New research emerges daily, demonstrating the effectiveness of Mindfulness in generating biopsychosocial well-being for individuals experiencing clinically significant discomfort, evidenced by difficulty managing their emotions, the presence of high levels of anxiety or depressive symptoms, which affects not only their personal sphere but also their development and response to their environment.
From clinical and health psychology, the applicability of Mindfulness techniques is a suitable choice to generate a mental state of calm and tranquility, as well as emotional balance in those who experience symptoms inherent or not to psychopathological conditions. Specifically, it is indicated for generating a new way of thinking, feeling, and acting.
There are different focused psychotherapeutic orientations that allow defining the appropriate methodology for a better approach according to the present difficulty. Vásquez-Dextre (2016) contributes to some therapies that include some components of Mindfulness or Mindfulness itself in its entirety, highlighting Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) created by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1982, where its objective is the individual and collective practice of exercises derived from Zen in people experiencing high levels of stress due to chronic diseases.
Likewise, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) created by Segal, Williams, and Teasdale in 2002 combines MBSR techniques with cognitive techniques to prevent relapses in chronic depression resulting from the reactivation of negative thought patterns. Also, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy with Integrated Mindfulness (Cayoun, 2014) impacts sustained attention, the inhibition of responses to intrusive thoughts, re-engagement with the response (change of attention), and not identifying with the experience.
Although each therapy that implements Mindfulness techniques has its own characteristics, all agree on the importance of strengthening attention. ISEP (n.d.) considers novel aspects of Mindfulness, highlighting focusing on the present moment when living each experience through the experimentation of stimuli and emotions beyond interpretation, radical acceptance of both what is pleasant and what we reject, and the choice of experiences and control, referring to not controlling discomfort, fear, anger, or sadness, but experiencing them as such.
What is an intrusive thought?
It can be understood as a commonly negative thought that appears involuntarily after a worry and remains in our mind for long periods, making it difficult to extinguish and detach from it immediately. Normally, it is a thought that leads to another, generating rumination, all due to the need to control it.
Boticaro (2016) indicates that the increased presence of intrusive thoughts generates, without determining, anxiety and depression, being immediate precursors to the onset of obsessions, as well as other types of psychopathological indicators. These differ in their frequency of appearance and how they affect the person based on their intensity, the value placed on them, and the need to neutralize them.
Mindfulness, cognitive and behavioral change
The strengthening of attention, as a cognitive process, is considered one of the primary elements in training through Mindfulness techniques. It provides the opportunity to generate a new way of relating to intrusive thoughts, being able to regulate and disconnect from automatic and impulsive reactions.
For Cayoun (et. al.), the practice of Mindfulness allows for the achievement of high competencies in metacognitive awareness, sustained attention, and inhibitory control of reactive habits, given that equanimity is the main mechanism of action. In this sense, the observation of thoughts is encouraged in two main contexts: external and internal. The first has to do with the external locus of distraction related to stimuli perceived in the external environment; and the second, with stimuli that may arise from our organism related to breathing and the meditation process itself.
The same author points out that when we pay attention to our natural breathing, a cognitive activation associated with information transmitted by neural networks arises, so we begin to perceive a greater number of thoughts, and it is the process of non-reaction to these that generates the non-reinforcement of them, allowing the dysfunctional cognitive structure to progressively weaken.
It is therefore considered that this process of non-reaction generates the possibility that dysfunctional thoughts, unpleasant emotions, and maladaptive behaviors, associated or not with depressive disorders, anxiety, mood disorders, trauma-related disorders and stress factors, or any other mental difficulty; gradually lose strength to the point of decreasing their frequency, occurrence, and intensity, allowing the experience of deep levels of consciousness and acceptance of the experience, detaching us from catastrophic thoughts about the future and destructive thoughts about the past.
[vc_cta h2=”Cristian Jesús Alvarado Segovia” h4=”Author”]
Student of the Master’s in Clinical and Health Psychology. Psychologist at Chilean Red Cross, Puente Alto Branch, and at Grupo ASCS – Chile.
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