Control Inflammation with Mind-Body Practices

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When the body is confronted with damage, invasion of foreign material, or an unwanted virus it immediately sends out an alarm and recruits all of the body’s resources to fight off the potential damage. This is called the inflammatory response. It can be elicited by a myriad of different stimuli including a bug bite, a splinter, a virus infection, a bruise, or a broken bone. The inflammatory response dispatches cells and chemicals to the site to isolate and  repair the damage. This is a key part of the body’s defense system, an indispensable protective response of self-defense.

To some extent the inflammatory response is an overreaction. The body triggers all of the resources and processes to defend itself until it can identify the precise problem and the targeted solution. This overreaction recruits mechanisms that are not needed and can actually be damaging. Paradoxically, the inflammatory response may produce tissue damage while it is engaged in healing and repair. But, the body’s logic is to get to the problem immediately with everything it has to insure survival first and deal with the consequences later. This is called acute inflammation and is short-lived, lasting only a few days.

If the inflammation continues for a longer period of time, it is termed as chronic inflammation and can last for weeks, months, or beyond. It is when inflammation is chronic that it becomes a major health problem. It can damage the tissues of the body producing or exacerbating disease. Inflammation may play a role in such diverse disorders as Alzheimer disease, meningitis, atherosclerosis, cystic fibrosis, asthma, cirrhosis of the liver, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), diabetes, osteoporosis, and even psoriasis.

Obviously, there is a need to have balance in the inflammatory response such that it deals with emergencies but stays restrained when no emergency is present. In today’s Research News article “Mind–body therapies and control of inflammatory biology: A descriptive review.”

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Bower and Irwin review the literature on the effectiveness of mind-body therapies such as Tai Chi, yoga, and meditation on restraining chronic inflammation. They concluded that mind-body therapies worked to help balance the inflammatory response at the gene level. They decreased the expression of inflammation-related genes and reduced pro-inflammatory signaling.

Mind-body techniques are known to have beneficial effects on health (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/why-is-mindfulness-so-beneficial/).  Bower and Irwin’s results suggest one of the mechanisms by which they produce these benefits, by helping to balance the inflammatory response, making it a useful defense against inflection while restraining its potentially damaging effects.

So, engage in mind-body practices, control damaging inflammation, and improve health.

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Eat Mindfully for Obesity

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Obesity has become an epidemic in the industrialized world. In the U.S. the incidence of obesity, defined as a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or above has more than doubled over the last 35 years to currently around 35% of the population. Although the incidence rates have appeared to stabilize, the fact that over a third of the population is considered obese is very troubling.

It is troubling because of the health consequences of obesity. Obesity has been found to shorten life expectancy by eight years and extreme obesity by 14 years. This is because obesity is associated with cardiovascular problems such as coronary heart disease and hypertension, stroke, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, and others. Obviously there is a need for effective treatments to prevent or treat obesity. But, despite copious research and a myriad of dietary and exercise programs, there still is no safe and effective treatment.

Mindfulness is known to be associated with lower risk for obesity (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/eat-mindfully-and-have-a-healthier-weight/). This suggests that mindfulness training may be an effective treatment for overeating and obesity. In today’s Research News article “Mindfulness-Based Interventions for Obesity-Related Eating Behaviors: A Literature Review”

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4046117/

O’Reilly and colleagues reviewed the published research on mindfulness interventions for obesity related eating behaviors. They concluded that the research demonstrates that mindfulness based interventions are effective for reducing the incidence of some obesity related behaviors that lead to overeating; binge eating, emotional eating, and external eating.

Binge eating disorder involves regularly eating far more food than most people would in a similar time period under similar circumstances and feeling that eating is out of control. It’s the most common eating disorder and is estimated to affect 2.8 million U.S. adults of which 70% are obese. The reviewed research indicates that mindfulness based interventions had large, clinically significant effects.

Emotional eating involves the consumption of food in response to emotions and external eating involves eating in response to the stimuli that are associated with food such as the sight, smell, and taste of food. Both of these eating patterns are associated with overweight and both are effectively reduced with mindfulness based interventions.

One way that mindfulness appears to have its effects on eating results from mindfulness improving emotion regulation. It has been well demonstrated that mindfulness improves the individual’s ability to regulate their emotions, reducing their intensity and responding more effectively and appropriately to them. So, the individual feels the emotion mindfully and then responds not by eating but by responding in a way more appropriate to the actual emotion.

Mindfulness also appears to affect eating by making the individual more sensitive to their internal state of hunger and satiety. By improving present moment awareness, mindfulness helps the individual be more in touch with the sensations from their body. This makes them more sensitive to their state of hunger and satiety, responding to these appropriate stimuli for eating and stopping eating. This then reduces mindless eating to emotions and food cues.

These findings are important and suggest that mindfulness based interventions may be useful in the treatment and prevention of obesity.

So, be mindful and control your eating.

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Alter Your Thinking with Meditation for Mental Health

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Meditation has been shown to have significant promise as a treatment for a variety of mental illnesses, including depression (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/dealing-with-major-depression-when-drugs-fail/), obsessive compulsive disorder (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/mindfully-improve-psychological-wellbeing/), and worrying (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/stop-worrying/). It is known that one mechanism by which meditation works is by improving emotion regulation, making the individual better able to control and deal with emotions. Meditation also produces cognitive (thought) changes that appear to assist in improving mental challenges.

In today’s Research News article “Common Factors of Meditation, Focusing, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Longitudinal Relation of Self-Report Measures to Worry, Depressive, and Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms Among Nonclinical Students.”

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4432024/

Sugiura and colleagues investigate how these cognitive effects of meditation might work to improve the symptoms of worry, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. They studied five psychological states affected by meditation, refraining from catastrophic thinking, logical objectivity, self-observation, acceptance, and detached coping.

They found that detached coping was associated with a decrease in both depressive and obsessive compulsive symptoms. Detached coping is a cognitive skill involving detachment and distancing from external events. This is cultivated by meditation in developing non-judgmental awareness of what is transpiring in the present moment. This allows the individual to simply observe what is happening around them without becoming identified with the events, which then are taken much less personally and thereby have a much smaller impact on depression and obsessions and compulsions.

Sugiura and colleagues also found that refraining from catastrophic thinking was associated with a decrease in worrying. Refraining from catastrophic thinking involves cognitive skills to analyze and reinterpret negative thoughts. This effect was meditated by negative beliefs about worrying, where refraining from catastrophic thinking is associated with fewer and less intense negative beliefs about worrying which in turn was associated with reduced worrying. Worrying about worrying is a problem in that it tends to intensify worrying. By reducing the negative beliefs about worrying meditation interrupts this process disabling the worrying about worrying. In this way meditation helps reduce worrying.

These findings indicate that, of the cognitive (thought) processes that are affected by meditation detached coping and refraining from catastrophic thinking are particularly important for relief of symptoms of troubling mental conditions. Both of these cognitive processes involve distancing the individual from the events and thoughts about the events that occur. This suggests that distancing attitudes are useful for long-term reduction of various psychological symptoms. It further emphasizes the importance of the non-judgmental observing that is cultivated by meditation.

So, meditate, improve non-judgmental observing, and improve mental health.

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

 

Control Weight in Diabetes with Yoga

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“The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move, yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.” – David Suzuki

Type 2 diabetes is a common and increasingly prevalent illness that is largely preventable. Although this has been known as adult-onset diabetes it is increasingly being diagnosed in children. It is estimated that 30 million people in the United States have diabetes and the numbers are growing. 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.

Diabetes is the 7th leading cause of death in the United States. In addition, 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.

A leading cause of Type II Diabetes is overweight and obesity and a sedentary life style. Hence, treatment and prevention of Type II Diabetes focuses on diet, exercise, and weight control. Yoga would appear to be an excellent potential treatment for Type II Diabetes as it is both an exercise and a help in weight control (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/heart-healthy-yoga/).

In today’s Research News article “Yoga: Managing overweight in mid-life T2DM”

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4481745/

Tikhe and colleagues tested the effects of a 7-day integrated approach of yoga therapy (IAYT) on patients with Type II Diabetes. They found that the program resulted in a significant loss in weight and body mass index (BMI), resting metabolism, and body fat.

Yoga appears to be a potential safe and effective treatment for Type II Diebetes. In addition yoga is known to strengthen the immune system (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/healthy-balance-through-yoga/) making the individual less susceptible to infection, helping to ward of potential secondary consequences of diabetes. These are exciting results that need to be confirmed in a large controlled trial. Many treatments for disease are not well tolerated by the patient and compliance becomes a huge issue. But, yoga is generally enjoyed and compliance rates, when administered properly, can be very high. So, yoga would appear to have advantages over other treatments.

So, practice yoga and control weight.

“Diabetes is a great example whereby, giving the patient the tools, you can manage yourself very well.” – Clayton Christensen

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

Prayer helps Cancer Patients

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“Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Depression affects approximately 15% to 25% of cancer patients. This is not surprising as a diagnosis of cancer can cause a number of patients to become depressed. The problem is, though, that depression can affect the course of the disease, with mortality rates 25% to 39% higher in cancer patients who are also depressed. So it would appear that the two are linked such that cancer diagnosis can induce depression and depression can reduce the prognosis for recovery.

Many cancer patients pray to help cope with the disease, but it is not known if prayer is in any way affective in helping the patients with either depression or with dealing with cancer and its treatment. In today’s Research News article “Types of prayer and depressive symptoms among cancer patients: the mediating role of rumination and social support”

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4183194/

John Perez and colleagues investigated the relationship between different kinds of prayer and depression in cancer patients and find that certain types of prayer are associated with lower depression in these patients.

They investigated eight different types of prayer—adoration, confession, reception, supplication, thanksgiving, prayer for one’s physical health, prayer for emotional strength, and prayer for others’ well-being. They found that more adoration prayer, reception prayer, thanksgiving prayer, and prayer for the well-being of others the lower the level of depression.

In looking deeper at the pattern of results they determined that prayers of thanksgiving acted by decreasing ruminative self-focused attention which in turn reduced depression. It would make sense that prayer that helped focus the patient on what they are thankful for in life would result in an increase in positive emotions and a decrease in the time spent ruminating about the cancer, leading to lower depression.

They also found that that prayer for the well-being of others was directly associated with lower depression and indirectly by being positively related to social support which is in turn associated with reduced depression. Praying for others directs attention away from the patient toward the problems of others. This can help provide a perspective on their problems with cancer and thereby reduce the depression. People who are thinking of the well-being of others tend to be better cared about and liked by others. The increase in the social support for them may follow. If someone cares about others, others care about them.

Reception and adoration prayer are both forms of contemplative prayer which is a form of meditation. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to improve the negative psychological issues that can go along with a cancer diagnosis http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/tackle-cancer-with-mindfulness/. So engaging in these forms of prayer may work through the same mechanism as meditation in improving the mood of cancer patients.

Hence it appears that the common response of cancer patients to pray is more than just an expression of religious faith. It has a positive impact on the patient’s psychological well-being which is known to improve the prognosis for recovery.

So, pray when cancer is diagnosed, reduce depression, and increase survival chances.

CMCS

 

What’s Right about Being Wrong

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“To make mistakes or be wrong is human. To admit those mistakes shows you have the ability to learn, and are growing wiser.” ― Donald L. Hicks

As humans we fear being wrong. Making a mistake is seen as weakness, as a lack of understanding, as not paying sufficient attention to the task, as not trying hard enough, as a lack of ability, or possibly as lack of foresight. In other words we tend to see being wrong as a negative reflection on ourselves. As a result making a mistake lowers our self-esteem and reinforces the western disease of low self-worth.

The fear of being wrong can produce a paralysis where we would rather do nothing than risk making an error. It produces automatic, tried and true, decision making, minimizing risk.

It inhibits creativity as it is seen as too risky and likely to produce an error.

On the other side of the coin we try too hard to make sure that we are right. We tend to go along with the crowd to win their approval. We shift the blame for an error to others. We defend ourselves constantly and thereby fail to investigate carefully what occurred. All of this leads to poor but safe performance that preserves our self-esteem at the cost of being mediocre. “Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong” ― Kathryn Schulz

But “to err is human.” We all make mistakes. I like to say that if you’re not making mistakes then you’re not trying hard enough. If we’re not making mistakes then we are not learning anything new. Scientists know this well. Science advances when theories are shown to be wrong not when they’ve been supported. We learn nothing new when we interact with people and all of us act predictably. We only learn new things about our fellow humans when someone does something that we didn’t expect. Then we have to revise our thinking. We learn something new.

True creativity involves risk. It involves doing, seeing, or saying something that hasn’t been done, seen, or said before. Since, it’s never been tried, it is just as likely to be wrong as to be right. In some ways, making mistakes is a sign of creativity, of thinking “out of the box.” “To live a creative life we must first lose the fear of being wrong.” ― Joseph Chilton Pearce

Mistakes are much more informative than being correct. The latter only reinforces what you already know while the former gives us information to craft new understanding. In a sense there’s a lot right with being wrong. But first we must lose our fear of it.

One of the benefits of contemplative practice is that it allows us to view our activities with less fear and more understanding. It can help us laugh at ourselves. It can assist us in understanding that making a mistake doesn’t mean we’re not worth much. To the contrary it means we’re trying. It means were working at making things better. It means that we’re a contributor to our life and the lives of others. We should be proud when we fail and yell out “Eureka, I’ve learned.”

So, attack life with individuality, zest, and creativity and relish your mistakes as wonderful learning opportunities.

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Control Blood Pressure with Meditation

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“Maintaining good control of glucose and hypertension high blood pressure limits morbidity and mortality.” – Stuart Weiss

High Blood pressure (hypertension) affects about 1/3 (70 million) of American adults. Hypertension is associated with heart disease, stroke, and kidney disease. It is sometimes called a silent killer as there are rarely any overt symptoms and the individual may not be aware of the condition. Yet it is estimated to be responsible for about 360,000 deaths a year in the U.S.

Hypertension is more prevalent in African American populations particularly in association with kidney disease. African Americans are four times more likely than Caucasians to develop kidney disease. Drugs are the treatment of choice for hypertension. But they have many adverse side effects. On drugs the individual feels terrible. Without them they feel fine. As a result compliance is a major problem and large numbers of people stop taking their medications.

Obviously, there is a need to develop a safe and effective treatment for hypertension. Elevated sympathetic activity is known to be characteristic of hypertension particularly in association with kidney disease. Mindfulness meditation is known to reduce this activity of the sympathetic nervous system and is known to reduce the effects of stress. In addition, meditation has been shown to reduce blood pressure in normal and hypertensive individuals. So, meditation may be a useful technique for the control of hypertension in patients with kidney disease.

In today’s Research News article “Mindfulness meditation lowers muscle sympathetic nerve activity and blood pressure in African-American males with chronic kidney disease.”

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4080275/

Park and colleagues test the application of a brief mindfulness meditation on hypertension in African American patients with kidney disease. They found that a single session of guided mindfulness meditation with these patients lowered blood pressure and heart rate. This was found to be associated with a reduction in the activity of the sympathetic nervous system. They also demonstrated that the effects were not due to the reduced rate of breathing that occurs in meditation.

It should be noted that this study only looked at very short term effects and there is a need to observe whether meditation could be used over the long-term for control of hypertension. But, the findings suggest that meditation may be a safe and effective treatment for hypertension in African American patients with kidney disease. Since, long-term meditation has been repeatedly shown to produce persistent relaxation and reduce the effects of stress on the individual, it is likely that meditation would continue to be effective in these patients.

So, meditate and keep your blood pressure under control.

CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies

 

Regulate Emotions with Mindfulness

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“Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.”  ― Jean Racine

Difficulties with emotions are at the heart of the majority of mental health problems. Depression, anxiety disorders, panic disorders etc. afflict hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Unregulated emotions create suffering for the individual and their families and can occasionally result in suicide. Mental health is estimated to account for nearly half of all health care spending worldwide. It accounts for the lion’s share of prescription drug use. But, the medications don’t always work, are costly, and frequently have troubling side effects. Needless to say finding safe and effective ways to deal with out of control emotions is badly needed.

Mindfulness practice has taken center stage in the psychological treatments for mental health problems in what has been called the third wave of therapies. This has resulted from the accumulating evidence of the effectiveness of mindfulness practices for a myriad of mental health issues. Mindfulness is a natural low cost method, with very few side effects, for dealing with a variety difficult psychological issues including those that involve difficult unregulated emotional states.

One of the ways that mindfulness appears to be effective in treatment is through increasing the individual’s ability to regulate emotions. That doesn’t mean that it eliminates emotions. To the contrary mindfulness brings emotions into full awareness. But, in doing so the magnitude and the impact of the emotions is mitigated. As a result individuals are better able to respond effectively to the emotions with reason and compassion. Mindfulness improves emotional intelligence http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/be-smart-about-emotions/.

In previous posts we discussed how mindfulness meditation increases emotion regulation by altering the activity of the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and parahippocampal gyrus (see  http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/mindfully-get-a-grip/ and http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/18/control-thinking-and-feeling-with-mindfulness/.)

In today’s Research News article “Baseline and Strategic Effects behind Mindful Emotion Regulation: Behavioral and Physiological Investigation”

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Grecucci and colleagues explore the mechanism by which mindfulness practice improves emotion regulation. They found that emotions could be regulated by either of three strategies, mindfulness meditation, or a cognitive strategy where the reason for the emotion evoked by others is reevaluated, or by mindful detachment where the individual simply views the situation and the feelings with an attitude of acceptance and lack of judgment. All of these strategies were successful in reducing emotional and physiological reactivity.

When they had meditators apply the cognitive and the detachment strategies they found that the meditators did even better when employing the detachment strategy but not when they employed the cognitive strategy. It has been previously shown that mindfulness improves cognitive reappraisal of emotions http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/rethink-your-emotions/. These results suggest that mindfulness improves emotion regulation through both cognitive reappraisal and by mindful detachment, but that mindful detachment is the more important of the two. Mindful detachment allows the individual to simply view and not judge the situation and the emotions evoked and thereby react reasonably and effectively.

So, be mindful, view emotions with nonjudgmental detachment, and regulate your emotions.

“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” ― Oscar Wilde

CMCS

 

This is the Brain on Meditation – Major Depressive Disorder

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Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a severe mood disorder that includes mood dysregulation and cognitive impairment. It is estimated that 16 million adults in the U.S. (6.9% of the population suffered from major depression in the past year and affects females (8.4%) to a great extent than males (5.2%). It is second-leading cause of disability in the world following heart disease.

The usual treatment of choice for MDD is drug treatment. In fact, it is estimated that 10% of the U.S. population is taking some form of antidepressant medication. But a substantial proportion of patients (~40%) do not respond to drug treatment. In addition the drugs can have nasty side effects. So, there is need to explore other treatment options. Mindfulness meditation is a safe alternative that has been shown to be effective for major depressive disorder even in individuals who do not respond to drug treatment. (see http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/dealing-with-major-depression-when-drugs-fail/ ).

In today’s Research News article “The effect of body-mind relaxation meditation induction on major depressive disorder: A resting-state fMRI study”

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Chen and colleagues explore potential brain mechanisms for meditation effects on depression. They observed neural activity in patients with MDD before and after a mindfulness meditation exercise. They observed decreased activity in the frontal pole and increased connectivity between the right side dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (r-dmPFC) and both the left side dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (l-dlPFC) and the left side orbitofrontal cortex (l-OFC).

The frontal pole area of the brain has been shown to be heavily involved in evaluation, monitoring, or manipulation of internally generated information, basically thinking without an external referent. One of the characterizing features of depression is rumination, which is a repetitive thought pattern involving worry about past troublesome events. Hence rumination comprises negative internal thoughts without external referents. This has the effect of amplifying the depression as worry about depression produces more depression which produces worry about the depression, etc. So, decreased activity of the frontal pole would signal that after meditation there is a reduced tendency for rumination. This suggests that meditation may in part reduce depressive symptoms by reducing frontal pole meditated rumination.

The increased connectivity between the r-dmPFC and both the l-dlPFC and the (l-OFC is significant as these areas have been implicated in cognitive reappraisal, a strategy to regulate emotions by reinterpreting their meaning from a negative interpretation to a more positive one. For example rather than the feeling surrounding an emotion signaling that the individual is upset and unhappy, it is reinterpreted to mean that the individual is sensitive and empathetic toward other people. So, meditation by improving communications between these areas helps the individual to better and more positively interpret the feeling that they’re experiencing, moving them away from thoughts about depression toward thoughts about more uplifting characteristics.

Hence it appears that even a brief meditation practice can alter the activity of the brain in such a way as to relieve depression.

So, meditate and induce your brain to relieve depression.

CMCS

Have a Healthy Relationship with Mindfulness

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Relationships can be challenging especially when one partner has medical needs that need to be provided by the spouse. This puts great strain on a relationship and engenders a wide range of emotional responses from compassion, to guilt, to anger, to depression.

In a previous post we discussed how mindfulness training can be employed to help relieve pain http://contemplative-studies.org/wp/index.php/2015/07/17/mindfulness-the-pain-killer/. But, how does mindfulness affect pain in a social environment? In particular, can mindfulness in a caregiver make it easier to assist a chronic pain patient? In today’s Research News article “Spousal Mindfulness and Social Support in Couples with Chronic Pain”

https://www.facebook.com/ContemplativeStudiesCenter/photos/a.628903887133541.1073741828.627681673922429/1070466376310621/?type=1&theater

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4013202/

Williams and colleagues explore this very question and find that spouses with high mindfulness were better caregivers.

When a spouse was high in mindful non-judging and non-reacting they were much less likely to meet a spouses behavior with negative responses. Spouses who mindfully act with awareness are perceived by the pain patient as more responsive, providing more support, and less negative. These characteristics are very important for maintaining a positive and supportive environment. Hence, the spouse’s mindfulness has a big impact on their ability to maintain an atmosphere conducive to effective assistance with chronic pain. It is always good to have empirical evidence, but the results here are not surprising. They fit with how mindful people act in general. They are more positive, empathetic, less critical and handle stress better.

Mindfulness has been shown to increase emotion regulation, the ability to feel emotions fully and to effectively respond to them. A spousal relationship, especially when taxed by one partner having a medical condition, can be full of emotion. For a healthy relationship these emotions must not be denied or suppressed but fully felt yet without allowing them to produce behaviors that would make things worse. This emotion regulation characteristic of mindful individuals may underlie why they can be effective caregivers.

Another stress of caring for a chronically ill person is that the caregiver can perceive the future negatively. It would be easy to catastrophize, by seeing things to be bad and getting worse leading to an intolerable situation. This could lead to a feeling of hopelessness. In addition, the interactions with the ill spouse can then be colored by the vision of a terrible future. Mindfulness, by focusing the caregiving spouse on the present moment and appreciating what is right in front of him/her can mitigate catastrophizing. This has been well documented in the research literature. This obviously would lead to better interactions and more effective caregiving.

Finally, caregiving can be very stressful. This can lead to negative emotions and can be detrimental to the caregiving spouse’s health. Since mindfulness training has been well documented to reduce responses to stress, both emotional and physical, the impact of the stress on the mindful spouse would be mitigated.

So, be mindful and have a better relationship even when your spouse is ill.

CMCS