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Thread: Can "Mindfulness" Help You?

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    Can "Mindfulness" Help You?

    To some, it may seen eastern hippie dippie stuff, but it's not. Dr. Jon Kabat Zinn is a western trained scientist who has brought the concepts of mindfulness (via meditation, lectures, and other modalities) to the mainstream, has published studies on its beneficial effects, and has the support of many within the medical community. Be you a vet, a housewife, or stressed out business man, this is information that could be very helpful. This vid does a nice job on the "big picture" of it and it's beginnings, and his first book Full Catastrophe Living is a good place to start for those interested. For some, this can be life changing info.


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    I've tried mindfulness techniques and it definitely helps. It's hard for me to stick to (just as any routine like exercise can be) but when I do I'm less stressed out, sleep better and have more energy.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Slippin' Jimmy View Post
    I've tried mindfulness techniques and it definitely helps. It's hard for me to stick to (just as any routine like exercise can be) but when I do I'm less stressed out, sleep better and have more energy.
    It is hard, far more difficult than you appreciate until you try it, then you see just how much the mind resists it and how helpful it can be.
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    I'm a huge fan of mindfulness and EI/EQ concepts. Great topic.
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    Quote Originally Posted by ST911 View Post
    I'm a huge fan of mindfulness and EI/EQ concepts. Great topic.
    Been trying to "work" on this more myself, but as you know, it may be simple, but it's far from easy. What's your approach and what/who have you found useful? I like Zinn because he's a legit scientist who's made the concepts more approachable for science minded/objective thinkers like myself, and less mystical eastern swami stuff that many are turned off by. He's the guy (for me) who seems to have made that east meets west jump without mystical hoopla.
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    .....
    Last edited by Waylander; 03-03-16 at 20:32.

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    Last edited by Waylander; 02-01-16 at 21:45.

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    Good bump for this thread regarding a new study of interest:

    How Meditation Changes the Brain and Body.

    The benefits of mindfulness meditation, increasingly popular in recent years, are supposed to be many: reduced stress and risk for various diseases, improved well-being, a rewired brain. But the experimental bases to support these claims have been few. Supporters of the practice have relied on very small samples of unrepresentative subjects, like isolated Buddhist monks who spend hours meditating every day, or on studies that generally were not randomized and did not include placebo* control groups.

    This month, however, a study published in Biological Psychiatry brings scientific thoroughness to mindfulness meditation and for the first time shows that, unlike a placebo, it can change the brains of ordinary people and potentially improve their health.

    To meditate mindfully demands ‘‘an open and receptive, nonjudgmental awareness of your present-moment experience,’’ says J. David Creswell, who led the study and is an associate professor of psychology and the director of the Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. One difficulty of investigating meditation has been the placebo problem. In rigorous studies, some participants receive treatment while others get a placebo: They believe they are getting the same treatment when they are not. But people can usually tell if they are meditating. Dr. Creswell, working with scientists from a number of other universities, managed to fake mindfulness.

    http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/0...rsm=Email&_r=0

    Study:

    Alterations in Resting State Functional Connectivity Link Mindfulness Meditation With Reduced Interleukin-6: A Randomized Controlled Trial
    J.biologicalpsychiatry

    Abstract

    Background

    Mindfulness meditation training interventions have been shown to improve markers of health, but the underlying neurobiological mechanisms are not known. Building on initial cross-sectional research showing that mindfulness meditation may increase default mode network (DMN) resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) with regions important in top-down executive control (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex [dlPFC]), here we test whether mindfulness meditation training increases DMN-dlPFC rsFC and whether these rsFC alterations prospectively explain improvements in interleukin (IL)-6 in a randomized controlled trial.

    Methods

    Stressed job-seeking unemployed community adults (n = 35) were randomized to either a 3-day intensive residential mindfulness meditation or relaxation training program. Participants completed a 5-minute resting-state scan before and after the intervention program. Participants also provided blood samples at preintervention and at 4-month follow-up, which were assayed for circulating IL-6, a biomarker of systemic inflammation.

    Results

    We tested for alterations in DMN rsFC using a posterior cingulate cortex seed-based analysis and found that mindfulness meditation training, and not relaxation training, increased posterior cingulate cortex rsFC with left dlPFC (p < .05, corrected). These pretraining/posttraining alterations in posterior cingulate cortex-dlPFC rsFC statistically mediated mindfulness meditation training improvements in IL-6 at 4-month follow-up. Specifically, these alterations in rsFC statistically explained 30% of the overall mindfulness meditation training effects on IL-6 at follow-up.

    Conclusions

    These findings provide the first evidence that mindfulness meditation training functionally couples the DMN with a region known to be important in top-down executive control at rest (left dlPFC), which, in turn, is associated with improvements in a marker of inflammatory disease risk.

    http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjourn...079-2/abstract
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    Good article, thanks Will. I try but often fail. Need to work harder on mindful meditation.

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    Quote Originally Posted by chuckman View Post
    Good article, thanks Will. I try but often fail. Need to work harder on mindful meditation.
    It's hard! Amazingly so. Been doing it daily for months now and am only starting to feel like "get" it and it does not last long. Consider a book by Dr Zinn per above.
    - Will

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    “Those who do not view armed self defense as a basic human right, ignore the mass graves of those who died on their knees at the hands of tyrants.”

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