This story adds to a steadily growing body of research on the health benefits of mindfulness based stress reduction.
An intervention aimed at helping patients accept the pain and disability associated with rheumatoid arthritis, while at the same time blocking negative thoughts and anxiety about their condition, reduced patients’ depression and improved coping skills, researchers in Norway reported.
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The researchers noted that the increase in emotional processing, by which they meant recognition and understanding of one’s own emotions, was of particular note because patient avoidance of disease-related emotions has increasingly been linked with negative outcomes in chronic disease.
They also pointed out that emotional expression improved in the control group at 12 months.
Although the control patients did not attend sessions, they received telephone calls from the researchers 12 times during the year’s follow-up, in which they were invited to discuss any emotional concerns. This may have increased their psychological awareness, according to Zangi and colleagues.
Many other psychological interventions for patients with chronic disease such as arthritis have found only short-term benefits, but in this study the benefits persisted for a year after the program.
“These lasting improvements indicate that the participants may have incorporated some mindfulness strategies into their daily lives and that these strategies have strengthened their ability to respond to their stressful experiences in a more flexible way,” the researchers observed.
