20 Feb Build better mental health with self-compassion and meditation
Happiness is the experience of positive emotions.
Happiness is also the effective management of negative emotions.
Happiness is mental HEALTH – maximising the positive and minimising the negative.
Keep reading to learn how self-compassion and meditation can help with this…
via Psychology Today by Christopher Bergland
Although there’s an abundance of empirical evidence linking meditation with more positive mental health outcomes, surprisingly little is known about the exact mechanisms that drive the psychological benefits associated with meditation.
A recent study of 828 people (414 “meditators” and 414 “non-meditators”) deconstructs why a consistent meditation practice tends to have positive mental health outcomes. The findings (Yela et al., 2020) are published online ahead of print in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
“Our study arises from the need to identify why meditation can produce positive psychological effects,” lead author José Ramon Yela said in a February 2020 interview.
Yela and his colleagues at the Pontifical University of Salamanca in Spain found that “meditation was positively associated with mental health, although the regularity of practice was an influential element to be considered.” On average, those who meditated more frequently had better mental health outcomes.
During this research, multiple‐step and multiple‐mediator models were tested using bootstrap‐based structural equation modeling (SEM). The authors acknowledge Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer of the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) for inspiring their research.
Yela speculates that consistently practicing meditation can boost levels of self-compassion, which triggers a chain reaction of sequential mechanisms that unfold positively over time.
More specifically, Yela et al. hypothesize that increased self-compassion generates an upward spiral that leads to experiencing more meaning in life, fewer avoidance behaviors, and, ultimately, better mental health…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE