Skip to main content

Home/ zenwrit/ Group items tagged Exercise

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Richard Ofosuhene

How Mindfulness Can Treat Anxiety - Carolyn Tucker MA, NCC, DCC, LAPC's Blog - Decatur-... - 1 views

  • From the poor economic climate, to traffic, to tragedy in the news, our culture contributes as well.
  • Mindfulness causes you to be fully presen
  • Mindfulness is defined as a state of active, open attention on the present
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • . When you're mindful, you exist solely in the moment, noticing what is going on right then to the fullest. The practice of acceptance goes along with mindfulness
  • In acceptance you observe your thoughts and feelings from a distance, without judging them good or bad
  • Instead of saying "I am anxious," notice the physical sensation and acknowledge that it is there
  • help clients daily learn skills to help them better cope with the effects of anxiety on their mind and bodies.
  • Mindfulness is most frequently associated with a practice of meditation. Even five minutes of meditation daily has been proven to show benefit.
  • Even as our minds get busy, the physical sensations of anxiety such as muscle tension, tightness in the chest or stomach, fluttering heartbeat are still present. Every few moments our minds do a "check in" to be sure that all systems are functioning properly. When the mind locates the symptoms of anxiety it sends off a "code red" and all of the symptoms feel exacerbated.
  • Any activity where you can be fully in the moment contributes to your ability to quiet that voice in the mind that causes anxiety.
  • By being mindful you are not denying your feelings, nor ignoring them. You are integrating them into your "whole self" and allowing your mind to get out of the way so that your body can naturally heal itself.
  • Some of my clients report washing the dishes as being meditative for them, or gardening, or listening to music.
  • ven as our minds get busy, the physical sensations of anxiety such as muscle tension, tightness in the chest or stomach, fluttering heartbeat are still present. Every few moments our minds do a "check in" to be sure that all systems are functioning properly
  • When we resist emotions or physical sensations they rear their ugly heads and demand to be noticed. The sheer energy of them increases due to our increase in attempt to squash them down. Our bodies were made to allow all energy, negative and positive to move through them and to be expressed in some way, whether spoken through communication, burned off through exercise or relaxed away. Acceptance allows our bodies to naturally self correct and allow that energy to pass through us without resistance.
  • Mindfulness is proven to increase our quality of life by improving our physical health (reducing blood pressure and increasing quality of sleep to name a few benefits) and our mental health (decreased rumination, increased ability to handle daily stress) and out relationships (One study showed that people who practice mindfulness deal with relationship stress more constructively.
  • indfulness is most frequently associated with a practice of meditation. Even five minutes of meditation daily has been proven to show benefit. You can practice mindfulness in many other ways too. Some of my clients report washing the dishes as being meditative for them, or gardening, or listening to music. Any activity where you can be fully in the moment contributes to your ability to quiet that voice in the mind that causes anxiety.
  • By being mindful you are not denying your feelings, nor ignoring them. You are integrating them into your "whole self" and allowing your mind to get out of the way so that your body can naturally heal itself
  •  
    It shows how to do mindfulness and the benefit of it
Emily Vargas

How Mindfulness Can Mitigate the Cognitive Symptoms of Depression | Psych Central - 0 views

  • can be very helpful in improving the cognitive symptoms of depression.
  • Cognitive symptoms can impair all areas of a person’s life. For instance, poor concentratio
  • n can interfere with your job or schoolwork
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Focusing on the here and now helps individuals become aware of their negative thoughts, acknowledge them without judgment and realize they’re not accurate reflections of reality, writes author William Marchand, M.D.
  • Depression and Bipolar Disorder: Your Guide to Recovery
  • psychotherapeutic and pharmacological treatments.
  • individuals start to see their thoughts as less powerfu
  • Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT)
  • It’s based on mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR)
  • a program developed by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. MBSR includes mindfulness tools, such as meditation, a body scan and hatha yoga, along with education about stress and assertiveness, according to Marchand.
  • MBCT teaches individuals to detach from distorted and negative thinking patterns, which can trigger the return of depression.
  • Getting professional treatment for depression is vital. But there are complementary mindfulness practices readers can try on their own
  • is essentially training one’s attention to maintain focus and avoid mind wandering
  • 10 to 15 minutes to meditate on most days.
  • Whether you’re eating, showering or getting dressed, you can practice mindfulness while doing any activity, according to Marchand, also a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Utah School of Medicine
  • Another option is to take a mindful walk, which also is helpful because it includes exercise, “an important component of healing.”
  • Mindfulness is a valuable practice for improving the cognitive symptoms of depression, such as distorted thinking and distractibility
  • realize that thoughts are not facts and refocus their attention to the present.
Emily Vargas

Yoga Improves Sleep for Cancer Patients | OSUN DEFENDER - 0 views

  • regular practice of yoga can lead to significant improvements in sleep for people who have undergone cancer treatment.
  • Research indicates that people coping with cancer are at significantly higher risk for sleep disorders than the general population
  • Poor sleep and disrupted circadian rhythms are also associated with hormone dysregulation and immune system dysfunctio
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • including physical pain or discomfort that interferes with falling asleep or staying asleep, side effects from medications and treatments, as well as stress and anxiety
  • Researchers divided the participants into 2 groups, both of which followed the same standard post-treatment care plan. In addition, one group also participated in a 4-week yoga program, consisting of 2 75-minute sessions each week. The yoga regimen included physical postures as well as meditation, breathing and relaxation exercises
  • Yoga also helped to reduce patients’ reliance on prescription sleep medication.
  • 410 patients with cancer, all of whom had undergone one or more types of treatment—including surgery, radiation and chemotherapy—within the past 24 months. Most of the participants (96%) were women, with an average age of 54, and 75% of participants had breast cancer. All were suffering from at least moderate levels of sleep problems.
  • While short-term use of sleep medication may be useful, it’s critical to identify strategies for improving sleep that don’t rely on long-term use of sleep medicines
  • , researchers measured sleep for both groups using questionnaires and wrist sensors worn during the night. They found both groups had improved their sleep during the 4-week period. However, the yoga group experienced significantly greater improvements to sleep compared to the non-yoga group:
  • The yoga group saw their average sleep quality score improve from 9.2 at the beginning of the study to 7.2 at the end. The non-yoga group’s average score improved to a lesser degree, from 9.0 to 7.9.
  • The yoga group experienced more significant improvements to daytime tiredness than the non-yoga group.
  • The yoga group reduced their use of sleep medication by 21% per week during the course of the study. The non-yoga group, on the other hand, increased their sleep medication use by 5% per week.
  • that the group practicing yoga improved their sleep while also reducing their reliance on sleep medication
  • CDC’s first-ever investigation of prescription sleep medication that reliance on prescription sleep aids is alarmingly high, with 4% of the adult population of the U.S. taking medication to sleep
  • After 3 months, patients who did yoga reported significant decreases in sleep disturbances, increased sleep duration, and less reliance on sleep medication, compared to a group that did not participate in the yoga regimen.
  • A group of patients with a variety of cancers experienced improvements to sleep and decreases to levels of stress and fatigue after an 8-week program of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). MBSR includes meditation practices designed to address both physical and psychological difficulties.
Brian Walsh

Self-Improvement Ideas | Diigo - 0 views

    • Brian Walsh
       
      We also haven't seen any mention of staying healthy. Exercising and eating healthy will allow the brain to work faster and better, meaning it will be easier to look into yourself.
    • Brian Walsh
       
      Here's a new one: learning from your mistakes. We've heard about learning of your shortcomings and bad traits, but we haven't seen the mention of learning from personal errors
Alyssa Lau

West Meets East - 0 views

  • The new centers often were staffed by Western teachers,
  • many of whom had first encountered meditation in the Peace Corps and later trained in monastic settings in the East
  • Creating a new wisdom tradition
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • None of us wanted ou
  • supervisors or clinical teammates to think of us as having unresolved infantile longings to return to a state of oceanic oneness
  • how radically meditation practices could transform the mind. Therapists of the day typically viewed meditation as either a fading hippie pursuit or a useful means of relaxation, but of little additional valu
  • mindfulness meditation was making inroads into the medical community.
  • Jon Kabat-Zinn, who, beginning in 1979, had adapted ancient Buddhist and yogic practices to create Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester.
  • MBSR was used primarily to augment the treatment of stress-related medical disorders, and was of particular interest to clinicians working in behavioral medicine.
  • The first use of mindfulness in psychotherapy to capture widespread attention among clinicians was Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), introduced in the early 1990s to treat suicidal individuals with complex disorders for which little else seemed to work.
  • he central dialectic in DBT is the tension between acceptance and change.
  • In searching for a means of helping therapists and their clients to experience what she called “radical acceptance”—fully embracing helplessness, terror, losses, and other painful facts of life
  • Because she empirically demonstrated that DBT could help challenging and volatile patients, the method rapidly became popular
  • he next big development came from Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale, cognitive psychologists in the tradition of Aaron Beck, who were working on treatments for depression in the 1990s
  • They came across mindfulness practice through Jon Kabat-Zinn and MBSR
  • Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which combined elements of an 8-week MBSR course with cognitive therapy interventions designed to help patients gain perspective on their thinking and not identify with their depressive thou
  • ghts.
  • This standardized, 8-week course couched meditation practices in Western, scientific terms
  • “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, and nonjudgmentally, to the unfolding of experience moment to moment
  • Steven Hayes and his colleagues had
  • radical philosophical orientation that they called “relational frame theory.”
  • Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which they describe as a psy
  • chological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility
  • ACT doesn’t teach many formal meditation practices, but uses imagery, metaphor, and brief exercises to cultivate awareness of the present, loosen identification with thought, and increase openness to the experience of moment-to-moment change
  • ACT encourages clients to identify and pursue activities that give life meaning.
‹ Previous 21 - 25 of 25
Showing 20 items per page