Improve Emotional Well-Being with Mindfulness
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“Mindfulness is about offering a warm, kind, friendly, accepting awareness to your moment-by-moment experience (all positive emotions), whatever that may be. For this reason, any practice of mindfulness, in the long term, develops your ability to generate positive feeling towards your inner (thoughts, emotions) and outer (world) experience.” – Anonymous
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. 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.
Two types of meditation practices are the commonly used. Loving kindness meditation is designed to develop kindness and compassion to oneself and others. The individual systematically pictures different individuals from self, to close friends, to enemies and wishes them happiness, well-being, safety, peace, and ease of well-being. In mindfulness meditation, the individual either practices paying attention to a single meditation object, or the individual opens up awareness to everything that’s being experienced regardless of its origin. In both cases, the meditator learns to filter out distracting stimuli, including thoughts, staying focused on the present moment, and filtering out thoughts centered around the past or future. The meditator just observes the stimuli present and lets them arise, and fall away without paying them any further attention.
There has been very little research on the relative effectiveness of these two very different types of meditation practice. In addition, there has been little attention paid to the growth and development in the benefits of practice over time. In today’s Research News article “Positive Emotion Correlates of Meditation Practice: a Comparison of Mindfulness Meditation and Loving-Kindness Meditation.” (See summary below). Fredrickson and colleagues compare Loving kindness meditation to mindfulness meditation practice effects on the growth of positive emotions as practice continues.
They recruited meditation-naive adults between the ages of 34 to 64 years and randomly assigned them to a wait-list control group or to receive 1-hour once per week for 6 weeks training in either loving kindness meditation or mindfulness meditation. Participants were asked to practice at home 3 to 5 times per week. Beginning with the start of training, participants completed daily on-line reports for 9 weeks of their meditation practice and their emotional states of 10 positive emotions (amusement, awe, gratitude, hope, inspiration, interest, joy, love, pride, and serenity) and 10 negative emotions (anger, shame, fear, hate, disgust, embarrassment, guilt, sadness, scorn, and stress).
They found that the participants in both meditation conditions had significant increases in positive emotions and the groups did not differ. Negative emotions were not affected. Hence, both loving kindness meditation and mindfulness meditation improved the participants mood equivalently. The improvements in positive emotions increased linearly over the 9 weeks of measurement, with the emotional state becoming more and more positive every day. They also found that the more the participants practiced the larger the improvements in their positive emotional states.
These are interesting results that indicate that meditation, regardless of type, leads to greater happiness and the more practice, both in frequency and duration, the greater the benefit which grows day by day. It would be interesting in future studies to continue collecting data for a longer period of time to determine when the growth in benefits begins to taper off. The fact that there was no effect on negative emotions may have been due to the fact that these otherwise normal participants did not have very high levels of negative emotions to start with. Again, future research should include individuals with high levels of negative emotions. Regardless, it is clear that meditation practice incrementally improves mood with continued practice.
So, improve emotional well-being with mindfulness.
“Meditation gives you the wherewithal to pause, observe how easily the mind can exaggerate the severity of a setback, and resist getting drawn back into the abyss.”— Richie Davidson
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Fredrickson, B.L., Boulton, A.J., Firestine, A.M. et al. Positive Emotion Correlates of Meditation Practice: a Comparison of Mindfulness Meditation and Loving-Kindness Meditation. Mindfulness (2017). doi:10.1007/s12671-017-0735-9
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to uncover the day-to-day emotional profiles and dose-response relations, both within persons and between persons, associated with initiating one of two meditation practices, either mindfulness meditation or loving-kindness meditation. Data were pooled across two studies of midlife adults (N = 339) who were randomized to learn either mindfulness meditation or loving-kindness meditation in a 6-week workshop. The duration and frequency of meditation practice was measured daily for 9 weeks, commencing with the first workshop session. Likewise, positive and negative emotions were also measured daily, using the modified Differential Emotions Scale (Fredrickson, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 47:1–53, 2013). Analysis of daily emotion reports over the targeted 9-week period showed significant gains in positive emotions and no change in negative emotions, regardless of meditation type. Multilevel models also revealed significant dose-response relations between duration of meditation practice and positive emotions, both within persons and between persons. Moreover, the within-person dose-response relation was stronger for loving-kindness meditation than for mindfulness meditation. Similar dose-response relations were observed for the frequency of meditation practice. In the context of prior research on the mental and physical health benefits produced by subtle increases in day-to-day experiences of positive emotions, the present research points to evidence-based practices—both mindfulness meditation and loving-kindness meditation—that can improve emotional well-being.