Depression is becoming one of the main causes of ill health in the western world, but hope is on the horizon.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is emerging as an effective way of helping people with depression to help themselves.
What is Mindfulness?
MBCT is a form of cognitive therapy that uses mindfulness techniques, including meditation, to help people become aware of how they are thinking and the affect this is having on their life.
Researchers have found that people who suffer depression are more likely to judge themselves harshly if they are feeling sad or lonely. This leads to a vicious cycle, which can spiral into a major depressive episode.
Mindfulness has its origins in the Buddhist tradition. It is a form of meditation that involves learning to live in the present moment without judging or reacting.
It was adapted as a way of reducing stress by Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn at the Massachusetts Medical Centre in 1995 and has since been tentatively embraced by western medicine.
The main challenge has been a lack of scientific evidence, but that is changing. A recent study by a Canadian University and published in the prestigious journal ‘Neuropsychiatry’ (2011), found that MBCT is an effective complement to existing approaches in preventing relapse in some people who have suffered depression.
How Can Mindfulness Help Treat Depression?
Mindfulness involves learning to meditate in a way that can be extended into everyday life. For treating depression it involves becoming more aware of how negative thought patterns and low moods impede wellbeing.
Most people are not aware that they habitually fall into these patterns, and if they are they don’t know the way through them.
Through meditation practice people can realise the thoughts and feelings can be there but they don’t need to get involved with them or get carried away by them. This can be extremely liberating.
The experience of meditation allows people to experience thoughts as just thoughts, as mental events that come and go.
Rather than struggle with the negative thoughts, mindfulness teaches practitioners how to let them go along their merry way while remaining focused on whatever is going on in the present moment. It is the stepping back, rather than suppressing the thoughts, which allows practitioners to notice them but not identify so strongly with them.
Researchers have found that trying to suppress thoughts actually increases them because the more people try, and fail, to suppress or challenge negative thoughts, the more the thoughts persist and the more incompetent people feel. To experience this, try not thinking of a white bear.
The same goes for a low mood. The more people struggle with a bad mood, the worse they can end up feeling. Mindfulness meditation teaches people to let their mood be what it is, to acknowledge it, and to let it run its natural course, which it usually does.
Because our minds are constantly changing letting things be as they are, means being aware that things will eventually change. It also teaches us to be more gentle and kind towards ourselves and this in itself can be uplifting and healing.
Ready to give mindfulness a try? Find a meditation or cognitive therapy practitioner in your local area.
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