Tip of the Week: Mindfulness: Does the Data Back Up the Theories?

Mindfulness

Mindfulness has been a focal point of stress relief for over a decade now, but does the data back up the theories?

Manoj Sharma and Sarah Rush set out to answer this very question in their article: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction as a Stress Management Intervention for Healthy Individuals: A Systematic Review. The authors perform a meta-analysis of 17 recent studies on the effects of mindfulness to improve stress.

The reason this work is important is due to how widespread the effects of stress have become. Stress has been found to result in unproductive rumination and challenges ‘resilience qualities’ such as hope and forgiveness.

As a solution, mindfulness has been linked to improvements in pain, body image, medical symptoms, mood, anxiety, depression, chronic pain, stress reduction, cancer, heart disease. The components of mindfulness are often grouped into the practice of body scan, sitting meditation, and hatha yoga. With this information on the possible negative effects of stress, and the positive effects of mindfulness, Sharma and Rush wanted to answer the following question: can mindfulness-based stress reduction be an alternative and complementary approach for stress reduction in nonclinical populations.

15 out of the 17 studies showed positive results, while 2 had mixed results. All mindfulness interventions were able to find some positive effects in psychological or physiological outcome measures related to stress. The authors would like to point out that there are limitations within these studies. However, teaching stress management and including mindfulness-based stress reduction is a highly beneficial approach.

As a coach, familiarizing yourself more with the effects of stress, and the benefits of mindfulness can be a good starting point for you in utilizing mindfulness as a tool in your coaching repertoire. If you are familiar with the basics, knowing that the majority of scientific research in this study agrees with the benefits can help you rest assured that this tool is beneficial to be recommending to your clients, or implementation in your own routine.


IOC's Tips of the Week are authored by Austin Matzelle