Contributor: Jon Kabat-Zinn

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Mindfulness Psychology

The Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Online Course

By IT Team — 12 years ago

Dear friends, we are so happy to announce our partnership with our friends at The University of Massachusetts’ Center for Mindfulness, where we’re working together to offer the first-ever online version of the highly-acclaimed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program.

Learn more about this very special opportunity here.

In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts to bring a form of meditation known as mindfulness into the medical mainstream. Mindfulness is a basic human quality, a way of learning to pay attention to whatever is happening in your life that allows you a greater sense of connection to your life inwardly and outwardly. Mindfulness is also a practice, a systematic method aimed at cultivating clarity, insight, and understanding. In the context of your health, mindfulness is a way for you to experientially learn to take better care of yourself by exploring and understanding the interplay of mind and body and mobilizing your own inner resources for coping, growing, and healing.

Nearly three decades of scientific research at medical centers all over the world suggest that training in mindfulness and MBSR can positively and often profoundly affect participants’ ability to reduce medical symptoms and psychological distress while learning to live life more fully.

Since its inception, more than 20,000 people have completed the MBSR training program. They have been referred by more than 5,000 physicians, by hundreds of other health care professionals, and through self-referral. These participants have been strongly motivated to do something for themselves—something no one else can do for them—by learning to draw upon their inner resources and natural capacity for greater health and balance, ease and peace of mind.

The MBSR Online Course is the only complete online training in the MBSR Online Course follows the same, well-respected method taught at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. This eight-week course offers the curriculum and methodology developed by Jon-Kabat Zinn and is taught by Center for Mindfulness director Dr. Saki Santorelli, and senior instructor Florence Meleo-Meyer.

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Meditation Mindfulness

Short on Time? Try Mindfulness

By IT Team — 12 years ago

A new study suggests that just 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation changes our experience of time. A great way to learn the practice of mindfulness, requiring no previous experience, is through the groundbreaking new book from Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners, and also through the new online course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.

From our friends at the Greater Good Science Center…

Short on Time? Try Mindfulness

Bogged down with responsibilities at work and at home? Many of us wish we had more time to get it all done—and still steal time to relax.

While adding more hours to our day may not be possible, a recent study suggests a little mindfulness meditation can help us at leastfeel like we have more time in our lives.

Researcher Robin Kramer and his colleagues trained students at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom to link different shapes to either a short and a long period of time. Shapes shown on a computer screen for 400 milliseconds represented a short duration, while shapes shown for 1600 milliseconds represented a long duration. Next, all of the participants were presented with shapes held on the screen for a variety of durations and had to determine whether the duration was more similar to the short or the long period of time.

Half of the participants then listened to a 10-minute mindfulness meditation exercise, which guided them to concentrate on the movement of their breath throughout their body. The other half listened to the audiobook version of The Hobbit for 10 minutes. Immediately afterward, the researchers again presented them with varying durations of time.

The results, published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, show that the meditators were more likely to report that durations of time were “long” after they had meditated. In contrast, participants didn’t report any difference in time duration if they had listened to theHobbit recording. The researchers conclude that mindfulness meditation made participants experience time as passing more slowly. Remarkably, they saw this effect after just a single 10-minute meditation, among participants who had no prior meditation experience.

Though more study is needed to explain this finding, the researchers suspect that the mindfulness meditation altered time perception because it induced people to shift their attention inward. In the paper, the authors write that when people are distracted by a task in the world around them, they have less capacity to pay attention to time passing, and so experience time as moving more quickly. Because the mindfulness meditation exercise cued participants to focus on internal processes such as their breath, that attentional shift may have sharpened their capacity to notice time passing.

Kramer thinks that this finding could be used in everyday situations, to help people gain control over their experience when they feel short on time. “If things feel like they’re running away,” he says, “slowing things down might help you deal with them more easily.”

Kramer also speculates that while a mindfulness exercise that shifts attention to internal events extends one’s experience of time, a mindfulness exercise that shifts attention to an external event could potentially make time feel like it’s passing more quickly. If this were true, mindfulness could have clinical applications for people who feel like time is moving too slowly, such as those experiencing depression, who tend to overestimate the duration of negative events.

Though Greater Good has previously reported on many positive effects of mindfulness, as well as on how experiencing awe can alter how we perceive time, this study is one of the first to investigate the relationship between mindfulness and time perception. In the future, the researchers aim to uncover how long mindfulness meditation’s effects on time perception last, and to explore further the precise causes of this shift in time perception.

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