Mindfulness Measured by Paper and Pencil Test does Not Predicts Real World Behavior

February 12, 2019 psyjdc Leave a comment

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

“I’m recognizing as I write this that even this moment will come and pass, and as I feel that, I notice some relief in my chest and my shoulders widening and releasing to let my heart relax. I’m being mindful that my day is winding down, and the thought is hitting me: “the work before me will get done.”- Elizabeth Ann Rue

A prerequisite in science is that in order to study something you have to be able to reliably and validly measure it. With many concepts such as mindfulness, depression, and anxiety that reflect subjective states, there are currently no objective means to measure them. Measurement then falls to some kind of after the fact test or to a self-report. Traditionally, mindfulness has been measured with paper and pencil psychometric tests, such as the Five Facets of Mindfulness Questionnaire. They ask the participant to answer the question in regard to their overall, general state of mindfulness. It is unclear whether these subjective questionnaire reports are reliable, accurate, and honest and whether they relate to actual behavior of people in their natural, everyday environments. Hence it is important to investigate whether the results of these self-report tests actually predict what the people will do in their everyday life.

In today’s Research News article “Dispositional mindfulness in daily life: A naturalistic observation study.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6261408/ ), Kaplan and colleagues performed two studies to determine first what people expect the behavior of mindful people to look like and second whether actual behavior conforms to these expectations. In a first study they recruited adults online and had them complete measures of their perceptions of the behavior of mindful people. They found that “laypersons assume that mindfulness relates to (1) attention to sensory perceptions, (2) emotional positivity, (3) quality social interactions, and (4) a prosocial orientation in daily life.”

In a second study, they recruited adults and randomly assigned them to either a control condition or to receive 8 weeks of meditation training they were measured before and after training for mindfulness and personality characteristics and wore a recording device over a weekend that recorded 50 seconds of sounds every 9 minutes. The sound samples were transcribed and analyzed for amount of time talking to others, positive and negative words, perception words (e.g., hear, see, feel, soft, loud), substantive, meaningful, conversations, and prosocial orientation (gratitude, affection, gossip, complaining).

They found that the level of mindfulness of the participant was positively related to the perceptual orientation, use of words indicating sensations, but was not reliably associated with positivity, negativity, social interactions, prosocial, or antisocial interactions. Hence, the actual observations of the participants behavior were not in line with the expectations people have about the behavior of mindful people.

The results suggest that mindful people are more tuned into their perceptual worlds, which is an expectation about the present moment awareness of mindful people. But, in other ways, people high in trait mindfulness were not especially socially, emotionally, or prosocially oriented. This may indicate that mindfulness measured with paper and pencil tests is not a valid indicator of actual mindful behavior. On the other hand, they may indicate that peoples expectations about the observable behavior of mindful people are incorrect.

This study is important in that it investigated actual, objectively defined behaviors by people that are expressed in their natural, everyday environments. This kind of analysis may prove to be a better actual measure of mindfulness than questionnaires and tests. It remains for future research to investigate this more thoroughly. But this study opens up a new and potentially important realm for the investigation of mindfulness.

“How often have you rushed out the door and into your day without even thinking about how you’d like things to go? Before you know it, something or someone has rubbed you the wrong way, and you’ve reacted automatically with frustration, impatience, or rage—in other words, you’ve found yourself acting in a way you never intended. You don’t have to be stuck in these patterns. Pausing to practice mindfulness for just a few minutes at different times during the day can help your days be better, more in line with how you’d like them to be.” – Parneet Pal

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

Kaplan, D. M., Raison, C. L., Milek, A., Tackman, A. M., Pace, T., & Mehl, M. R. (2018). Dispositional mindfulness in daily life: A naturalistic observation study. PloS one, 13(11), e0206029. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0206029

Abstract

Mindfulness has seen an extraordinary rise as a scientific construct, yet surprisingly little is known about how it manifests behaviorally in daily life. The present study identifies assumptions regarding how mindfulness relates to behavior and contrasts them against actual behavioral manifestations of trait mindfulness in daily life. Study 1 (N = 427) shows that mindfulness is assumed to relate to emotional positivity, quality social interactions, prosocial orientation and attention to sensory perceptions. In Study 2, 185 participants completed a gold-standard, self-reported mindfulness measure (the FFMQ) and underwent naturalistic observation sampling to assess their daily behaviors. Trait mindfulness was robustly related to a heightened perceptual focus in conversations. However, it was not related to behavioral and speech markers of emotional positivity, quality social interactions, or prosocial orientation. These findings suggest that the subjective and self-reported experience of being mindful in daily life is expressed primarily through sharpened perceptual attention, rather than through other behavioral or social differences. This highlights the need for ecological models of how dispositional mindfulness “works” in daily life, and raises questions about the measurement of mindfulness.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6261408/

Meditation Alters Brain Responses to Negative Stimuli

February 8, 2019 psyjdc Leave a comment

Meditation Alters Brain Responses to Negative Stimuli

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

“meditation facilitates strengthening the Assessment Center, weakening the unhelpful aspects of the Me Center (that can cause you to take things personally), strengthening the helpful parts of the Me Center (involved with empathy and understanding others) and changing the connections to/from the bodily sensation/fear centers such that you experience sensations in a less reactive, more balanced and holistic way. In a very real way, you literally are changing your brain for the better when you meditate.” – Rebecca Gladding

There has accumulated a large amount of research demonstrating that mindfulness has significant benefits for psychological, physical, and spiritual wellbeing. It even improves high level thinking known as executive function. Its positive effects are so widespread that it is difficult to find any other treatment of any kind with such broad beneficial effects on everything from thinking to mood and happiness to severe mental and physical illnesses. This raises the question of how mindfulness training could produce such widespread and varied benefits.

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 ability of mindfulness training to improve emotion regulation may be the basis for a wide variety of benefits that mindfulness provides to mental health.

Mindfulness practices may result in beneficial changes in the nervous system that underlie emotion regulation. The nervous system is a dynamic entity, constantly changing and adapting to the environment. It will change size, activity, and connectivity in response to experience. These changes in the brain are called neuroplasticity. Over the last decade neuroscience has been studying the effects of contemplative practices on the brain and has identified neuroplastic changes in widespread areas. In other words, mindfulness practice appears to mold and change the brain, producing psychological, physical, and spiritual benefits.

In today’s Research News article “Does Meditation Alter Brain Responses to Negative Stimuli? A Systematic Review.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6243128/ ), Magalhaes and colleagues review and summarize the published research literature on the ability of mindful practice to alter brain responses to improve the regulation of emotions especially reactions to negative events.

They identified 11 published studies that used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to assess brain responses to negative stimuli before and after mindfulness training. Six of these studies involved a comparison to a control group while five involved before after comparisons. They found that the research, in general, indicated that mindfulness training resulted in greater activation of the frontal and prefrontal cortical regions of the brain in response to negative emotion eliciting stimuli. A number of studies also identified greater activation of the insular cortical region.

These are interesting findings as the frontal and prefrontal cortical regions have been identified as involved in higher level thought processes and particularly attentional processes. This suggests that a top down, cognitive, regulation of emotion is elicited to negative stimuli. Hence, it appears that individuals, trained in mindfulness, deal with negative emotions with attention and reason, analyzing the reality of the situation, and thereby responding less intensely and more adaptively and appropriately.

The insular region has been shown to be involved in body sense, particularly interoceptive awareness of the state of the body. Its heightened response to negative stimuli after mindfulness training suggests that trained individuals have a heightened sense of how their bodies are responding to a negative emotion. Many people are unaware of their physiological reactions to emotions. By improving this internal awareness mindfulness training may make individuals better able to detect when a emotion is arising and thereby better able to regulate it.

Hence, the published research indicates that mindfulness training results in changes to the brain that improve the detection of emotional reactions and the ability to attend to and rationally process the conditions that elicited them. These neuroplastic changes to the brain may underlie the ability of mindfulness training to enhance emotion regulation in response to negative situations and thereby improve the mental health of practitioners.

“Now, as the popularity of mindfulness grows, brain imaging techniques are revealing that this ancient practice can profoundly change the way different regions of the brain communicate with each other – and therefore how we think – permanently.” – Tom Ireland

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

Magalhaes, A. A., Oliveira, L., Pereira, M. G., & Menezes, C. B. (2018). Does Meditation Alter Brain Responses to Negative Stimuli? A Systematic Review. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 12, 448. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00448

Abstract

Background: Despite several attempts to review and explain how meditation alters the brain and facilitates emotion regulation, the extent to which meditation and emotion regulation strategies share the same neural mechanisms remains unclear.

Objective: We aim to understand the influence of meditation on the neural processing of negative emotional stimuli in participants who underwent meditation interventions (naive meditators) and long-term meditators.

Methodology: A systematic review was conducted using standardized search operators that included the presence of terms related to emotion, meditation and neuro-imaging techniques in PsycInfo, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases.

Results: Searches identified 882 papers, of which 11 were eligible for inclusion. Results showed a predominance of greater prefrontal/frontal activity related to meditation, which might indicate the increased recruitment of cognitive/attentional control resources in naïve and long-term meditators. This increased frontal activity was also observed when participants were asked to simply react to negative stimuli. Findings from emotion-related areas were scarce but suggested increased insular activity in meditators, potentially indicating that meditation might be associated with greater bodily awareness.

Conclusions: Meditation practice prompts regulatory mechanisms when participants face aversive stimuli, even without an explicit request. Moreover, some studies reported increased insular activity in meditators, consistent with the hypothesis that meditation helps foster an interoceptive awareness of bodily and emotional states.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6243128/

Meditation’s Reduction of Pain is Independent of Brain Opioid Systems

February 7, 2019 psyjdc Leave a comment

Meditation’s Reduction of Pain is Independent of Brain Opioid Systems

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

“Bit by bit, as I sat noticing my breath and body sensations, I began to feel the deep knots of pain in my body start to untie themselves.” – Avi Craimer

We all have to deal with pain. It’s inevitable, but hopefully it’s mild and short lived. For a wide swath of humanity, however, pain is a constant in their lives. At least 100 million adult Americans have chronic pain conditions. The most common treatment for chronic pain is drugs. These include over-the-counter analgesics and opioids. Opioids act on a system in the brain that contains receptors that respond to these drugs. But opioids are dangerous and highly addictive. Prescription opioid overdoses kill more than 14,000 people annually. So, there is a great need to find safe and effective ways to lower the psychological distress and improve the individual’s ability to cope with the pain.

Pain involves both physical and psychological issues. The stress, fear, and anxiety produced by pain tends to elicit responses that actually amplify the pain. So, reducing the emotional reactions to pain may be helpful in pain management. There is an accumulating volume of research findings to demonstrate that mind-body therapies have highly beneficial effects on the health and well-being of humans. Mindfulness practices have been shown to improve emotion regulation producing more adaptive and less maladaptive responses to emotions. Indeed, mindfulness practices are effective in treating pain in adults. It is not known whether meditations effects on pain are mediated by the same system that responds to opioids.

In today’s Research News article “Enhancement of Meditation Analgesia by Opioid Antagonist in Experienced Meditators.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6162167/ ), May and colleagues recruited adult experienced meditators who were free of chronic pain and not taking opioid drugs. They were measured for pain responses to an electric shock delivered to the ring finger of the non-dominant hand. They rated the level of pain on a 10-point scale. The participants first rated pain under normal conditions and later while meditating. Those participants who demonstrated a 15% or more reduction in pain while meditating (meditation analgesia) participated in the second half of the experiment. Half the participants received a saline injection and half an injection of Naloxone (an opioid receptor blocker) and repeated the pain testing while meditating. In the next session the participants received either the saline or Naloxone injection that they did not receive in the first session. So, all participants received both saline and Naloxone injections and were tested for their pain sensitivity.

They found in the initial test that 85% of the participants demonstrated a 15% or more reduction in pain while meditating (meditation analgesia). This high rate suggests that meditation routinely produces a reduced experience of pain in experienced meditators. In the second phase they found that meditation analgesia was not only not reduced by Naloxone injection but actually significant increased, with larger reductions in both pain intensity and pain unpleasantness to the electric shock after Naloxone injection than after saline injections.

The opioid system of the brain is a well-established pain processing system. Its function is blocked by Naloxone. So, the reduction in pain produced by meditation was not affected by disrupting the opioid system. So, meditation analgesia must not be due to changes in this opioid system. It must be processed by a different system in the brain. The increase in meditation analgesia after Naloxone was a surprise, for which there is no viable explanation at this time. Hence, meditation reduces pain sensitivity and does so independent of the brain system that responds to opiates.

So, meditation reduces pain sensitivity independent of brain opioid systems.

“Mindfulness meditation is believed to be a viable alternative to drugs when it comes to pain management. Although research is still in the beginning phases, pilot studies focusing on the benefits of mindfulness have shown promising outcomes for patients suffering from chronic ailments such as fibromyalgia, back pain, migraines, etc.” – Mindworks

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

May, L. M., Kosek, P., Zeidan, F., & Berkman, E. T. (2018). Enhancement of Meditation Analgesia by Opioid Antagonist in Experienced Meditators. Psychosomatic medicine, 80(9), 807-813.

ABSTRACT

Objective

Studies have consistently shown that long-term meditation practice is associated with reduced pain, but the neural mechanisms by which long-term meditation practice reduces pain remain unclear. This study tested endogenous opioid involvement in meditation analgesia associated with long-term meditation practice.

Methods

Electrical pain was induced with randomized, double-blind, cross-over administration of the opioid antagonist naloxone (0.15-mg/kg bolus dose, then 0.2-mg/kg per hour infusion dose) with 32 healthy, experienced meditation practitioners and a standardized open monitoring meditation.

Results

Under saline, pain ratings were significantly lower during meditation (pain intensity: 6.41 ± 1.32; pain unpleasantness: 3.98 ± 2.17) than at baseline (pain intensity: 6.86 ±1.04, t(31) = 2.476, p = .019, Cohen’s d= 0.46; pain unpleasantness: 4.96 ±1.75, t(31) = 3.746, p = .001, Cohen’s d = 0.68), confirming the presence of meditation analgesia. Comparing saline and naloxone revealed significantly lower pain intensity (t(31) = 3.12, p = .004, d = 0.56), and pain unpleasantness (t(31) = 3.47, p = .002, d = 0.62), during meditation under naloxone (pain intensity: 5.53 ± 1.54; pain unpleasantness: 2.95 ± 1.88) than under saline (pain intensity: 6.41 ± 1.32; pain unpleasantness: 3.98 ± 2.17). Naloxone not only failed to eliminate meditation analgesia but also made meditation analgesia stronger.

Conclusions

Long-term meditation practice does not rely on endogenous opioids to reduce pain. Naloxone’s blockade of opioid receptors enhanced meditation analgesia; pain ratings during meditation were significantly lower under naloxone than under saline. Possible biological mechanisms by which naloxone-induced opioid receptor blockade enhances meditation analgesia are discussed.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6162167/

Breath Counting May Be an Objective Measure of Mindfulness

January 25, 2019January 25, 2019 psyjdc Leave a comment

Breath Counting May Be an Objective Measure of Mindfulness

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

“As its name implies, the ‘Mindfulness of Breathing’ uses the breath as an object of concentration. By focusing on the breath you become aware of the mind’s tendency to jump from one thing to another. The simple discipline of concentration brings us back to the present moment and all the richness of experience that it contains. It is a way to develop mindfulness, the faculty of alert and sensitive awareness.” – The Buddhist Centre

Mindfulness training has been shown to improve health and well-being. It has also been found to be effective for a large array of medical and psychiatric conditions, either stand-alone or in combination with more traditional therapies. As a result, mindfulness training has been called the third wave of therapies. One problem with understanding mindfulness effects is that there are, a wide variety of methods to measure mindfulness most of which involve subjective answers to questions from the practitioner. There is a need for more objective measures.

Focused attention meditation is a mindfulness training technique that involves paying attention to a single meditation object, frequently the breath, counting each in breath and each out breath. This breath following meditation practice is easy to observe and quantify with a breath counting test and may serve as an objective measure of the development of mindfulness.

In today’s Research News article “Towards an Objective Measure of Mindfulness: Replicating and Extending the Features of the Breath-Counting Task.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6153891/ ), Wong and colleagues recruited college students and had them complete a 20-minute breath counting task, a 20-minute vigilance task, and mindfulness, cognitive failures, and mind wandering questionnaires. On a second occasion the participants completed a second 20-minute breath counting task. In the breath counting task the participants pushed a button after each breath while their actual breathing was measured.

They found that 72% of the breaths were accurately counted but participants were significantly poorer during the second 10 minutes of the task than the first 10 minutes. The results of the first breath counting task were highly correlated with the results of the second, suggesting high reliability of measurement with the task. They also found that the higher the breath counting accuracy, the higher was the accuracy and the fewer the errors in the vigilance (attentional) task and the fewer the cognitive failures reported in everyday life. Finally, there was a trend toward higher breath counting accuracy being associated with higher subjective mindfulness.

These results suggest that the breath counting task may be a useful objective measure of mindfulness that has high reliability. It correlates with sustained attentional ability (vigilance) and also with subjective mindfulness. Further research is needed to determine if this is a better measure of mindfulness for use in research and therapeutic interventions. One potential way to look at this is to see if breath counting accuracy increases after mindfulness training and better predicts other outcomes of mindfulness practice.

So, breath counting may be an objective measure of mindfulness.

“Breath-counting meditation builds on controlled breathing techniques and exercises and can alleviate stress. Breath-counting meditation is one of the most basic and commonly used forms of meditation.” – Alan Elkin

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

F Wong, K., A A Massar, S., Chee, M., & Lim, J. (2018). Towards an Objective Measure of Mindfulness: Replicating and Extending the Features of the Breath-Counting Task. Mindfulness, 9(5), 1402-1410.

Abstract

Despite calls for objective measures of mindfulness to be adopted in the field, such practices have not yet become established. Recently, a breath-counting task (BCT) was proposed as a reliable and valid candidate for such an instrument. In this study, we show that the psychometric properties of the BCT are reproducible in a sample of 127 Asian undergraduates. Specifically, accuracy on the BCT was associated with everyday lapses and sustained attention, and weakly associated with subjectively measured mindfulness. BCT metrics also showed good test-retest reliability. Extending the use of the paradigm, we further found that two different types of task errors—miscounts and resets—were correlated with different aspects of cognition. Miscounts, or errors made without awareness, were associated with attentional lapses, whereas resets, or self-caught errors, were associated with mind-wandering. The BCT may be a suitable candidate for the standardized measurement of mindfulness that could be used in addition to mindfulness questionnaires.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6153891/

Improve Glaucoma with Meditation

January 22, 2019April 28, 2022 psyjdc Leave a comment

Improve Glaucoma with Meditation

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

“a relaxation program with meditation can lower IOP (intraocular pressure) in glaucoma patients and improve their quality of life by lowering stress hormones like cortisol.” – Tanuj Dada

Glaucoma is a disease of the eye that is the leading cause of blindness in people over 60 years of age, although it can occur at younger ages. It affects over 65 million people worldwide and over 3 million Americans. It involves an abnormally high pressure in the eye that if untreated produces permanent damage to the retina and the optic nerve. It often occurs without other symptoms and can only be detected with measurement of intraocular pressure. Treatments are designed to prevent further damage by lowering intraocular pressure and may involve eyedrops, drugs, laser treatment or surgery. “These therapies are costly and have ocular and systemic side effects that can adversely affect the health-related quality of life of glaucoma patients.”

Mindfulness training is known to be able to lower blood pressure. So, it is possible that meditation practice may be useful in the treatment of glaucoma. In today’s Research News article “Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Intraocular Pressure, Lowers Stress Biomarkers and Modulates Gene Expression in Glaucoma: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://eyewire.news/articles/study-meditation-an-effective-therapy-to-reduce-eye-pressure-in-primary-open-angle-glaucoma/), Dada and colleagues recruited patients with open-angle Glaucoma who were being treated with prescription eye drops and randomly assigned them to either receive a 3 week, once a day for 60 minutes, program of meditation and yogic breathing exercises or to a wait-list control condition. They were measured before and after treatment for intraocular pressure, quality of life, stress-related serum biomarkers [cortisol, β-endorphins, IL6, TNF-α, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, reactive oxygen species, total antioxidant capacity], and whole genome expression.

They found that in comparison to baseline and the wait-list control that the Glaucoma patients who meditated had significantly lower intraocular pressure and stress-related serum biomarkers and significantly improved quality of life. Additionally, meditation significantly reduced the levels of the stress hormone, cortisol levels and increased the levels of beta-endorphins and brain-derived neurotrophic factors and reduced the levels of the pro-inflammatory markers, interleukins. In addition, the greater the decrease in intraocular pressure the greater the improvements in quality of life and the stress-related serum biomarkers. These changes correlated well with gene expression profiling.

These are exciting results that suggest that meditation may be a safe and effective treatment for Glaucoma. The reduction in intraocular pressure may reduce further damage to the optic nerve and help to preserve the remaining vision of the patients. Further the reduction in stress hormones and inflammation suggests an overall improvement in the patient’s health.

Meditation appears to produce these benefits by reducing the physiological responses to stress. This makes sense as stress has been shown to be highly related to the development of Glaucoma and mindfulness practices are well known to reduce the physiological and psychological responses to stress. The authors speculate that the relaxation produced by meditation and yogic breathing exercises is responsible for the benefits. Regardless of the mechanism, the findings indicate that meditation practice may be a treatment to slow further visual degeneration and improve the lives of Glaucoma sufferers,

So, improve glaucoma with meditation.

“When scientists asked 45 glaucoma patients to try mindfulness meditation for an hour a day for three weeks they discovered that the pressure in their eyes lowered by 25 per cent compared to patients who stuck to eye drops.” Sarah Knapton

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

Dada, Tanuj, Mittal, Deepti, Mohanty, Kuldeep, Faiq, Muneeb A., Bhat, Muzaffer A., Yadav, Raj K., Sihota, Ramanjit, Sidhu, Talvir, Velpandian, Thirumurthy, Kalaivani, Mani, Pandey, Ravindra M., Gao, Ying, Sabel, Bernhard A., Dada, Rima. Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Intraocular Pressure, Lowers Stress Biomarkers and Modulates Gene Expression in Glaucoma: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Glaucoma: December 2018 – Volume 27 – Issue 12 – p 1061–1067. doi: 10.1097/IJG.0000000000001088

Background: Reducing intraocular pressure (IOP) in primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG) is currently the only approach to prevent further optic nerve head damage. However, other mechanisms such as ischemia, oxidative stress, glutamate excitotoxicity, neurotrophin loss, inflammation/glial activation, and vascular dysregulation are not addressed. Because stress is a key risk factor affecting these mechanisms, we evaluated whether mindfulness-based stress reduction can lower IOP and normalize typical stress biomarkers.

Materials and Methods: In a prospective, randomized trial 90 POAG patients (180 eyes; age above 45 y) were assigned to a waitlist control or mindfulness meditation group which practiced daily for 21 days. We measured IOP (primary endpoint), quality of life (QOL), stress-related serum biomarkers [cortisol, β-endorphins, IL6, TNF-α, brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), reactive oxygen species (ROS), total antioxidant capacity (TAC)], and whole genome expression.

Results: Between-group comparisons revealed significantly lowered IOP in meditators (OD: 18.8 to 12.7, OS 19.0 to 13.1 mm Hg) which correlated with significantly lowered stress-biomarker levels including cortisol (497.3 to 392.3 ng/mL), IL6 (2.8 to 1.5 ng/mL), TNF-α (57.1 to 45.4 pg/mL), ROS (1625 to 987 RLU/min/104 neutrophils), and elevated β-endorphins (38.4 to 52.7 pg/mL), BDNF (56.1 to 83.9 ng/mL), and TAC (5.9 to 9.3) (all P<0.001). These changes correlated well with gene expression profiling. Meditators improved in QOL (P<0.05).

Conclusions: A short course of mindfulness-based stress reduction by meditation in POAG, reduces IOP, improves QOL, normalizes stress biomarkers, and positively modifies gene expression. Mindfulness meditation can be recommended as adjunctive therapy for POAG.

https://eyewire.news/articles/study-meditation-an-effective-therapy-to-reduce-eye-pressure-in-primary-open-angle-glaucoma/

Improve Mental Health with Yoga Nidra and Meditation

December 21, 2018 psyjdc Leave a comment

Improve Mental Health with Yoga Nidra and Meditation

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

“Yoga nidra promotes deep rest and relaxation that isn’t found in your average meditation practice. The stages of body scan and breath awareness alone can be practiced to calm the nervous system, leading to less stress and better health.” – Allison Ray Jeraci

“Meditation leads to concentration, concentration leads to understanding, and understanding leads to happiness” – This wonderful quote from the modern-day sage Thich Nhat Hahn is a beautiful pithy description of the benefits of meditation practice. Meditation allows us to view our experience and not put labels on it, not make assumptions about it, not relate it to past experiences, and not project it into the future. Rather meditation lets us experience everything around and within us exactly as it is arising and falling away from moment to moment.

Meditation training has been shown to improve health and well-being. It has also been found to be effective for a large array of medical and psychiatric conditions, either stand-alone or in combination with more traditional therapies. Meditation techniques have common properties of restful attention on the present moment, but there are large differences. These differences are likely to produce different effects on the practitioner. Yoga Nidra is a deep relaxation technique where the practitioner lies on the back in a “corpse pose” and is guided through body scan and imagery into a deeply relaxed state. Meditation involves a more active and concentrated process on the part of the practitioner but also leads to relaxation. It is not known if these two different contemplative techniques have different effects on psychological health.

In today’s Research News article “The Impact of Yoga Nidra and Seated Meditation on the Mental Health of College Professors.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6134749/ ), Ferreira-Vorkapic and colleagues recruited healthy adults and randomly assigned them to either practice Yoga Nidra of meditation for 3 months, once a week for 45 minutes, or to a wait-list control. They were measured before and after training for anxiety, depression, fear, and perceived stress.

They found that in comparison to baseline and the wait-list control group, the participants who practiced either Yoga Nidra or meditation had significant reductions in anxiety, depression, fear, and perceived stress. There were no significant differences between the contemplative techniques on any of the measure of psychological health. Hence, the techniques would appear to be equally effective in improving the psychological state of the participants.

It should be mentioned that since the control condition did not receive any treatment and both treated groups had significant effects, that a subject expectancy (placebo effect), attention, of experimenter bias effects may account for the improvements. It is also possible that the techniques may produce different effects on variable that were not measured, as only negative mood states were measured and a variety of contemplative techniques have been shown to reduce anxiety, depression, fear, and perceived stress. Regardless, the present study demonstrates that the contemplative techniques of Yoga Nidra and meditation are effective in improving the psychological states of the practitioners.

So, improve mental health with Yoga Nidra and meditation.

“As you can imagine, feeling well rested is life changing, but yoga nidra also improves your overall health. A 2013 study showed that practicing yoga nidra improved anxiety, depression, and overall well-being.” – Karen Brody

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

Ferreira-Vorkapic, C., Borba-Pinheiro, C. J., Marchioro, M., & Santana, D. (2018). The Impact of Yoga Nidra and Seated Meditation on the Mental Health of College Professors. International journal of yoga, 11(3), 215-223.

Abstract

Background:

World statistics for the prevalence of anxiety and mood disorders shows that a great number of individuals will experience some type of anxiety or mood disorder at some point in their lifetime. Mind–body interventions such as Hatha Yoga and seated meditation have been used as a form of self-help therapy and it is especially useful for challenging occupations such as teachers and professors.

Aims:

In this investigation, we aimed at observing the impact of Yoga Nidra and seated meditation on the anxiety and depression levels of college professors.

Materials and Methods:

Sixty college professors, men and women, aged between 30 and 55 years were randomly allocated in one of the three experimental groups: Yoga Nidra, seated meditation, and control group. Professors were evaluated two times throughout the 3-month study period. Psychological variables included anxiety, stress, and depression.

Results:

Data analysis showed that the relaxation group presented better intragroup results in the anxiety levels. Meditation group presented better intragroup results only in the anxiety variable (physical component). Intergroup analysis showed that, except for the depression levels, both intervention groups presented better results than the control group in all other variables.

Conclusions:

Prepost results indicate that both interventions represent an effective therapeutic approach in reducing anxiety and stress levels. However, there was a tendency toward a greater effectiveness of the Yoga Nidraintervention regarding anxiety, which might represent an effective tool in reducing both cognitive and physiological symptoms of anxiety.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6134749/

Increase Pain Tolerance and Spirituality with a Brief Meditation

December 13, 2018 psyjdc Leave a comment

Increase Pain Tolerance and Spirituality with a Brief Meditation

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

“Bit by bit, as I sat noticing my breath and body sensations, I began to feel the deep knots of pain in my body start to untie themselves.” – Avi Craimer

We all have to deal with pain. It’s inevitable, but hopefully it’s mild and short lived. For a wide swath of humanity, however, pain is a constant in their lives. At least 100 million adult Americans have chronic pain conditions. The most common treatment for chronic pain is drugs. These include over-the-counter analgesics and opioids. But opioids are dangerous and highly addictive. Prescription opioid overdoses kill more than 14,000 people annually. So, there is a great need to find safe and effective ways to lower the psychological distress and improve the individual’s ability to cope with the pain.

In today’s Research News article “Spirituality in pain medicine: A randomized experiment of pain perception, heart rate and religious spiritual well-being by using a single session meditation methodology.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6128533/ ), Sollgruber and colleagues recruited adults and randomly assigned them to receive either a 20-minute guided meditation or a 20-minute relaxation. They were measured before and after the brief meditation or relaxation for symptoms of psychological disorders and spirituality, including hope, immanent, forgiveness, experience of sense and meaning, hope transcendent, general religiosity and connectedness. They were measured for perception of cold and warmth and cold and warmth pain, their threshold for pain, and their heart rate. They were also asked to rate their subjective religious faith, dimension of religious faith, dimension of spirituality and attachment to an ecclesiastical community and also stress, pain, relaxation and spirituality.

They found that the meditation group reported a greater sense of spirituality as a result of the brief meditation while both groups reported increased relaxation. The meditation group in comparison to the relaxation group also showed a greater increase in pain tolerance and intensity of heat pain. and a significant increase in religious spiritual well-being including general religiosity, forgiveness, and connectedness. These effects were of moderate effect sizes.

These are relatively remarkable results that suggest that even a one-time, very brief meditation can significantly improve pain tolerance and increase spirituality. It has been previously demonstrated that much greater amounts of meditation training decrease pain perception and increase spirituality. But, the fact that a single 20-minute meditation is sufficient to produce these changes, at least on the very short-term, is quite impressive.

The results are also impressive as they were demonstrated in comparison to a comparable relaxation control condition which produced equivalent relaxation to meditation. This suggests that it was the meditation and not simple relaxation that was responsible for the effects. Further research is needed to see if these changes endure beyond the immediate aftermath of the meditation and are applicable to patients with chronic pain.

So, increase pain tolerance and spirituality with a brief meditation

“Mindful mediation is an appealing option for treating your pain because it has an unusual benefit; it places you in a position of control. Unlike pain medications or surgical procedures, meditation is not done to you—but rather it is something you do for yourself.” – Stephanie Burke

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

Sollgruber, A., Bornemann-Cimenti, H., Szilagyi, I. S., & Sandner-Kiesling, A. (2018). Spirituality in pain medicine: A randomized experiment of pain perception, heart rate and religious spiritual well-being by using a single session meditation methodology. PloS one, 13(9), e0203336. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0203336

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate different effects on pain perception among randomly assigned volunteers practicing meditation compared to a relaxation condition. The study examines whether participants of the experimental conditions (meditation versus relaxation) differ in the change of pain perception and heart rate measurement and in religious and spiritual well-being after an intervention. Method: 147 volunteers (long-term practitioners and novices) were randomly assigned to the experimental conditions with a headphone guided 20-minute single session intervention. The change in their pre- and post-intervention pain perception was measured using Quantitative Sensory Testing and Cold Pressor Testing (CPTest), their stress-level was compared by monitoring heart rate, and their religious and spiritual well-being by using the Multidimensional Inventory for Religious/Spiritual Well-Being (MI-RSB48). Additionally, dimensions of the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) measured the psychological resilience of the participants; pain and stress experience, and the state of relaxation and spirituality experience were assessed. Five persons were excluded due to failure in measuring the heart rate and 29 participants had to be excluded because of high values on the BSI. Results: The meditation group showed an increase in their pain tolerance on the CPTest and a decrease in their pain intensity for heat after the experimental condition, in contrast to the relaxation group. Futhermore, the meditation group showed a higher level of religious spiritual well-being (MI-RSB48 Total score) as well as in the sub-dimensions General Religiosity, Forgiveness, and Connectedness after the experimental condition, compared to the relaxation group. Our data is consistent with the hypothesis that meditation increases pain tolerance and reduces pain intensity, however, further work is required to determine whether meditation contains similar implications for pain patients.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6128533/

Improve Psychological Well-Being with a Mindfulness Smartphone Ap

December 5, 2018 psyjdc Leave a comment

Improve Psychological Well-Being with a Mindfulness Smartphone Ap

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

“When it comes to building a mindfulness meditation practice, “there’s no substitute for a live connection with a teacher — and encouragement from a group or class. But for people who have already taken a class or been introduced to the basics apps are a terrific support to the process.” – Steven Hickman

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, Apps for smartphones 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. But, the question arises as to the effectiveness of these Apps in inducing mindfulness and improving psychological health.

In today’s Research News article “Improvements in Stress, Affect, and Irritability Following Brief Use of a Mindfulness-based Smartphone App: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6153897/ ), Economides and colleagues recruited meditation naïve adults on-line and randomly assigned them to practice either meditation or psychoeducation with a cellphone ap. They practiced for 10 minutes per day for 10 days. The meditation ap presented meditation instructions and guided meditations while the psychoeducation ap was structured identically but contained a presentation about the concepts of mindfulness and how an individual applied them. They were measured before and after training for stress, positive and negative emotions, and irritability.

Approximately 20% of the initial participants in both groups dropped out before completing the study. Of the completers, compared to baseline and the psychoeducation group, the participants who received the meditation training had significantly lower levels of stress and irritability, and greater levels of positive emotions. Hence, a simple meditation training with a smartphone ap produced significant improvements in psychological well-being.

These results are interesting and potentially important as they demonstrate that a simple practice guided with brief smartphone instructions can significantly improve psychological health in individuals without mental or physical illness. A strength of the study was that there was an equivalent comparison condition, psychoeducation ap, to the meditation ap. This suggests that meditation practice was responsible for the results and not some confounding factor such as participant bias, attentional effects, practice effects, experimenter bias, or expectancy effects. Hence, it appears that meditation practice via smartphone ap may be a simple, inexpensive, convenient way to spread the benefits of meditation practice to widespread populations.

So, improve psychological well-being with a mindfulness smartphone ap.

“Mindfulness based programs in person have been found to be effective for reducing stress, anxiety, and depression. However, it’s unclear if you can reap the same benefits of mindfulness programs with mobile apps. There is only one scientific study on the effectiveness of a mindfulness app . . . showed improvement in mood and fewer symptoms of depression.” – Marilyn Wei

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

This and other Contemplative Studies posts are also available at the Contemplative Studies Blog http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/

They are also available on Google+ https://plus.google.com/106784388191201299496/posts and on Twitter @MindfulResearch

Study Summary

Economides, M., Martman, J., Bell, M. J., & Sanderson, B. (2018). Improvements in Stress, Affect, and Irritability Following Brief Use of a Mindfulness-based Smartphone App: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Mindfulness, 9(5), 1584–1593. http://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-018-0905-4

Abstract

Mindfulness training, which involves observing thoughts and feelings without judgment or reaction, has been shown to improve aspects of psychosocial well-being when delivered via in-person training programs such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). Less is known about the efficacy of digital training mediums, such as smartphone apps, which are rapidly rising in popularity. In this study, novice meditators were randomly allocated to an introductory mindfulness meditation program or to a psychoeducational audiobook control featuring an introduction to the concepts of mindfulness and meditation. The interventions were delivered via the same mindfulness app, were matched across a range of criteria, and were presented to participants as well-being programs. Affect, irritability, and two distinct components of stress were measured immediately before and after each intervention in a cohort of healthy adults. While both interventions were effective at reducing stress associated with personal vulnerability, only the mindfulness intervention had a significant positive impact on irritability, affect, and stress resulting from external pressure (between group Cohen’s d = 0.44, 0.47, 0.45, respectively). These results suggest that brief mindfulness training has a beneficial impact on several aspects of psychosocial well-being, and that smartphone apps are an effective delivery medium for mindfulness training

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6153897/

Improve Cognition and Reduce Age-related Cognitive Decline with Meditation

November 30, 2018 psyjdc Leave a comment

Improve Cognition and Reduce Age-related Cognitive Decline with Meditation

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

“While we might expect our bodies and brains to follow a shared trajectory of development and degeneration over time, by actively practicing strategies such as meditation, we might actually preserve and protect our physical body and brain structure to extend our golden years and shine even more brightly in old age.” – Sonima Wellness

The aging process involves a systematic progressive decline in every system in the body, the brain included. This includes our mental abilities (cognition) which decline with age including impairments in memory, attention, and problem solving ability. It is inevitable and cannot be avoided. An encouraging new development is that mindfulness practices such as meditation training can significantly reduce these declines in cognitive ability. In addition, it has been found that mindfulness practices reduce the deterioration of the brain that occurs with aging restraining the loss of neural tissue. Indeed, the brains of practitioners of meditation and yoga have been found to degenerate less with aging than non-practitioners.

Most studies of age-related decline are cross-sectional, comparing groups of different ages. In today’s Research News article “Cognitive Aging and Long-Term Maintenance of Attentional Improvements Following Meditation Training.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41465-018-0068-1 ), Zanesco and colleagues perform a longitudinal analysis, following participants for up to 7 years to investigate the effects of a meditation retreat on cognitive ability.

They recruited experienced meditators and randomly assigned them to either a wait-list control condition or to receive a 3-month intensive meditation retreat. After completion of the first retreat, the wait-list control participants received the 3-month meditation retreat. All participants were measured before, during, and after the retreat and 6 months, and 1.5 and 7 years later with a response inhibition task. In this task, participants were asked to respond when a long line is present and not respond when an infrequent short line was presented. This task measures high level thinking including attention, response inhibition, discrimination, and vigilance.

They found that during and following the retreat there were large significant improvements in perceptual discrimination, response inhibition, vigilance, and response time variance as measured in the response inhibition task. Importantly, these improvements were maintained for as much as 7 years after the completion of the retreat. Overall, older participants had age-related declines in accuracy. But, older participants who reported large amounts of continued meditation practice, did not have declines.

This study documents that the effects of a 3-month intensive meditation retreat on cognitive ability are large and lasting. In addition, they demonstrate that age-related declines in cognitive performance can be prevented by continued meditation practice. In this study, these effects were observed longitudinally, in the same individuals over time, supplementing the previous findings with cross-sectional studies of groups of individuals of different ages. This suggests that the loss of high-level thought ability does not necessarily inevitably have to decline as we age. It can be improved and sustained with meditation practice.

So, improve cognition and reduce age-related cognitive decline with meditation.

“What we do know is that long-term engagement in mindfulness meditation may enhance cognitive performance in older adults, and that with persistent practice, these benefits may be sustained. That’s great news for the millions of aging adults working to combat the negative effects of aging on the brain.” – B. grace Bullock

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

Zanesco, A.P., King, B.G., MacLean, K.A. et al. Cognitive Aging and Long-Term Maintenance of Attentional Improvements Following Meditation Training. J Cogn Enhanc (2018) 2: 259. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41465-018-0068-1

Abstract

Sustained attention is effortful, demanding, and subject to limitations associated with age-related cognitive decline. Researchers have sought to examine whether attentional capacities can be enhanced through directed mental training, with a number of studies now offering evidence that meditation practice may facilitate generalized improvements in this domain. However, the extent to which attentional gains are maintained following periods of dedicated meditation training and how such improvements are moderated by processes of aging have yet to be characterized. In a prior report (Sahdra et al., Emotion 11, 299–312, 2011), we examined attentional performance on a sustained response inhibition task before, during, and after 3-months of full-time meditation. We now extend this prior investigation across additional follow-up assessments occurring up to 7 years after the conclusion of training. Performance improvements observed during periods of intensive practice were partially maintained several years later. Importantly, aging-related decrements in measures of response inhibition accuracy and reaction time variability were moderated by levels of continued meditation practice across the follow-up period. The present study is the first to offer evidence that intensive and continued meditation practice is associated with enduring improvements in sustained attention and response inhibition, with the potential to alter longitudinal trajectories of cognitive change across the lifespan.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41465-018-0068-1

Improve Diabetes with Meditation

November 28, 2018April 28, 2022 psyjdc Leave a comment

Improve Diabetes with Meditation

By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.

“As a therapist who works primarily with people with diabetes, I have found that those who have a deeper understanding of themselves and have the ability to cope well with stressful life events simply live better with diabetes, both in terms of diabetes control and general quality of life.” – Joseph Nelson

Diabetes is a major health issue. It is estimated that 30 million people in the United States and nearly 600 million people worldwide have diabetes and the numbers are growing. Diabetes is heavily associated with other diseases such as cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, stroke, blindness, kidney disease, and circulatory problems leading to amputations. As a result, diabetes doubles the risk of death of any cause compared to individuals of the same age without diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes is a common and increasingly prevalent illness that is largely preventable. One of the reasons for the increasing incidence of Type 2 Diabetes is its association with overweight and obesity which is becoming epidemic in the industrialized world. A leading cause of this is a sedentary life style. Unlike Type I Diabetes, Type II does not require insulin injections. Instead, the treatment and prevention of Type 2 Diabetes focuses on diet, exercise, and weight control. Recently, mindfulness practices have been shown to be helpful in managing diabetes. There is a need for further research into this promising approach to the treatment of patients with diabetes.

In today’s Research News article “Mind–Body Interactions and Mindfulness Meditation in Diabetes.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5954593/ ), Priya and Kalra review and summarize the published research literature on the effectiveness of meditation-based practices for patients with diabetes. They report that the research found that meditation produces changes to the brain areas that reduce the physiological and psychological responses to stress and this improves emotion regulation and coping responses to the disease and overall feelings of well-being.

They report that in diabetes patients, meditation-based treatments have been found to improve the psychological state of the patients including improved mood and reduced psychological distress, anxiety, and depression and increased self-care behaviors. These treatments also appear to improve the diabetes patient’s physiological state including lower weight and waist circumference, improved glycemic control, and improved cardiovascular health, including blood pressure, heart rate variability, and vascular resistance.

Hence, the published research indicates that meditation-based practices are safe and effective treatments for diabetes patients. “To summarise, mindfulness interventions have demonstrated impact on a broad range of outcomes relating to all domains of holistic care in diabetes – biological, psychological and also social” (Priya and Kalra, 2018).

So, improve diabetes with meditation.

“Exercise trains the body and meditation train the mind. Many people with diabetes find meditation is a good way to reduce stress, lower blood sugar levels, lower blood pressure readings and minimize pain. Regular meditation should become an important part of your diabetes self-management program.” – Roberta Kleinman

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

Priya, G., & Kalra, S. (2018). Mind–Body Interactions and Mindfulness Meditation in Diabetes. European Endocrinology, 14(1), 35–41. http://doi.org/10.17925/EE.2018.14.1.35

Abstract

Diabetes is associated with significant psychological distress. It is, therefore, important to ensure the physical and emotional as well as psychosocial wellbeing of individuals living with diabetes. Meditation-based strategies have been evaluated for their complementary role in several chronic disorders including depression, anxiety, obesity, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The practice of meditation is associated with reduction in stress and negative emotions and improvements in patient attitude, health-related behaviour and coping skills. There is increased parasympathetic activity with reduction in sympathetic vascular tone, stress hormones and inflammatory markers. Additionally, several studies evaluated the role of mindfulness-based stress reduction in diabetic individuals and demonstrated modest improvements in body weight, glycaemic control and blood pressure. Thus, mindfulness meditation-based intervention can lead to improvements across all domains of holistic care – biological, psychological and social. Though most of these studies have been of short duration and included small numbers of patients, meditation strategies can be useful adjunctive techniques to lifestyle modification and pharmacological management of diabetes and help improve patient wellbeing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5954593/