This blog explores Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), a method combining mindfulness with cognitive therapy to help manage anxiety, depression, and emotional regulation. It highlights MBCT's effectiveness in preventing depression relapses and promoting mental well-being.
August 8, 2024
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Humans are blessed with the gift of the mind, which is an excellent tool for problem-solving, creativity, unrealized talent, and much more. But somehow it seems to wander more often in the past or the future than staying in the present. To stay in the present moment is to be mindful.
Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. This is a form of meditation, the objective of which is to learn more about your own mind and the thoughts you are having. At the same time, it teaches you to be less of a slave to your thoughts and to live more in the now.
Mindfulness means using meditation to rise above those thoughts so that you can live in the now. So that you can ‘just be’ instead of feeling like a slave to the whims of your mind. As Winston Churchill said, “The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.”
The above quote draws our attention to the thoughts we feel, shape the way our life becomes, successful, meaningful, stressful, or just burdensome. From ancient times, it has been stressed that keeping your thoughts positive yields the required results. Do thoughts indeed make us what we are? In today’s world, we work on a generally accepted assumption that our thoughts define our reality and that we can take control of this reality and make adjustments accordingly to enhance the quality of life.
Emerging from Asian Buddhist cultures, mindfulness and meditation practices focus on cultivating an embodied awareness of the present moment. Over the last 20 years, these practices have played an increasingly significant role as a component of the healthcare system. MBCT gives people the skills to improve how they regulate their emotions, enabling them to observe their thoughts, sensations, or feelings rather than immediately reacting to them.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is one tool that can help us learn to recognize and understand our thought and feeling patterns, with the goal of creating new, more effective patterns. It is a combination of cognitive therapy and meditative principles. Cognitive therapy aims to help clients grow out of their mental illness by working on their thinking patterns. Mindfulness can be perceived as the practice of being in, the state of awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The combination of these two techniques can be applied to treat bipolar, anxiety, depression, and much more.
In the 1990s, psychologists Jon Teasdale and Phillip Barnard found that the mind had two main modes: the ‘doing’ mode and the ‘being’ mode. The ‘doing’ mode is goal-oriented, triggered when the mind sees a difference between how things are and how it wants things to be. The ‘being’ mode isn’t focused on achieving specific goals but rather accepting and allowing what is. It was found that the ‘being’ mode was the one that led to lasting emotional changes. Psychiatrists Zindel Segal and Mark Williams, as well as Jon Kabat-Zinn, helped combine these new ideas about cognitive therapy with Kabat-Zinn’s 1979 mindfulness-based stress reduction program to create what is known as MBCT.
Either guided or self-directed, helping gain greater awareness of the body.
Becoming more aware of the present moment
Involves stretching mindfully to help bring awareness to both the body and mind
Encouraging different yoga poses to facilitate mindful stretching of the body
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy can help with:
Like cognitive therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy operates on the theory that if you have a history of depression and become distressed, you are likely to return to those automatic cognitive processes that triggered a depressive episode in the past. The combination of mindfulness and cognitive therapy makes MBCT so effective. Mindfulness helps you observe and identify your feelings while cognitive therapy teaches you to interrupt automatic thought processes and work through feelings in a healthy way.
Mindfulness has become increasingly popular for its ability to promote mental health, so even mental health professionals who are not specifically trained in MBCT may incorporate some aspects of CBT and mindfulness practices in their therapy sessions. The key for healthy living is what we are in search of, being Mindful is one way to achieve holistic healthy living. However, watch out for what suits you best. Stay aware and help us help you mindfully Transform Happily!
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Stay informed about the latest research in psychology.
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