Month: December 2015

Regulate Emotions with Mindfulness

psyjdc Leave a comment

 

“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.” – Daniel Goleman

 

We are very emotional creatures. Without emotion, life is flat and uninteresting. Emotions provide the spice of life. We are constantly having or reacting to emotions. We often go to great lengths in an attempt to create or keep positive emotions and conversely to avoid, mitigate, or get rid of negative emotions. They are so important to us that they affect mostly everything that we do and say and can even be determinants of life or death. Anger, fear, and hate can lead to murderous consequences. Anxiety and depression can lead to suicide. At the same time love, joy, and happiness can make life worth living. Our emotions also affect us physically with positive emotions associated with health, well-being, and longevity and negative emotions associated with stress, disease, and shorter life spans.

 

The importance of emotions is only surpassed by our ignorance of them. Our rational side tries to downplay their significance and as a result research studies of emotions are fairly sparse and often ridiculed by politicians. So there is a great need for research on the nature of emotions, their effects, how they are regulated or not, and what factors affect them. One important factor is mindfulness. It has been shown to affect our ability to regulate emotions (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/category/research-news/emotions/). Research has demonstrated that people either spontaneously high in mindfulness or trained in mindfulness are better able to be completely in touch with their emotions and feel them completely, while being able to respond to them more appropriately and adaptively. In other words, mindful people are better able to experience yet control emotions.

 

In today’s Research News article “Mindfulness and emotion regulation in older and young adults.”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1125417244148867/?type=3&theater

Prakash and colleagues delve into mindfulness, emotion regulation and dysregulation, and overall well-being in younger (mean 23 years of age) and older (mean 65 years of age) adults. They found that older adults were significantly higher in mindfulness and lower in emotional difficulties (dysregulation). They further found that people who were high in mindfulness were lower in emotional difficulties (dysregulation). This may have been due to the fact that people high in mindfulness were less likely to use suppression or thought avoidance to regulate emotions. As a result, mindful people tended to regulate emotions by confronting them rather than avoiding them. This was substantiated by the finding that high mindfulness was associated with higher emotional clarity. Finally, they found that age made a difference. The younger group had a much stronger tendency to use suppression and thought avoidance than the older group and the influence of these strategies on emotion dysregulation was stronger in the younger group.

 

These results help to clarify how mindfulness may help us avoid emotional difficulties and why older adults appear to have less emotional troubles. The key appears to be the type of strategy used to deal with emotions. Younger people tend to try to suppress the emotion or avoid thinking about it and as a result don’t experience fully, confront, or regulate emotions as well as older adults. But, younger people benefit greatly from mindfulness, reducing the maladaptive suppression and avoidance strategies, and thereby reducing the dysregulation of emotions. Older adults, on the other hand are more mindful and tend not to avoid emotions but to confront them with clarity and thereby are better able to deal with them.

 

So, regulate emotions with mindfulness.

 

“Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience. It isn’t more complicated than that. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it.” – Sylvia Boorstein

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Up to your Neck in Pain – Try Yoga

psyjdc 6 Comments

 

“For many people, managing pain involves using prescription medicine in combination with complementary techniques like physical therapy, acupuncture, yoga and massage. I appreciate this because I truly believe medical care should address the person as a whole – their mind, body, and spirit.” – Naomi Judd

 

We all have to deal with pain. It’s inevitable, but hopefully mild and short lived. But, for many, pain is a constant in their lives. The most common forms of chronic pain are back and neck pain. Indeed, back pain is the number one cause of disability worldwide. In addition, neck pain is the number three cause of chronic pain; affecting more than a quarter of Americans. People who experience chronic back and neck pain are limited in their daily activities and may compensate in order to walk, run, sit, etc. and the compensatory postures can produce further sometimes different problems.

 

There are a myriad of causes for chronic back and neck pain, including something as simple as improper positioning while sleeping, or even sitting or standing with bad posture. It can also occur due to injuries, accidents, heavy lifting or other spinal issues. These types of pain are not only a problem for the individual but are also costly for society as they constitute the largest category of medical insurance claims.

 

Just as there are many different causes there are also a plethora of treatments for back and neck pain. The most common is the use of drugs, including over –the-counter pain relievers and at times opiates. These are helpful but have limited effectiveness. Sometimes the pain can lead to surgical interventions that can be costly and are not always effective. So, alternative treatments such as acupuncture have also been used with some success. Yoga is another promising alternative treatment for back and neck pain. Many forms of yoga focus on the proper alignment of the spine, which could directly address the source of back and neck pain for many individuals.

 

We’ve seen in previous posts that yoga can be effective for the relief of chronic low-back pain

http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/11/23/treat-back-pain-with-yoga/. Indeed, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) which includes yoga practice is effective for low back pain (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/10/17/control-low-back-pain-with-mindfulness/).In today’s Research News article “Effectiveness of Iyengar yoga in treating spinal (back and neck) pain: A systematic review”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1124994394191152/?type=3&theater

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4278133/

Crow and colleagues review the published randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of the application of yoga for the relief of back and neck pain. They found that yoga produced clinically significant improvements in pain intensity. There was clear and strong evidence for effectiveness on the short term. Only three trials had long-term follow-up but were supportive that yoga has sustained effectiveness.

 

Yoga has many positive benefits for the physical and psychological well-being of the individual and can even provide spiritual benefits. It is generally safe when taught by well-trained yoga instructors, but can still have some adverse effects and practice needs to be tempered with moderation and caution. The present review, hiowever, provides strong support for its use in treating chronic back and neck pain.

 

So, practice yoga and relieve chronic back and neck pain

 

“The practices of Yoga equip us with tools for transcending this suffering – and for transcending our moments of happiness, too. Even moments of elation, contentment, and joy carry the future pain of their termination, after all.”  – Sharon Gannon & David Life

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Quit Smoking Mindfully

psyjdc Leave a comment

 

“Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.” – Mark Twain

 

“Tobacco use remains the single largest preventable cause of death and disease in the United States. Cigarette smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans each year, with more than 41,000 of these deaths from exposure to secondhand smoke. In addition, smoking-related illness in the United States costs more than $300 billion a year. In 2013, an estimated 17.8% (42.1 million) U.S. adults were current cigarette smokers.”  (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

 

Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known. But, its addictiveness is not just due to its pharmacological properties. Addiction to smoking also involves learned or conditioned factors, genetics, and social and environmental factors. This makes it easy to become addicted and very difficult to stop. To some extent this is why there still are high rates of smoking even though mostly everyone understands that it has very negative effects on health and longevity.

 

There are a wide variety of methods and strategies to quit smoking which are to some extent effective. According to the National Institutes of Health, about 40% of smokers who want to quit make a serious attempt to do so each year, but fewer than 5% actually succeed. Most people require three or four failed attempts before being successful. One problem is that after quitting if a single cigarette is smoked, going back to regular smoking is almost assured. As John Polito wrote “nicotine dependency recovery is one of the few challenges in life where being 99% successful all but assures 100% defeat.”

 

So, better methods to quit which can not only promote quitting but also prevent relapse are badly needed. In today’s Research News article “Randomized trial comparing mindfulness training for smokers to a matched control”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1124440280913230/?type=3&theater

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4121076/

Davis and colleagues compared the efficacy of a mindfulness training for smokers (MTS) program to the American Lung Association’s Freedom from Smoking (FFS) program. The MTS program included meditation, group support, and instruction on mindful management of smoking triggers, urges, addictive thoughts and emotions. They applied these programs to quitting smoking with low socioeconomic status smokers, a very difficult segment of the population to treat. Both groups used nicotine patches for the first two weeks of treatment.

 

They found that at four weeks after the end of treatment 35% of the mindfulness training group and 34% of the FFS group were smoking abstinent. But at 24 weeks 25% of the mindfulness group were still abstinent compared to 18% for the FFS group. This suggests that mindfulness may be helpful in maintaining abstinence after successful quitting of smoking. The mindfulness training group not surprisingly had higher mindfulness scores. Importantly, they showed lower urges to smoke after quitting. In addition, the mindfulness training group showed a lower tendency to avoid experiences. It is important to note that mindfulness training had these effects in a low socioeconomic status group which have traditionally been found to be difficult to treat.

 

These are exciting results and suggest that mindfulness training may be an important addition to programs for smoking cessation. It appears that mindfulness may be effective by reducing urges to smoke. Mindfulness training increases focus of an acceptance of the present moment. After the physiological symptoms of smoking withdrawal are over the most difficult issues that tend to produce relapse are learned environmental and social triggers to smoke. It is possible that mindfulness training allows the individual to be better at understanding and accepting these triggers and not avoid experiences but confront them. This may then decrease the urge to smoke and improve abstinence.

 

Regardless of the mechanism, mindfulness training appears to be a beneficial addition to smoking cessation programs. Of course, further research is needed.

 

So, quit smoking mindfully.

 

“Smoking sucks! The one thing I would say to my kid is, ‘It’s not just that it’s bad for you. Do you want to spend the rest of your life fighting a stupid addiction to a stupid thing that doesn’t even really give you a good buzz?’” – Katherine Heigl

 

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies