mindfulness is really the practice of being aware of what's going on in the
moment some people add you know without judging
it so just really observing and then the practice of meditation is a more you
know kind of structured disciplined practice often with some kind of an
anchor where you're resting attention the breath or something like that
in some specific conditions the evidence is a little bit stronger on the effects
of mindfulness meditation and those are depression anxiety and chronic pain
the idea behind mindfulness based cognitive therapy is that by training
people in mindfulness meditation we increase their capacity for inter
reception and for being able to listen to their body so to speak and to drop in
the body and that will actually help them disengage from this cognitive
rumination with negative thoughts about self
we're testing these hypotheses in the brain by looking at the brain networks
that are involved and having people do specific tasks in the scanner to test if
they engage in these tests differently after having received the mindfulness
training
the purpose of this research is to find out the mechanisms of mindfulness
training in the brain and from that information hopefully make some changes
to the intervention that take those mechanisms into account for example
doing more of certain types of practices if we think these are the ones that are
key and perhaps doing less of other aspects of the mindfulness training if
science finds that these elements don't actually have so much of an impact I
think you kind of have this daily practice so that as you go about your
day you're able to be mindful and present or notice when you're not
because it's nobody does it 100%