More about mindfulness
Meditation and mindfulness
Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to what is happening to us right now. This includes being aware of our body and its sensations, being aware of our mind and what it is doing. We are so often thinking about things or doing things that we are completely unaware of what is actually going on in the present moment - there is often a lot going on!
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​​​Meditation is a practice where we set aside a period of time while we deliberately focus our mind. One can find lots of examples of meditation in many traditions and religions. Here, we are just interested in meditation for wellbeing. In a wellbeing meditation we typically set aside a short period of time while we focus on a particular sensation, such as the breath, what is happening in the body, or we just sit in broad awareness. We can meditate sitting, standing, lying down or walking.
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How does mindfulness help?
A lot of our emotional stress comes from thinking about things in the future (this can drive stress and anxiety), things in the past (leading to anger and grief), or thinking about things that lead us to depression. All of these conditions are of course way more complicated than this. However, our thinking patterns associated with these conditions is something that we can influence by the things we do. In particular, we can try to change our mental focus. This is what we are doing when we practice meditation and mindfulness and there is a lot of evidence to show that it can be very effective in helping us reduce our levels of discomfort.
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By practising mindfulness we strengthen our awareness of the real "here and now" and spend less time focused on the imagined "there and then". By practising meditation we gently calm ourselves and train our mind to focus where we want it to be, rather than let it romp free.
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In our experience meditation and mindfulness may not be a cure for these conditions but they can be very effective in lowering the level of our discomfort. They can also mix very well with other therapies that a GP or counsellor may provide and can even make them more effective.
The origins of mindfulness
Mindfulness comes from Buddhism and has a history stretching back 2,500 years. In Buddhist traditions meditation and mindfulness are used as part of an ethical way of living in order to reduce suffering. Western therapeutic mindfulness is a greatly simplified form of this traditional use.
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In the 1970s western psychiatrists and psychologists, noting the potential benefits of using meditation and mindfulness to help with depression took the techniques out of their traditional setting and set them in a western therapeutic package. In wellbeing and therapeutic practice, as adopted by the NHS, mindfulness is therefore presented in a westernised form and sometimes its origins may not even be mentioned.
In our courses we teach using the western therapeutic understanding of mindfulness but we also mention the origins of these practices because we think it helps to see where these ideas come from.
Evidence of benefits
The following extracts are taken from recent research into the use of meditation and mindfulness.
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The Effects of an Online Mindfulness Intervention on Perceived Stress, Depression and Anxiety in a Non-clinical Sample
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"Results showed that participants who completed the online mindfulness course reported significantly lower levels of perceived stress, depression and anxiety. The large effect sizes associated with completing the intervention were maintained for all of the outcome variables at 3- and 6-month follow-up."
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This is part of the Discussion from "The Effects of an Online Mindfulness Intervention on Perceived Stress,
Depression and Anxiety in a Non-clinical Sample: A Randomised Waitlist Control Trial". A paper by Dawn Querstret & Mark Cropley & Chris Fife-Schaw. Published in Mindfulness (2018) 9:1825–1836.
This article is distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license
Effects of Brief Mindfulness-Based Interventions on Health-Related Outcomes: a Systematic Review
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"The evidence for brief MBIs improving psychological out comes, especially for anxiety and depression, was convincing. This group, which covered a range of general psychological outcomes, was the most common category. Almost half of the studies with psychological outcome measures reported signif-
icant positive results for all outcomes providing some evidence that a brief MBI (i.e., of five to 20 min duration), in a single session, can positively impact negative mood and different types of anxiety, or related factors such as rumination in both healthy or clinical populations. These MBIs were mostly
mindfulness audios, but mindfulness cue cards and instructions were also found to be effective"
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Extract from "General Psychological Outcomes" from "Effects of Brief Mindfulness-Based Interventions on Health-Related Outcomes: a Systematic Review". A paper by Ana Howarth & Jared G. Smith1 & Linda Perkins-Porras2 & Michael Ussher. Published in Mindfulness (2019) 10:1957–1968.
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Mindfulness in Schools: a Health Promotion Approach
to Improving Adolescent Mental Health
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"Between 10 and 20% of adolescents worldwide experience a mental health problem within a given 12-month period. Mental health problems impact on an adolescent’s potential to live a fulfilling and productive life and lead to challenges such as stigma, isolation and discrimination. To address this need, in recent years, there has been growing interest into broad-based school-integrated health promotion interventions that seek to build resilience and augment protective factors in adolescents. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) reflect one such approach that have been administered to adolescent populations in both resilience building and treatment contexts. This paper discusses the utility of school-based MBIs as an adolescent health promotion approach and makes recommendations for intervention design, delivery and evaluation. Emerging evidence indicates that school-integrated MBIs may be a cost-effective means of not only meeting government objectives relating to adolescent mental health, but also for improving the wellbeing of teachers and parents. Furthermore, there is growing evidence indicating that mindfulness can elicit improvements in student learning performance and general classroom behaviour. However, notwithstanding these beneficial properties, there remains a need to conduct large-scale empirical investigations that seek to evaluate the effectiveness of school-integrated MBIs at a regional or national level. A further challenge is the need to ensure that mindfulness instructors are able to impart to adolescents an experiential understanding of this ancient contemplative technique."
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The Abstract from "Mindfulness in Schools: a Health Promotion Approach to Improving Adolescent Mental Health" By Supakyada Sapthiang & William Van Gordon & Edo Shonin. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction (2019) 17:112–119.
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
The Effectiveness of Daily Mindful Breathing Practices on Test Anxiety of Students
"The present study examined the effectiveness of daily mindful breathing practices on test anxiety of university students. A total of 36 participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a training mindful breathing condition, a training cognitive reap-
praisal condition, and a non-training condition (control group. .. Before and after training, each of the participants completed a questionnaire to assess: test anxiety, positive thought, and positive affect. The results of the study showed that both mindful breathing practice and cognitive reappraisal practice yielded
large effect sizes in reducing test anxiety. In addition, the mindful breathing condition scored significantly higher on positive thoughts than the cognitive reappraisal and control conditions. The findings of this study suggest that both daily mindful breathing and cognitive
reappraisal practices were effective in reducing test anxiety; however, mindful breathing increased positive automatic thoughts to a greater extent than cognitive reappraisal."
Edited Abstract of Cho H, Ryu S, Noh J, Lee J (2016) The Effectiveness of Daily Mindful Breathing Practices on Test Anxiety of Students. PLoS ONE 11(10):
e0164822. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0164822
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​This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
A note on mindfulness research
We have tried to show here a couple of research reports that would be applicable and of interest to the readers of this website. These extracts are not intended to fully report the detailed results from specific pieces of research. Rather they are intended to give confidence to anyone who was considering trying mindfulness that this is a well researched area with considerable benefits being experienced.
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There is a truly enormous amount of reseach on mindfulness. At the time of writing, a search on the web using the term "Mindfulness Research" generated 516,000 hits. This strongly illustrates how much research has been done in this field. However finding the most appropriate research for this website was a challenge. This is due to the following factors:
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1. For a lot of research the full paper is behind a pay wall and permission is needed to quote it. We needed to find research where the full paper was available and published under a licence that allowed it to be used.
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2. A lot of recent research is tightly targeted on specific patient communities and conditions, eg. a particular age group with a particular illness. This means it is less suitable or of general interest for use here.
3. Some reports are written in very dense technical language, which didn't seem suitable for here.
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I didn't read all 516,000 reports (!) but I hope the articles I have chosen are of interest. I will keep my eyes open and when I can find new articles of interest then I will update the site.
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If you are interested in the available research on mindfulness then the best thing I can suggest is to open up a browser and explore for yourself.