Mindfulness Is More Effective Than Drugs For Both Anxiety And Depression

Dr. Madhav Goyal of John Hopkins School of Medicine, who led the study published in JAMA
called mindfulness meditation the most effective form.

“I’m not at all surprised that mindfulness performs as well or better than medication,” says Adrian Wells, professor of psychopathology at the University of Manchester and clinical advisor to the charity Anxiety UK. Psychologist Katie Sparks agrees.

“In the group work I have done with people suffering from anxiety or depression, I have found it very useful as it calms the mind. It’s nothing new,” she adds.

That’s an understatement: Mindfulness is a meditation technique that has been advocated by Buddhism for 2,500 years. Paul Christelis, course leader at the Light Center and clinical psychologist, defines it as ‘paying purposeful attention to your experience, in the present moment, without judgment or criticism.’

The transition to Western culture has been gradual. But in 2004, its use in preventing the relapse of depression was approved by the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice). Since then it has quickly gained popularity.

Gene activity can change depending on perception

According to Dr. Bruce Lipton can change gene activity on a daily basis. If the perception in your mind is reflected in the chemistry of your body, and if your nervous system reads and interprets the environment and then controls the chemistry of the blood, then you can literally change the fate of your cells by changing your thoughts.

The research of Dr. Lipton even illustrates that by changing your perception, your mind can alter the activity of your genes, creating more than thirty thousand variations of products with each gene. He goes into more detail, saying that the gene programs are located in the nucleus of the cell, and that you can rewrite those genetic programs by changing the chemistry of your blood.

In the simplest terms, this means that we need to change the way we think if we want to cure cancer. “The function of the mind is to create coherence between our beliefs and the reality we experience,” said Dr. Lipton. “What that means is that your mind will adapt the body’s biology and behavior to your beliefs. If you have been told that you will die in six months and your mind believes it, then you will most likely die in six months. That’s called the nocebo effect, the result of a negative thought, which is the opposite of the placebo effect, where healing is mediated by a positive thought.”

That dynamic points to a three-party system: There’s a part of you that swears it doesn’t want to die (the conscious mind), trumped by the part that believes you will (the doctor’s prognosis, mediated by the subconscious mind). , which then initiates the chemical reaction (mediated by brain chemistry) to cause the body to conform to the dominant belief. (Neuroscience has recognized that the subconscious mind controls 95 percent of our lives.)

Now what about the part that doesn’t want to die: the conscious mind? Doesn’t it also affect the body’s chemistry? Dr. Lipton said it comes down to the way the subconscious, which holds our deepest beliefs, is programmed. It is these beliefs that ultimately cast the deciding vote.

Many declare themselves devotees

In recent years, Oprah Winfrey, Arianna Huffington, and Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone have declared themselves committed.

General Mills, the manufacturer of Cheerios, has a corporate mindfulness program with 700 members. In some business communities—particularly Silicon Valley—it’s so popular that you could say it’s become a status symbol, a badge that proves how busy and important your work is.

But its proponents swear by it. Ben, 32, a football-loving political consultant from Oxford, tries to set aside 15 minutes every day to meditate. “It definitely makes a difference when I do it,” he says. “It gives me more peace. I feel clearer.” He was attracted to the promise of improved concentration – “my mind has a tendency to wander” – but “the most important thing I took away from it is that it teaches you to combine the rough with the smooth.” Sometimes at work you feel like, ‘This is just a nightmare.’ But then you think: ‘It will remain a nightmare for ten days, then it will pass.’”
Kate, 34, works in fashion and has been taking medication for years to help manage her depression. “The medication only went so far,” she says. “I wasn’t supposed to be overwhelmed by my mind.” She has been meditating for 20 minutes every morning for the past three years and says, “The emotion is still there, but instead of feeling, ‘Oh my God, I feel really terrible or depressed,’ or whatever, you do a step back and think, ‘There’s that feeling. It will be there for a while and then it will go away. ”

Paul believes that mindfulness meditation “promotes equanimity. It trains you to have an unshakable balance in your mind, so that you feel everything but are not overwhelmed by it.”

While I’ve never thought of it as “mindfulness,” I think I’m pretty good at appreciating the here and now. Many times a week I find myself (a little smugly) being the only one looking up from my device and out the window on my bus journeys to work. I’m also a big believer in the benefits of quiet time: taking a few minutes every now and then to acknowledge and even indulge a little sadness, frustration, or worry. So I arrive at the Light Center thinking this will be a piece of cake.

The popularity of mindfulness coincides with a spike in the incidence of depression and anxiety in Britain. The number of prescriptions for antidepressants has increased from 33.8 million in 2007 to 50.2 million in 2012. Job insecurity, financial pressure and attachment to technology all play a role. People work longer, worry more and sleep less.

Mindfulness movement

The purpose of Basic Meditation is to trick the mind into freeing itself, to trick the mind into giving rest to the thinking apparatus, so that we can realize our Higher Self, our essential oneness with all that we consider divine. On the other hand, the purpose of mindfulness meditation is secular; namely to train the mind, in the same way we would lift weights to strengthen a muscle, to be able to concentrate for longer and longer periods of time – and avoid wandering around weakly on autopilot.

Unlike ‘zoning out’, Mindfulness meditation is like ‘zooming in’ on whatever phenomenon or phenomenon we want to focus on. We consciously focus our attention on designated and specific thoughts or sensations that arise in our field of consciousness and observe them without judgment – ​​and perhaps even label them. So there are countless types of mindfulness meditations, because we can choose to focus our attention on seemingly infinite phenomena.

Mindfulness is gaining popularity as a practice in daily life, apart from Buddhist insight meditation and its application in clinical psychology. In this context, mindfulness is defined as moment-to-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and the surrounding environment, characterized primarily by ‘acceptance’ – attending to thoughts and feelings without judging whether they are right or wrong. Mindfulness focuses the human brain on what is being perceived in each moment, rather than on the normal worrying about the past or future.

Mindfulness promotes compassion and altruism: Research suggests that mindfulness training increases our ability to help someone in need and increases activity in neural networks involved in understanding the suffering of others and regulating emotions. There are indications that this could be possible increase self-compassion also.

The constant stimulation provided by mobile devices (the average person checks their phone every six and a half minutes) keeps us constantly alert and affects our ability to concentrate, form memories and relax. If anxiety is the modern malaise, mindfulness may be the cure.