![]() ![]() So there’s a hybrid called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), which has also been shown to be extremely effective it treating depression and reducing relapse. I'm valuable.’ And the new behavior: You apply for the position and work towards that goal.”ĬBT and meditation have a lot in common-in particular, the recognition of one’s own thought processes. Now the thought is, ‘I could get that promotion. But if you think positively, you’ll behave positively. ![]() “The psychological equation usually goes like this: if you think negatively, you behave negatively. So the thought is, ‘I'm never going to get that promotion.’ And the resulting behavior is that you don't work harder at work. She adds that CBT can ultimately change one’s way of being in a larger sense, after one learns how to adjust his or her go-to thought processes. The second level looks to shift your behavior to match your newly minted thoughts.” “It works on two levels-the first is with your thoughts, helping you to identify them, how they're semantically worded, and how they impact your well-being, and finally how to reframe them. “Cognitive behavioral therapy is the gold standard when it comes to reducing negative thoughts,” says clinical psychologist Deborah Serani, author of the book Living With Depression. So as with meditation, here, you’re also working to rewire the brain over time. In a nutshell, CBT teaches a person to recognize the negative thought processes they fall back on, and then consciously create a new thought-one that’s more based in reality-to replace it. The research here is also pretty incontrovertible: Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) has been shown again and again to help treat a range of mental health issues, not the least of which is the negative voices in our heads. So meditation seems to offer a lot of benefit-not only psychologically, but neurologically-in reducing mind chatter. Others have shown that it can actually change the structure of the brain in ways that support our ability to turn off the DMN. In the new study, OM was more effective at helping reduce the number of negative thoughts people had, but FA helped a great deal, too.Īnd beyond this, lots of earlier work earlier work has found the same thing in different ways: Studies have shown that mindfulness meditation can actually deactivate the brain regions that are thought to underlie mind chatter, the default mode network (DMN), which is active when our brains are just idling and flitting from thought to thought. Rather than reacting to a thought, you just observe it curiously and then watch it subside. In the other, more advanced form, OM (also called mindfulness meditation), you watch your thoughts non-judgmentally, acknowledge them, and then (theoretically) let them go. So the practice isn’t actually sitting there with a blank mind-it’s bringing the focus back to its object repeatedly. And when your mind wanders, you bring it back to the breath, again and again. The study mentioned earlier is especially important, since it found strong effects in both of the two main forms of meditation: Focused Attention (FA) and Open Monitoring (OM). (For a longer recap, see here.) In FA, one focuses on a thing-usually the breath-to train attention. The effects of mediation are so robust and so well-illustrated that they're worth mentioning right off the bat. ![]()
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