Feature Channels: Mindfulness

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People who often mix their media consumption — texting while watching TV, or listening to music while reading — are not known for being able to hold their attention on one task. But sharpening their focus may be as simple as breathing. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have shown that heavy media multitaskers benefited from a short meditation exercise in which they sat quietly counting their breaths.

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Like an endlessly repeating video loop, horrible memories plague people with post-traumatic stress disorder. But a new study in veterans shows the promise of mindfulness training for enhancing the ability to manage those thoughts if they come up. It also shows the veterans’ brains changed in ways that could help switch off that endless loop.

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Patients recovering from heart attacks or other heart trouble could cut their risk of another heart incident by half if they incorporate stress management into their treatment, according to research from Duke Health.

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While cynics may scoff at the United Nations'; March 20 observance of International Happiness Day, a positive psychology researcher at Washington University in St. Louis says it's high time for happiness to be taken seriously. "Happier people live longer, get sick less often, are more productive at work, more engaged in their communities, more likely to help those in need, and enjoy higher-quality relationships." said Tim Bono, who teaches courses on the psychology of happiness in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.

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Everyone knows that stubbing your toe hurts. What makes it stop hurting is the body’s main pain-blocking process – the natural production of opioids.

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Mindfulness is often viewed as either a touchy-feely fad or valuable management tool that can lift an entire workplace.

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Given the high stress levels, extended periods of screen time and regular social outings many Americans experience day-to-day in environments where high-calorie foods are readily available, it can be easy to fall into the habit of mindless eating – where we’re too distracted to pay attention to how much, what and why we’re eating. Research suggests that practicing mindfulness – or taking the time to bring awareness to present-moment experiences with an open attitude of curiosity and non-judgment – can be effective in allowing us to make more thoughtful food choices and recognize when we are hungry, satisfied or full. The latest research in this area led by Jennifer Daubenmier, PhD, Assistant Professor at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, suggests that the impact of mindful eating could be even greater.

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A new study confirms the age-old conception that meditation is associated with wisdom. Surprisingly, it also concludes that somatic (physical) practices such as classical ballet might lead to increased wisdom.

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Dispositional, or "everyday" mindfulness is the inherent trait of being aware of one's present thoughts and feelings. In a new study of 399 people that measured health indicators including dispositional mindfulness and blood glucose, researchers found that those with higher scores for mindfulness were significantly more likely than people with low scores to have healthy glucose levels.

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Meditation eases anxiety, fatigue and pain for women undergoing breast cancer biopsies, according to researchers at the Duke Cancer Institute. They also found that music is effective, but to a lesser extent.

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Understanding and integrating patients’ cultural beliefs into cancer treatment plans may help improve their acceptance of and adherence to treatment in multicultural settings. Researchers examined traditional Maya healers’ understanding of cancer and published their findings online today in the Journal of Global Oncology.

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In a paper published Thursday, Jan. 21, in the journal Heliyon, the researchers suggest that mindfulness, a practice used as a therapeutic technique to focus awareness, should be studied as a way to encourage healthy eating and weight loss in children.

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A new study published in PLOS ONE found that the Transcendental Meditation technique and lifestyle changes both appear to stimulate genes that produce telomerase, an enzyme that's associated with reduced blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and mortality.

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Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found new evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces pain more effectively than placebo.

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Training in meditation and other mindfulness-based techniques brings lasting improvements in mental health and quality of life for patients with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), according to a study in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, official journal of the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA). The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer.

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Student and faculty researchers at Florida State University have found that mindfully washing dishes calms the mind and decreases stress.

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Switzerland is the best place in the world for older people to live, closely followed by Norway and Sweden, according to a new report from HelpAge International, working in partnership with the University of Southampton, UK.

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In a randomized trial that included veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), those who received mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy showed greater improvement in self-reported PTSD symptom severity, although the average improvement appears to have been modest, according to a study in the August 4 issue of JAMA, a violence/human rights theme issue.

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Other topics include resurgence of whales off southern California, treating chronic kidney disease, and a breakthrough in a heart-specific type of stem cell.

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Drawing on its Jesuit Catholic heritage, Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine has long understood the importance of reflection in medical education as a key element in physician formation. With physician burnout on the rise, it is all the more integral for students to learn ways to engage better with the challenges faced in the medical profession. Stritch faculty members believe reflection is a fundamental tool to help students process and cope with the tremendous physical, emotional, and mental pressure that can accompany their vocation.

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Chronic pain is known to cause brain anatomy changes and impairments, but yoga can be an important tool for preventing or even reversing the effects of chronic pain on the brain, according to a National Institutes of Health (NIH) official speaking at the American Pain Society’s annual meeting today, www.americanpainsociety.org.

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A study by researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center found that a workplace mindfulness-based intervention reduced stress levels of employees exposed to a highly stressful occupational environment.

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Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: Astronomy, Cardiology, Nephrology, Neurology, Neutrinos, oil spills, Toxicology, Cancer, and Nutrition

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A new Bournemouth University study, in collaboration with University of Portsmouth, has challenged conventional thinking that people’s attention is readily captured by other people’s faces above all other objects.

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Dr. Douglas Mann is coordinating the first "psyching team" for the New Jersey Marathon & Half-Marathon and providing tips for runners dealing with race-related anxiety.

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Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: Cancer treatment, meditation, careers in engineering, astronomy, marine conservation, effective dieting, internet marketing, Ebola treatments, and exercise as preventive health for seniors.

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Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center are examining the effectiveness of meditation as a therapy for mild cognitive impairment and migraine headaches and as a way to reduce pain.

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Dartmouth investigators note the lack of hypothesized scientific models for the mechanisms of action responsible for outcomes in Somatic Experiencing(SE) trauma therapy and other body-mind therapies.

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Kansas State University researchers conduct first study demonstrating increases in both self-control and timing precision as a result of a time-based intervention.

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Encouraging adversaries to have more interpersonal contact to find common ground may work on occasion, but not necessarily in the U.S. Senate, according to new research.

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Prekindergarten students in the Madison Metropolitan School District took part in a study assessing a new curriculum meant to promote social, emotional and academic skills, conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (CIHM) at the Waisman Center. Researchers found that kids who had participated in the curriculum earned higher marks in academic performance measures and showed greater improvements in areas that predict future success than kids who had not. The results were recently published in the journal Developmental Psychology.

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Classic psychedelic drugs include LSD, psilocybin and mescaline. This new School of Public Health research is published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

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When faced with making choices, but lack sufficient evidence to guarantee success, our brain uses elapsed time as a proxy for task difficulty to calculate how confident we should be, a team of neuroscientists has found. Their findings help untangle the different factors that contribute to the decision-making process.

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If dieting is on your New Year agenda, it might pay to be mindful of a study suggesting there is little hard evidence that mindfulness leads to weight loss.

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University of Utah professor Eric Garland developed Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery-Enhancement to change the face of intervention and treatment for drug abusers.

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People with bipolar disorder who do yoga believe their yoga practice has significant mental health benefits, reports a survey study in the September Journal of Psychiatric Practice. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.

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Adults who were abused or neglected as children are known to have poorer health, but adults who tend to focus on and accept their reactions to the present moment—or are mindful—report having better health, regardless of their childhood adversity.

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Sometimes when people get upsetting news – such as a failing exam grade or a negative job review – they decide instantly to do better the next time. In other situations that are equally disappointing, the same people may feel inclined to just give up. How can similar setbacks produce such different reactions? It may come down to how much control we feel we have over what happened, according to new research from Rutgers University-Newark. The study, published in the journal Neuron, also finds that when these setbacks occur, the level of control we perceive may even determine which of two distinct parts of the brain will handle the crisis.

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Prescribing both a stimulant and an antipsychotic drug to children with physical aggression and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), along with teaching parents to use behavior management techniques, reduces aggressive and serious behavioral problems in children, according to a study conducted by researchers in the Department of Psychiatry at Stony Brook University School of Medicine. The findings are published in the September issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

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Contrary to popular belief, not all meditation techniques produce similar effects of body and mind. Indeed, a recent study by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has demonstrated for the first time that different types of Buddhist meditation – namely the Vajrayana and Theravada styles of meditation - elicit qualitatively different influences on human physiology and behaviour, producing arousal and relaxation responses respectively.

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Mindfulness training, including focused breathing and awareness training, helped U.S. veterans with diabetes significantly lower their diabetes-related distress and blood sugar levels and improve their self-management of the disease.

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Trial results in a study published in Psychosomatic Medicine finds that mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) for hypertension resulted in substantial and statistically significant reductions in the primary outcomes, a -4.8-mm Hg reduction in systolic blood pressure (SBP) and a 1.9-mm Hg reduction in diastolic blood pressure (DBP) when measured in the clinic. The alternate arm of the trial involved only progressive muscle relaxation (PMR), which resulted only in a decrease of 0.7-mm in SBP and an increase of 1.2-mm Hg in DBP.

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Mindfulness practice in the classroom may be one way to help students improve their academic performance, nurture their emotional well-being and bolster their behavior.

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Adolescence can be a wild ride. But a new book called The Owner’s Manual for Driving your Adolescent Brain uses science and storytelling to explain to children how to think about and sometimes manage the chaos. The book is a collaboration of neuroscientist Terrence Deak, associate professor of psychology at Binghamton University, and his aunt, JoAnn Deak, a longtime educator with a doctorate in educational psychology and author of several books, including Your Fantastic Elastic Brain, written for children ages 5 to 9.

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Researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Naval Health Research Center have found that mindfulness training – a combination of meditation and body awareness exercises – can help U.S. Marine Corps personnel prepare for and recover from stressful combat situations.

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Forgiving ourselves for hurting another is easier if we first make amends — thus giving our inner selves a “moral OK,” according to Baylor University psychology researchers.

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Eastern and Western views about consciousness will clash at the 20 year anniversary conference ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness” which kicks off April 21 at the Marriott University Park Hotel at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Web-based TV channel ‘Consciousness Central’ will show plenary lectures, interviews with key figures, commentary and analysis, clips from previous conferences, scenes from the consciousness art show, poetry slam, ‘zombie blues’, and parties.