How mindfulness reduces stress
Mindfulness meditation is known for reducing stress and buffering us from the harmful effects of stress and anxiety.
It teaches us to monitor our experience in the present moment with acceptance. By learning how to accept our emotions of the experience in that moment, we can be open to that experience thus making us less stressful.
The results showed that training in monitoring and acceptance program had the best results with participants showing reduced cortisol and systolic blood pressure reactivity.
While we know that mindfulness is beneficial for stress reduction, we do not know how it works to reduce stress and what factors are important for it to work?
153 stressed adults with an average age of 32 years participated in this study. They were randomly assigned to one of the three smartphone-based interventions: (1) training in both monitoring and acceptance (Monitor + Accept), (2) training in monitoring only (Monitor Only), or (3) active control training (Coping control).
Each participant completed one – 20 minutes daily lesson for 14 days. They were then placed in a stressful situation where their blood pressure and cortisol levels were measured.
The results showed that training in monitoring and acceptance program had the best results with participants showing reduced cortisol and systolic blood pressure reactivity.
Blood pressure was approximately 20 per cent lower than participants in the other groups which did not include acceptance training. The cortisol responses were 50 per cent lower than the other two non-acceptance groups.
The results show that acceptance of our experience is critical to mindfulness working on our stress levels. Rather than resisting and fighting to get rid of our stressful feelings, it helps to accept these feeling in the moment that we experience them.
We all experience some sort of stress in our lives, but with this study and its finding, we know now that mindfulness is a skill which can be learned very easily with the help of a smartphone app which we can access at any time to help us through our mindfulness program.
So reduce your stress with the mindfulness app.
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology
