Reduce Negative Emotions and Stress Sensitivity with Mindfulness
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“Mindfulness training teaches people to be fully attentive to their present experience in a nonjudgmental way, which is believed to help reduce the rumination common to mood disorders. A mindful perspective teaches people how to apply a brake between a single lonely thought and what could be a resulting chain of distressing thoughts and feelings,” – J. David Creswell
Mindfulness training has been shown to improve the psychological well-being of healthy people. It also has been shown to be beneficial for a variety of mental health problems, including anxiety, depression, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Borderline personality disorder, impulsivity, obsessive compulsive disorder, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual dysfunction, suicidality and even with psychosis. Mindfulness is thought to work in part by improving the physiological and psychological responses to stress. This increases the individual’s ability to withstand the negative effects of stress on emotions and to cope with it adaptively. It also appears to work by improving emotion regulation. This improves the individual’s 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 cope with stress and experience yet control emotions.
These is a very important consequence of mindfulness. Humans are very emotional creatures and emotions can be very pleasant, providing the spice of life. But, when they get extreme they can produce misery and even mental illness. Humans, particularly in the developed world, are also embedded in a high stress environment that can damage their health and well-being. So, it is important to understand, in depth, how mindfulness training may reduce responses to stress and improve the responses to emotions. It would also be useful to learn how these factors change over the course of treatment.
In today’s Research News article “The Shape of Change in Perceived Stress, Negative Affect, and Stress Sensitivity During Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.” (See summary below). Snoppe and colleagues recruited people who had enrolled in a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program that met once a week for 2.5 hours for eight weeks and consisted of body scan, meditation, and yoga practice. Participants were also request to practice at home for 40 minutes each day. The participants completed pretraining measures and daily on-line diaries during the 8-weeks of the program which included measures of perceived stress, mindfulness practice, and negative emotions including depression, tension, anger, and fatigue.
They found that over the 8 weeks of the program negative emotions and perceived stress decreased in a linear fashion, improving day by day. They also found that the lower the daily levels of perceived stress, the lower the levels of negative emotions. In addition, they found that the degree of association between stress and negative emotions did not change over the 8 weeks. So, mindfulness training appeared to reduce their levels but did not decouple their mutual influences. Hence, day by day of mindfulness practice produces a progressive reduction in perceived stress and negative emotions.
It has been well established that mindfulness programs like MBSR are effective in reducing the physiological and psychological responses to stress and negative emotions such as depression, anxiety, anger, and fatigue. What is new in the present study is the documentation of the linear growth in these benefits. Each day of practice appeared to produce increased benefit. It would be interesting to follow this growth over a longer period of time to determine at what point do the benefits stabilize. But for now, it appears that the more practice the better.
So, reduce negative emotions and stress sensitivity with mindfulness.
“Instead of ‘turning away’ from pain in avoidance we can learn to gently ‘turn towards’ what we’re experiencing. We can bring a caring open attention towards the wounded parts of ourselves and make wise choices about how to respond to ourselves and to life. It’s a paradox that we all must understand: It is by turning towards negative emotions that we find relief from them – not by turning away.” – Melli O’Brien
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Snippe, E., Dziak, J.J., Lanza, S.T., Nyklíček, I., Wichers, M. The Shape of Change in Perceived Stress, Negative Affect, and Stress Sensitivity During Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Mindfulness (2017) 8: 728. doi:10.1007/s12671-016-0650-5
Abstract
Both daily stress and the tendency to react to stress with heightened levels of negative affect (i.e., stress sensitivity) are important vulnerability factors for adverse mental health outcomes. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) may help to reduce perceived daily stress and stress sensitivity. The purpose of this study was to examine how change in perceived stress, negative affect (NA), and the decoupling between perceived stress and NA evolved over the course of a MBSR program, without making any a priori assumptions on the shape of change. Seventy-one adults from the general population participating in MBSR provided daily diary assessments of perceived stress and NA during MBSR. The time-varying effect model (TVEM) indicated that perceived stress and NA decreased in a linear fashion rather than in a nonlinear fashion, both as a function of time and as a function of the cumulative number of days of mindfulness practice. Both TVEM and multilevel growth modeling showed that the association between perceived stress and NA did not decrease over the course of MBSR. The findings support the hypothesis that MBSR reduces NA and also reduces the extent to which individuals perceive their days as stressful. Also, the results suggest that there is a dose-response relationship between the amount of mindfulness practice and reductions in daily stress and NA.