Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy

posted on 12 January 2010 | posted in Depression

MBCT is based on the Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) eight week program, developed by Jon Kabat Zinn in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy grew from this work. Zindel Segal, Mark Williams and John Teasdale adapted the MBSR program so it could be used especially for people who had suffered repeated bouts of depression in their lives.


How MBCT works:

1.When we enter a phase in our lives when we are vulnerable to depression, we lose touch with what is going on around us. It is a sort of tunnel vision: we can only see part of the landscape. We do not notice the moment when a spiral of low mood is starting. Mindfulness practice helps us to see more clearly the patterns of the mind; and to learn how recognise when our mood is beginning to go down. This means we can ‘nip it in the bud’ much earlier than before.

2.The very ‘losing touch’ with things can put a barrier between ourselves and the small things in life that might have given us pleasure. This tendency can become extreme in clinical depression where it is known as ‘anhedonia’ (lack of pleasure from things we used to enjoy). But we all may know the feeling, especially when there is too much to do at work or home, or we are preoccupied on a project, when we don’t notice the small pleasures around us.
Mindfulness teaches us a way in which we can get back in touch with the experience of being alive.

3.Low mood can bring back memories and thoughts from the past, and make us worry about the future. Mindfulness helps to halt the escalation of these negative thoughts and teaches us to focus on the present moment, rather than reliving the past or pre-living the future.

4.When we start to feel low, we tend to react as if our emotions were a problem to be solved: we start trying to use our critical thinking strategies. When these do not work, we re-double our efforts to use them. We end up over-thinking, brooding, ruminating, living in our heads. Mindfulness helps us to enter an alternative mode of mind that includes thinking but is bigger than thinking. It teaches us to shift mental gears, from the mode of mind dominated by critical thinking (likely to provoke and accelerate downward mood spirals) to another mode of mind in which we experience the world directly, non-conceptually, and non-judgementally.

5. When we have been depressed, we dread it coming back. At its first sign, we may try to suppress the symptoms, pretend they aren’t there, or push away any unwanted thoughts or memories. But such suppression often does not work, and the very things we tried to get rid of come back with renewed force.

Mindfulness takes a different approach. It helps develop our willingness to experience emotions, our capacity to be open to even painful emotions. It helps give us the courage to allow distressing mood, thoughts and sensations to come and go, without battling with them. We discover that difficult and unwanted thoughts and feelings can be held in awareness, and seen from an altogether different perspective - a perspective that brings with it a sense of warmth and compassion to the suffering we are experiencing.
 
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