down the notes, close their eyes, set an intention, and breathe, gaining an “awareness of the breath.”

Dr Hickman’s opening to the session, “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Patients with Chronic or Life-Threatening Illness,” highlighted the intuitive element of what he teaches: His techniques are based on 2000-year-old Eastern philosophy and can be done anywhere; it’s the hectic nature of Western culture that relegates them to classes or …

Mindfulness may benefit migraine

September 18, 2014

Pauline Anderson, Medscape: Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) can be a safe and effective means of lessening the effect of migraine headache and can be carried out while patients continue to take migraine medication, results of a pilot study suggest.

“Although the small sample size of this pilot trial did not provide power to detect statistically significant changes in migraine frequency or severity, secondary outcomes demonstrated this intervention had a beneficial effect on headache duration, disability, self-efficacy, and mindfulness,” the authors, led by Rebecca Erwin Wells, MD, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, conclude.

“Future studies with larger sample sizes are warranted …

Kent State and Penn get $3.6 million from feds to study serenity

September 5, 2014

Sabrina Eaton, Cleveland.com: Niles Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan — who has become a congressional evangelist for a meditation technique known as “mindfulness” and even authored a book on the subject — announced today that universities in Northeast Ohio and Philadelphia will get $3.6 million from the National Institutes of Health to study his pet topic.

Kent State University researchers David Fresco and Joel Hughes and the University of Pennsylvania’s Jeffrey Greeson will use the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute award to examine whether lifestyle modification like meditation can keep hypertension patients off medication.

The study called “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for High Blood Pressure” will recruit …

25 minutes of mindfulness meditation can be best stress buster – study

July 7, 2014

Alvin Barnes, Wall Street OTC: If there’s one mental practice that’s stood the test of time and rigorous laboratory tests, it’s meditation. Mindfulness meditation in particular has done a good job of proving itself effective in reducing stress and depression, improving attention and cognitive performance, and even increasing grey matter density in the brain.

According to a new study in Psychoneuroendocrinology, just a little mindfulness training goes a long way, at least when it comes to quieting the mind in stressful situations. And for most people beginning a meditation practice, that’s not a bad place to start.

Mindfulness has been described by Jon …

The mainstreaming of mindfulness meditation

April 9, 2014

Frances Weaver, TheWeek.com: Stressed-out Americans, from war veterans to Google workers, are embracing mindfulness meditation. Does it really work?

Why is mindfulness so popular?
It appeals to people seeking an antidote to life in work-obsessed, tech-saturated, frantically busy Western culture. There is growing scientific evidence that mindfulness meditation has genuine health benefits — and can even alter the structure of the brain, so the technique is drawing some unlikely devotees. Pentagon leaders are experimenting with mindfulness to make soldiers more resilient, while General Mills has installed a meditation room in every building of its Minneapolis campus. Even tech-obsessed Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are using …

Mindfulness in policing

April 7, 2014

Rebecca Woolington, OregonLive.com: Since last spring, the Hillsboro Police Department has offered mindfulness-based training to build resiliency in officers.

The three, nine-week courses have cost the city about $18,000, said Hillsboro Lt. Richard Goerling, one of the program’s creators. Each round comes with a $5,800 bill for the instructor, and some officer time is included in the overall cost.

The department has tentatively budgeted $30,000 for mindfulness training next fiscal year.

About a third of the department’s officers have participated in the Mindfulness-Based Resilience Training. The course was created by Goerling; Brant Rogers, a mindfulness instructor at Yoga Hillsboro; and Michael Christopher, a psychology professor at …

The Mindful Revolution

January 24, 2014

Kate Pickert, Time: Finding peace in a stressed-out, digitally dependent culture may just be a matter of thinking differently.

The raisins sitting in my sweaty palm are getting stickier by the minute. They don’t look particularly appealing, but when instructed by my teacher, I take one in my fingers and examine it. I notice that the raisin’s skin glistens. Looking closer, I see a small indentation where it once hung from the vine. Eventually, I place the raisin in my mouth and roll the wrinkly little shape over and over with my tongue, feeling its texture. After a while, I push it …

Mindfulness-based stress reduction helps lower blood pressure

October 15, 2013

ScienceBlog: Blood pressure is effectively lowered by mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) for patients with borderline high blood pressure or “prehypertension.”

This finding is reported in the October issue of Psychosomatic Medicine: Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine, the official journal of the American Psychosomatic Society. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.

“Our results provide evidence that MBSR, when added to lifestyle modification advice, may be an appropriate complementary treatment for BP in the prehypertensive range,” writes Joel W. Hughes, PhD, of Kent State (Ohio) University and colleagues.

Mindfulness Practice Leads to Drop in Blood Pressure…