Reduce Psychological Distress and Improve Emotion Regulation with Online Mindfulness Training
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“Mindful emotion regulation represents the capacity to remain mindfully aware at all times, irrespective of the apparent valence or magnitude of any emotion that is experienced. It does not entail suppression of the emotional experience, nor any specific attempts to reappraise or alter it in any way. Instead, MM involves a systematic retraining of awareness and nonreactivity, leading to defusion from whatever is experienced, and allowing the individual to more consciously choose those thoughts, emotions and sensations they will identify with, rather than habitually reacting to them.” – Richard Chambers
Mindfulness training has been shown through extensive research to be effective in improving physical and psychological health and particularly with the physical and psychological reactions to stress. The vast majority of the mindfulness training techniques, however, require a certified trained therapist. This results in costs that many clients can’t afford. In addition, the participants must be available to attend multiple sessions at particular scheduled times that may or may not be compatible with their busy schedules and at locations that may not be convenient. As an alternative, online mindfulness training programs have been developed. These have tremendous advantages in decreasing costs, making training schedules much more flexible, and eliminating the need to go repeatedly to specific locations. There is a need to investigate the effectiveness of these programs as an alternative to face-to-face trainings.
In today’s Research News article “Effectiveness of Online Mindfulness-Based Interventions on Psychological Distress and the Mediating Role of Emotion Regulation.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02090/full?utm_source=F-AAE&utm_medium=EMLF&utm_campaign=MRK_820262_69_Psycho_20181108_arts_A ), Ma and colleagues recruited adult participants over the web and randomly assigned them to 4 different online groups; group mindfulness-based intervention, self-direct mindfulness-based intervention, discussion group, and blank control group.
The group mindfulness-based intervention was similar to Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and included homework, meditation, body scan, yoga, and cognitive therapy. It was delivered over 8 weeks in 8, 2-hour, sessions including a 40-minute mindfulness practice and group online discussion. The self-direct mindfulness-based intervention condition was the same as the group mindfulness-based intervention except that there were no group discussions. The discussion group met online and discussed emotions including “positive and negative events, stress, and interpersonal communications, as well as how the participants perceived their psychological distress such as stress, anxiety, and depression symptoms, and how they dealt with their emotional problems.” The blank control group was a wait-list group that received no treatment. All participants were measured before and after the 8 weeks of training for mindfulness, emotion regulation, anxiety, and depression.
They found that in comparison to baseline the group mindfulness-based intervention and self-direct mindfulness-based intervention groups had large significant increases in mindfulness and emotion regulation and decreases in anxiety and depression. The group mindfulness-based intervention group generally produced larger effects than the self-direct mindfulness-based intervention group. They also found that the higher the levels of mindfulness the higher the levels of emotion regulation and the lower the levels of anxiety and depression and that the higher the levels of emotion regulation the lower the levels of anxiety and depression.
Previous research using face-to-face mindfulness training has demonstrated that mindfulness improves emotion regulation, anxiety and depression. The contribution of the present study is demonstrating that similar benefits can be produced by online mindfulness training, especially when group discussion is included. The group discussions are generally included in the face-to-face mindfulness trainings including Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). So, it would appear that being able to share and discuss experiences with other participants is important in producing maximum benefits of the trainings but it doesn’t matter if they occur face-to-face or online.
So, reduce psychological distress and improve emotion regulation with online mindfulness training.
“both face-to-face and internet-based mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) reduced psychological distress compared with usual care.” – Matthew Stenger
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
This and other Contemplative Studies posts are also available on Google+ https://plus.google.com/106784388191201299496/posts and on Twitter @MindfulResearch
Study Summary
Ma Y, She Z, Siu AF-Y, Zeng X and Liu X (2018) Effectiveness of Online Mindfulness-Based Interventions on Psychological Distress and the Mediating Role of Emotion Regulation. Front. Psychol. 9:2090. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02090
Online mindfulness-based intervention as a feasible and acceptable approach has received mounting attention in recent years, yet more evidence is needed to demonstrate its effectiveness. The primary objective of this study was to examine the effects of online mindfulness-based programs on psychological distress (depression and anxiety). The randomized controlled intervention design consisted of four conditions: group mindfulness-based intervention (GMBI), self-direct mindfulness-based intervention (SDMBI), discussion group (DG) and blank control group (BCG). The program lasted 8 weeks and a total of 76 participants completed the pre- and post-test. Results showed that participants in GMBI and SDMBI had significant pre- and post-test differences on mindfulness, emotion regulation difficulties, and psychological distress, with medium to large effect sizes. In addition, ANCOVA results indicated significant effects of group membership on post-test scores of mindfulness, depression and anxiety when controlling the pretest scores, with medium to large effect sizes. The GMBI appeared to exert the greatest effects on outcome variables in comparison with other groups. In addition, changes in emotion regulation difficulties across groups could mediate the relationship between changes in mindfulness dimensions (Observing and Describing) and changes in psychological distress across groups. These results provided encouraging evidence for the effectiveness of online mindfulness-based interventions in reducing psychological distress, and the possible mediating role of emotion regulation, while also underlining the importance of group discussion in online mindfulness-based interventions.