Mindfulness and Mental Health: how does it work?
Definition of mindfulness
To be mindful means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and surrounding environment through a kind, nurturing lens is what mindfulness means.
Mindfulness also involves acceptance, which is paying attention to our thoughts and feelings without criticizing them—for example, without assuming that there is a “good” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment. When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts shift from rehashing the past to imagining the future.
The multy million wellness market includes mindfulness, which accounts for 1.5–6% of annual global wellness spending.
Particularly among consumers, smartphone apps have enormous promise for improving mental health thanks to their low cost, broad reach, and scalability. Prior to the pandemic, mental illness was on the rise, but it spiked during it. COVID thereby increased demand for online courses and mindfulness apps that had never before been witnessed.
People’s inclination toward mindfulness in the aftermath of the recent difficult years and their significant promotion is not surprising. While there may be some advantages, it cannot and should not be relied upon to cure mental illness.
Mindfulness in the treatment of mental illness
In-person mindfulness-based stress reduction programs, which frequently contain health information and guided meditation practice, have moderately positive effects on both mentally ill and healthy people.
A thorough analysis among healthy populations reveals that mindfulness-based treatments are most effective in reducing symptoms of anxiety, sadness, and distress and, to a lesser extent, in promoting wellbeing.
Among people with a psychiatric diagnosis mindfulness-based treatments can help with anxiety and depressive disorders, as well as pain conditions and substance use disorders. But mindfulness-based therapy do not perform better than traditional talk therapy.
According to a review, the advantages of structured online mindfulness programs for depression, anxiety, and general well-being are marginal but nevertheless considerable. These programs are digital adaptations of traditional ones like mindfulness-based stress reduction.
What about Mindfulness apps?
Less convincing evidence supports mobile phone apps and therapies.
Results from 145 randomised controlled trials involving 47,940 participants—including apps—were recently integrated in a thorough analysis of mobile phone therapies. The study compared no intervention, minimum intervention (such as health information), and active interventions for a number of mental health disorders using text messaging and apps (other programs known to work). According to the authors, there is “no persuasive evidence in favor of any mobile phone-based intervention on any outcome.”
Only 15 of the hundreds of accessible applications have well-designed randomised controlled trials, according to one evaluation of mindfulness apps that was part of the thorough review mentioned above. Results were small to moderate overall for stress, anxiety, and well-being. Even if these findings appear encouraging, the majority of studies (approximately 55%) compared using apps to doing nothing at all, while 20% compared apps to controls like audiobooks, games, calming music, or arithmetic practice.
