Improve Emotional Reactivity and Stress Responding with Mindfulness
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“There are moments in life that are hard, painful, scary and difficult to endure. There are times when we feel anger, anxiety, grief, embarrassment, stress, remorse or other negative emotions. Through mindfulness you can learn to turn your negative emotions into your greatest teachers and sources of strength.” – Melli O’Brien
Mindfulness practice has been shown to produce improved emotion regulation. Practitioners demonstrate the ability to fully sense and experience emotions, but respond to them in more appropriate and adaptive ways. In other words, mindful people are better able to experience yet control emotions and not overreact to them. This is a very important consequence of mindfulness. Humans are very emotional creatures and these emotions can be very pleasant, providing the spice of life. But, when they get extreme they can produce misery and even mental illness. The ability of mindfulness training to improve emotion regulation is thought to be the basis for a wide variety of benefits that mindfulness provides to mental health and the treatment of mental illness especially depression and anxiety disorders.
Stress is an integral part of life. In fact, I’ve quipped that the definition of death is when stress ceases. People often think of stress as a bad thing. But, it is in fact essential to the health of the body. If we don’t have any stress, we call it boredom. In fact, we invest time and resources in stressing ourselves, e.g. ridding rollercoasters, sky diving, competing in sports, etc. If stress, is high or is prolonged, however, it can be problematic. It can damage our physical and mental health and even reduce our longevity, leading to premature deaths. So, it is important that we employ methods to either reduce or control our responses to it. Mindfulness practices have been found routinely to reduce the psychological and physiological responses to stress.
Mindfulness practices improve physiological and psychological responses to stress and also improve emotional reactivity. In today’s Research News article “Dispositional Mindfulness Uncouples Physiological and Emotional Reactivity to a Laboratory Stressor and Emotional Reactivity to Executive Functioning Lapses in Daily Life.” See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4831864/
Feldman and colleagues examine the relationships between mindfulness, emotional reactivity, and stress responses in two experiments employing female undergraduate students. In the first experiment, they measured the students’ mindfulness and the levels of negative emotions. They were then required to complete a very stressful difficult laboratory task (mirror tracing) during which heart rate was measured as an indication of the physiological effects of stress. After completing the task, they were again measured for negative emotions. They found that mindfulness moderated the effect of physiological stress (heart rate) on negative emotions such that with low levels of mindfulness high physiological stress produced high negative emotions while at high levels of mindfulness there was no increase in negative emotions. So, “dispositional mindfulness was found to uncouple the association between degree of physiological arousal and subjective distress.”
In the second experiment, a new group of female students were measured for mindfulness and then completed measures daily of negative emotions and executive function lapses, things such as “I procrastinated on an important task,” “I forgot to do an important task.” “I had difficulty motivating myself,” “I was late for something important” and “I said something to someone that I later regretted.“ They found that on days when mindfulness was high negative emotions tended to be low. In addition, they found that mindfulness moderated the effect of executive function lapses on negative emotions such that with low levels of mindfulness executive function lapses produced high negative emotions while at high levels of mindfulness there was no increase in negative emotions.
These findings suggest that mindfulness uncouples the associations between degree of either physiological arousal or executive function lapses and negative emotions. This further suggests that being high in mindfulness is associated with a greater ability for emotional regulation, lowering emotional reactivity in the face of either physiological or psychological stress. This is another interesting example of how mindfulness improves the individual’s ability to cope effectively with stress and regulate their emotions. This should have ramifications for improving the individual’s physical and mental health.
So, improve emotional reactivity and stress responding with mindfulness.
“Then I see what is happening. Ah, agitation is here. By making time for meditation, I get to more consciously connect with myself and my state of being, and I realize that my sense of urgency is actually fuelled from a physical state of tension and stress.” – Elise Bialylew
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Feldman, G., Lavalle, J., Gildawie, K., & Greeson, J. M. (2016). Dispositional Mindfulness Uncouples Physiological and Emotional Reactivity to a Laboratory Stressor and Emotional Reactivity to Executive Functioning Lapses in Daily Life. Mindfulness, 7(2), 527–541. http://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-015-0487-3
Abstract
Both dispositional mindfulness and mindfulness training may help to uncouple the degree to which distress is experienced in response to aversive internal experience and external events. Because emotional reactivity is a transdiagnostic process implicated in numerous psychological disorders, dispositional mindfulness and mindfulness training could exert mental health benefits, in part, by buffering emotional reactivity. The present studies examine whether dispositional mindfulness moderates two understudied processes in stress reactivity research: the degree of concordance between subjective and physiological reactivity to a laboratory stressor (Study 1); and the degree of dysphoric mood reactivity to lapses in executive functioning in daily life (Study 2). In both studies, lower emotional reactivity to aversive experiences was observed among individuals scoring higher in mindfulness, particularly non-judging, relative to those scoring lower in mindfulness. These findings support the hypothesis that higher dispositional mindfulness fosters lower emotional reactivity. Results are discussed in terms of implications for applying mindfulness-based interventions to a range of psychological disorders in which people have difficulty regulating emotional reactions to stress.