By HAYDEN FINCH, PhD
In one of my recent posts, I shared with you emerging research about how mindfulness benefits our physical health. Today, I’m bringing you even more information about how mindfulness is beneficial – this time, for our mental health.
You know I’m a big believer in mindfulness, and this research by David Creswell, PhD, of Carnegie Mellon University shows why. Here are six ways mindfulness helps improve the way we think, feel, and interact with others.
Effects on Mental Health Conditions
1. Mindfulness helps people with depression have fewer episodes of depression in the future (i.e., it reduces relapse), including for people with a long history of depression and a trauma history.
2. Mindfulness reduces current symptoms of depression and seems to also have a positive impact on anxiety and PTSD symptoms.
3. Mindfulness helps treat addictions and reduce drug relapse.
“People who practice mindfulness tend to be less lonely, more satisfied with their relationships, and more likely to engage in helpful, compassionate behaviors.”
Effects on Thinking and Feeling
4. Mindfulness helps us sustain our attention longer and work with information in our head.
5. Mindfulness reduces “ruminating,” which is when you have the same series of thoughts over and over and over again (like when you replay an embarrassing conversation repeatedly, or when you can’t stop thinking about the bad things that keep happening to you).
Effects on Relationships
6. We don’t know much in this area, but people who practice mindfulness tend to be less lonely, more satisfied with their relationships, and more likely to engage in helpful, compassionate behaviors.
Keep it up with your daily practice. Here’s a mindfulness exercise to get you going today:
Take a moment to pause. Touch your heart, or hug yourself. Breathe deeply a few times. Offer compassionate words of encouragement to yourself as if you were talking to your best friend, a wounded child, or even your pet. If you’re not sure what to say, offer to treat yourself with kindness, wish yourself peace, aim to love and accept yourself just as you are. Breathe deeply a few more times and then resume your daily activities.
Based on the Self-Compassion Pause method.
Check out my other posts for more information about mindfulness and for helpful mindfulness resources around the internet and in print.
Hayden C. Finch, PhD,
is a practicing psychologist
in Des Moines, Iowa.
