One of the strong benefits of meditation generally
has to do with the ordinary ways in which
we suffer depression, anxiety, the angst of
life.
It turns out that meditation generally makes
people feel more positively, it helps diminish
anxiety, but it becomes particularly powerful
when it’s combined with a psychotherapy.
The way this is usually done is with mindfulness
on the one hand and what’s called cognitive
therapy on the other.
Mindfulness allows us to shift our relationship
to our experience.
Instead of getting sucked into our emotions
or our thoughts, which is what happens when
we’re depressed or anxious, we see them
as “those thoughts again” or “those
feelings again,” and that disempowers them.
There’s actually research at UCLA that shows
when you can name that feeling, “Oh, I’m
feeling depressed again,” you have shifted
the activity levels neurologically in the
part of the brain which is depressed to the
part of the brain which notices, which is
aware—the prefrontal cortex.
And that diminishes the depression and enhances
your ability to be able to understand it or
to see it as just a feeling.
So if you combine that ability with cognitive
therapy, cognitive therapy helps you talk
back to your thoughts.
The basic realization in cognitive therapy
is: “I don’t have to believe my thoughts.”
This is extremely important in people with
chronic anxiety or chronic depression because
it’s our thoughts that trigger the anxiety,
that trigger the depression.
The depressive thoughts are classic; “I’m
no good; my life is worthless,” whatever
it is.
Those thoughts actually make us depressed.
So if you use mindfulness-based cognitive
therapy on the one hand you can see, “Oh,
there’s that thought again.”
On the other hand cognitive therapy lets you
talk back to that thought, “Oh I’m not
so worthless, I’ve done some pretty good
things in my life; there are people who love
me,” whatever it may be.
You can develop a habit of not letting those
thoughts take you over, but countering them
with actual evidence from your life that says
“Oh they’re not true.
I don’t have to believe them!”
And that is very relieving.
The first study that used mindfulness-based
cognitive therapy with depression it was pretty
spectacular.
It was done at Oxford University and it was
done with people whose depression is so severe
that nothing helps, no medication helps, electric
shock doesn’t help, psychiatry doesn’t
know what to do.
People get depressed very deeply, they recover,
and then they get depressed again.
So with that group they use mindfulness-based
cognitive therapy and they found that it cut
the rate of relapse (of having depression
again) by 50 percent.
If this were a drug some pharmaceutical company
would be making billions of dollars, but it’s
not a drug.
It’s free basically.
So mindfulness-based cognitive therapy works
very well for depression.
Better-designed studies afterwards shows that
it wasn’t 50 percent, but still the impact
is palpable and it turns out that mindfulness
and other meditations, particularly combined
with cognitive therapy, work just as well
for anxiety or depression as the medications
do, but they don’t have those side effects.
