Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is an eight-week evidence-based program that offers secular, intensive mindfulness training to assist people with stress, anxiety, depression and pain. Developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in the 1970s by Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn, MBSR uses a combination of mindfulness meditation, body awareness, yoga and exploration of patterns of behaviour, thinking, feeling and action. Mindfulness can be understood as the non-judgmental acceptance and investigation of present experience, including body sensations, internal mental states, thoughts, emotions, impulses and memories, in order to reduce suffering or distress and to increase well-being. Mindfulness meditation is a method by which attention skills are cultivated, emotional regulation is developed, and rumination and worry are significantly reduced. During the past decades, mindfulness meditation has been the subject of more controlled clinical research, which suggests its potential beneficial effects for mental health, as well as physical health. While MBSR has its roots in wisdom teachings of Zen Buddhism, Hatha Yoga, Vipassana and Advaita Vedanta, the program itself is secular. The MBSR program is described in detail in Kabat-Zinn's 1990 book Full Catastrophe Living.
History
In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, and nearly twenty years later the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Both these institutions supported the growth and implementation of MBSR into hospitals worldwide. Kabat-Zinn described the MBSR program in detail in his bestselling 1990 book Full Catastrophe Living, which was reissued in a revised edition in 2013. In 1993, the MBSR course taught by Jon Kabat-Zinn was featured in Bill Moyer's Healing from Within. In the year 2015, close to 80% of medical schools are reported to offer some element of mindfulness training, and research and education centers dedicated to mindfulness have proliferated.
Program
A meta-analysis described MBSR as "a group program that focuses upon the progressive acquisition of mindful awareness, of mindfulness". The MBSR program is an eight-week workshop taught by certified trainers that entails weekly group meetings (2.5 hour classes) and a one-day retreat (seven-hour mindfulness practice) between sessions six and seven, homework (45 minutes daily), and instruction in three formal techniques: mindfulness meditation, body scanning and simple yoga postures. Group discussions and exploration - of experience of the meditation practice and its application to life - is a central part of the program. Body scanning is the first prolonged formal mindfulness technique taught during the first four weeks of the course, and entails quietly sitting or lying and systematically focusing one's attention on various regions of the body, starting with the toes and moving up slowly to the top of the head. MBSR is based on non-judging, non-striving, acceptance, letting go, beginners mind, patience, trust, and non-centering.
According to Kabat-Zinn, the basis of MBSR is mindfulness, which he defined as "moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness." During the program, participants are asked to focus on informal practice as well by incorporating mindfulness into their daily routines. Focusing on the present is thought to heighten sensitivity to the environment and one's own reactions to it, consequently enhancing self-management and coping. It also provides an outlet from ruminating on the past or worrying about the future, breaking the cycle of these maladaptive cognitive processes. The validity and reliability of a weekly single-item practice quality assessment have been confirmed by research. Increases in practice quality predicted improvements in self-report mindfulness and psychological symptoms but not behavioral mindfulness, and longer practice sessions were linked to better practice quality.
Scientific evidence of the debilitating effects of stress on human body and its evolutionary origins were pinpointed by the work of Robert Sapolsky, and explored for lay readers in the book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Engaging in mindfulness meditation brings about significant reductions in psychological stress, and appears to prevent the associated physiological changes and biological clinical manifestations that happen as a result of psychological stress. According to early neuroimaging studies, MBSR training has an influence on the areas of the brain responsible for attention, introspection, and emotional processing.