![]() ![]() ![]() I’ve always been a keen photographer and owned far too many cameras. Film cameras are fun to use and produce wonderful ‘Netflix-style’ colours.He’s madly in love with steam trains though. My three-year-old son refuses to believe that people used to burn black pieces of rock to heat their homes (that’s coal, by the way).A great way of noticing nature is to do the Sounds and Thoughts meditation in the park and then pay attention as you walk home or continue on to work. Birdsong is returning, snowdrops and crocuses are blooming, and the daffodils are reaching for the sky. The Art Of Breathing: The Secret To Living Mindfully, by Dr Danny Penman, is published in the US by Conari Press You can download free meditations from You Are Not Your Pain/Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Relieving Pain, Reducing Stress and Restoring Wellbeingfrom here. It is also used for back problems, migraine, fibromyalgia, coeliac disease, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome and even multiple sclerosis. Many say that they barely notice it at all.įor these reasons, hospital pain clinics now prescribe mindfulness meditation to help patients cope with the suffering arising from a wide range of diseases such as cancer (and the side effects of chemotherapy), heart disease, diabetes and arthritis. Imaging studies show that mindfulness soothes the brain patterns underlying pain and, over time, these changes take root and alter the structure of the brain itself, so that patients no longer feel pain with the same intensity. Such deep relaxation enhances healing and boosts mental and physical health. It also creates a relaxed state of mind that reduces the level of stress hormones in the body. And when you do this, something remarkable happens: your suffering begins to melt away of its own accord. This allows you to see your mind and body in action, to observe painful sensations as they rise and fall, and to let go of struggling with them. (Our book is published in the US as You Are Not Your Pain).Ī typical meditation involves focusing on different parts of the body and simply observing with the mind’s eye what you find. Accomplished meditators can reduce it by over 90 percent.ĭr Zeidan said: ‘Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs.’Īs I explain in our book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Relieving Pain, Reducing Stress and Restoring Wellbeing, which is recommended by the British Medical Association, meditation achieves these remarkable results because it turns down the ‘volume’ control on pain. For example, work carried out by Fadel Zeidan at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre in North Carolina discovered that mindfulness can reduce chronic pain by 57 percent. Previous work has shown that mindfulness meditation is highly effective at directly relieving chronic pain and also reducing the distress it causes. ![]() ‘Although a number of recommendations have been proposed to improve CBT for patients with chronic pain, an additional solution may be to offer patients Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction since it shows promise in improving pain severity and reducing pain interference and psychological distress.’ And both mindfulness and CBT were equally good at reducing pain and its associated conditions such as depression.ĭr Wei Cheng, lead researcher on the study carried out at the Ottawa Hospital, Ontario, Canada, said: “While CBT is considered to be the preferred psychological intervention for chronic pain, not all patients experience a clinically significant treatment response. This new analysis suggests that mindfulness is just as effective as CBT when it comes to improving ‘physical functioning’. In nearly 40 percent of the studies, participants had endured their pain for more than a decade. Most of the participants in this new analysis were women aged between 35 and 65 and suffered largely from musculoskeletal pain. But, crucially, not everyone benefits from CBT. CBT can be effective and has none of the side-effects of traditional painkillers such as lethargy and addiction. It was designed to assess whether mindfulness was as effective as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for relieving chronic pain and its associated distress. This new meta-analysis, published in the peer-reviewed journal Evidence Based Mental Health, analysed the evidence from 21 previous studies involving 2,000 chronic pain sufferers. The findings add weight to previous studies which discovered that mindfulness can reduce pain severity by around 50 percent. Mindfulness is a powerful painkiller that can dramatically enhance quality of life in chronic pain sufferers, suggests new research. ![]()
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