Mindfulness – Key to Behavior Change.
Overview:
Understand the origins of mindfulness-based interventions
Mindlessness:
Neuroscientists would call this the Default Mode Network – living here most of the time.
Narrative Network .. Mind wandering and introspection.
Mindlessness: Ellen Langer
1. We keep doing things the same way and it becomes mindless through habit and lack
of questioning.
2. We do not question information when it comes from an authority or when
presented in absolute and unconditional language. The language of authority binds
us to a single perspective that limits our ability to respond creativity.
For instance, parents tell their children that they should clean their plates. Parents are the
“authority.” People in my mindful eating classes report that one of the hardest things they try
to do is to leave food on their plates because they have been told this as a child.
Three components of mindfulness:
SEQUENTIAL BUT SIMULTANEOUS.
Intention: a personal vision or motivation for initiating mindfulness is not explicit in the
“secular” arena in which mindfulness-based interventions are found. There appears to be a
shift over time with the degree of practice one engages… from self-regulation to self-liberation
How Mindfulness Works?
Not in resistance mode – struggling with what is. We are able to more readily change from a position of
relaxed attention.
Recognize what is happening – I’m feeling sad, lonely, angry, bored – this is when we usually react
Allow life to be just as it is – open to the feelings and the situation just as it is.
Investigate inner experience with kindness – “Ahhhh” this is what sadness feels like .. I don’t need to do
anything necessarily.
Non-identification – I am not my thoughts or emotions .. They are passing phenomenom - giving
attention in this way allows us to see this.
More flexible in how you respond: Instead of reaching for the plate of brownies, I might go out for a
walk instead, call a friend, take a nap, do some yoga.
MINDFULNESS OF BODY: Feel your body…For fifteen seconds I want you to focus on the feeling of
sitting in your chair. Notice the position of the body and the feeling of the chair.. It’s texture,
springiness, and other aspects of your chair. Okay 15 seconds.. GO!
What did you notice? Along with the information about the chair and your body, you probably lost track
of it and started thinking instead .. You thought about lunch, your to-do list, someone you’re upset
with… and then you remembered you were supposed to be thinking about your chair and then you went
back to that.
When your brain switched away from the feeling of the chair and went to your to-do list, your brain
switched from your direct experience to your narrative network.
This quick experiment gives you a personal sensation of the shift between these two circuits.
Rise of Mindfulness
Dryden and Still (2006) identify the year 1990 as a watershed, after which use of the term “mindfulness”
began burgeoning in the discourse of Western psychology and psychotherapy. This coincides with the
publication of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full-Catastrophe Living, a description and de facto manualization of the
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program that he and colleagues at the University of
Massachusetts Medical Center had been developing since 1979. Its success and influence on the
development of other interventions incorporating mindfulness arise from its status as an “evidencebased practice,” and the endorsement by powerful institutions in the academy and the popular media,
including PBS (Bill Moyer’s special Healing and the Mind), Time, Newsweek, and Business Week (Dryden
and Still, 2006; Hovanessian, 2003; Kalb, 2003; Moyers, 1993; Stein, 2003).
Original MBSR –
Mindfulness–Based Stress Reduction was designed for a heterogeneous patient population, open to
people with physical and/or psychological diagnoses or with simply a desire to alleviate the “stress” of
the human condition. It is non-pathologizing in its insistence that “…as long as you are breathing, there
is more right with you than there is wrong…” (Kabat-Zinn, 1990, p. 2). It is designed to train participants
in formal and informal practices, as well as to actuate and accelerate the placebo effect, and to exploit
the social factors of emotional support and caring (Kabat-Zinn, 1996). Further, it is not positioned as a
clinical intervention at all, but rather as an educational program.
Educational, experiential, and patient-centered.
MBSR Adaptations It is interesting to note that the average practice time reported by participants in the CFM model
program, where 45-minute recordings are used, is found to be variable, depending upon the specific
practice, from an average of 16 to 35 minutes per day (Carmody & Baer, 2008).
There is no consensus on the relationship between home practice duration or frequency and health
outcomes. Some reports do not show a correlation between formal home practice time and health
outcomes (Astin, 1997; Carmody, Reed, Kristeller, & Merriam, 2008; Davidson, Kabat-Zinn, Schumaker,
Rosenkranz, Muller, Santorelli, et al., 2003) while others find correlations between practice time and
specific health outcomes (Speca, 2000; Carmody & Baer, 2008). For example, in Carmody and Baer
(2008), practice time was correlated with improvement in psychological well being and perceived stress
but not medical symptoms.
Curriculum:
Session One: Problems can be worked with, and the MBSR program offers the opportunity to do this in
a supportive environment. Present moment awareness of body sensations, thoughts, and emotions is
the foundation of this work, because it is only in the present that one can learn, grow, and change.
Session Two: How you see things, or don’t see them, will determine how you will respond to them. It is
not the events themselves but rather how you handle them that influences the effects on your body
and mind.
Session Three: We miss many of our pleasant moments, perhaps by focusing only on the unpleasant
ones (i.e. crisis or pain). You can have pleasant moments even when you a re experiencing pain. Focus
on the triangle of awareness: body sensation, thought, and emotion.
Session Four: Cultivating mindfulness can reduce the negative effects of stress reactivity, as well as help
develop more effective ways of responding positively and pro-actively to stressful situations and
experiences.
Session Five: Acceptance: “You are not your thought.”
Session Six: Mindful communication in stressful situations, including awareness of your needs in the
present moment, and ways to express those needs effectively. The learning objective of this session is
to learn how to maintain your center, recognize habitual patterns of relating, and discern skillful options
in stressful interpersonal exchanges.
All-day Session: Theme: Integrate mindfulness practices learned in the prior sessions. Deepen mindful
awareness of experience by formally cultivating mindfulness over an extended period of time, fostering
the possibility of greater self-knowledge, and insight into the impermanence of body-mind states.
Session Seven: Theme: Cultivating kindness towards self and others. The learning objective of this
session is to learn to cultivate a disposition of generosity in formal meditation practice so that it may
arise more readily in our day-to-day life.
Session Eight: Theme: “The eighth week is the rest of your life.”
The learning objectives are to help participants keep up the momentum and discipline they’ve
developed over the past seven weeks in mindfulness practice, both formal and informal, and to present
a range of resources, such as books, tapes, advanced programs, and other opportunities for practice in
the community, is reviewed to support continued practice. Meditations and opportunities for sharing
with the group close the session and the course.
Research Publications:
Mindfulness Research Guide has a database of over 2,500 references on mindfulness research
Measures of Mindfulness: Kirk Warren Brown will be joining our faculty as a Provost Hire this year.
Immune Functioning: The underlying changes in biological processes that are associated with reported
changes in mental and physical health in response to meditation have not been systematically explored.
In order to look at alterations in brain and immune function produced by Mindfulness Meditation, A
randomized controlled study was conducted by Kabat-Zinn and Ritchie Davidson at the University of
Wisconsin on employees at a biotech corporation (known for their stressful environments). Used EEG
(rather crude measure of brain activity), Positive and Negative Affect Scale, Anxiety Inventory, and Blood
Draws to test anti-body titers after flu vaccination .
Results were..
This is an important finding because this left-sided activation has been shown to play a role in
decreasing activation in the amygdala which in turn is more active in people who are depressed, anxious
and who have PTSD.
Neuroscience:
Neural De-centering – a decoupling of brain parts that are usually connected.. Awareness is detached,
shift toward a more depersonalized mode (meta cognition) – new self in each moment