Mindfulness-based Approaches to Stress, Anxiety and Depression

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a way of paying attention, of being deeply attuned to yourself, the environment and those around you. It is a natural state of mind, focused and aware. Rooted in the ancient art of meditation, mindfulness can be learned and practiced by anyone, no matter what their religious or cultural background.

Often we find ourselves swept away by thoughts and feelings that are wrapped up in the past or the future. We lose the connection with what is actually going on now by ‘being somewhere else’ and we don’t even realize it.  Mindfulness encourages us to pay attention to what’s going on ‘right now’, developing a moment-to-moment non-judgemental awareness.

Mindfulness–based approaches to stress, anxiety and depression emphasize holding thoughts and feelings in awareness rather than trying to change them. It aims to help people build their own strategies for staying well.

Mindfulness–based approaches introduce practices and skills that aim to bring about a different way of relating to experience, replacing an old mode of 'fixing and repairing' problems with a mode of allowing things to be as they are in order to see more clearly how best to respond.

In Jon Kabat-Zinn's words:  "If you learn how to open to thoughts and feelings and not try to shut them off or change them, you can then taste a degree of freedom where you are not necessarily plagued by obsessive or difficult thoughts because you know they are just bubbles in the stream of thought and they are not the reality"

Zindel Segal, Mark Williams and John Teasdale developed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). It fuses long-established meditation techniques with a modern therapeutic approach, emerging as an extension of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the late 1970’s in the USA.  It was designed specifically to help people who suffer repeated episodes of stress, anxiety or depression. It is recommended by the 'National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence' (NICE) as a means to work with depression that is proven to help prevent relapse in people who are currently well.

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