With the prevalence and continued rise of anxiety and trauma-related disorders, it’s become more and more important to develop effective treatment strategies. This need is what sparked new research from the University of Southern Denmark exploring the effect of mindfulness training on participants’ ability to rid the body of negative emotions.
A recent report from MindBodyGreen outlined the study: “Researchers recruited 26 participants and placed them into either an experimental or control group. While the experimental group went through a four-week mindfulness training consisting of daily practices of short breathwork or meditation through a smartphone app, the control group did not. After the month-long training period, participants were brought into a lab to complete an experiment in emotions.
Researchers were able to condition-specific fear reactions linked to certain images by subjecting participants to a small shock after showing them the images. The association of the shock with the images created a physiological response of fear within the body. Typically, these learned fear reactions are acquired through any sort of trauma or psychological disorders and can be very difficult to forget.
The following day, participants were brought back to test their reactions to the same images. The researchers discovered that subjects who had been trained in mindfulness were able to completely extinguish the fear reactions from the previous day, showing no response when faced with the images. The results, therefore, established the link between mindfulness and eliminating fearful and anxious emotions, which is the first time a study has proved this with direct physical evidence.”
While most of us have a basic understanding of the power of mindfulness practices like yoga and meditation to alleviate stress and anxiety in the present and future, this particular research experiment shows how these practices can help those suffering from fear and anxiety due to past trauma. The research implies that things like guided meditation may be used in place of a typical psychological treatment to help alleviate trigger responses.
“We can show that mindfulness does not only have an effect on subjective experiences of negative emotions, as has been shown previously but that you can actually see clear effects on autonomic arousal responses, even with a limited amount of training,” said lead author Johannes Björkstrand. He added that the team hopes to replicate the study on a larger scale and learn more about what processes in the brain are involved.
