Many people who suffer the pain, depression and negative health effects associated with social anxiety or loneliness do not respond to common therapy tactics or drugs. Two new studies offer hope from an unlikely source: rather than focusing on your relationships with others, turn inward for relief.

Mindfulness meditation—which has been around for well over 2,000 years—has many forms, but an extensive body of research supports the effectiveness of one training program in particular. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is an eight-week program developed in 1979 by a U.S. physician. Initially created to help patients suffering from chronic pain, the program has been found to reduce symptoms of stress, depression and anxiety, even among people with cancer and HIV.

In one of the new studies, published in the October 2012 Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 55- to 85-year-old adults were randomized to either receive MBSR or be put on a waiting list for the program. The loneliness of the participants who received MBSR decreased after training, whereas the loneliness of the wait-listed control subjects increased slightly. MBSR also reduced inflammation—the cause of loneliness-related health risks such as heart attack or stroke—as measured by levels of stress proteins and proinflammatory gene expression.

The other study, published online in August 2012 in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, found that MBSR reduced negative emotions in people with social anxiety disorder.

Mindfulness training teaches people to be fully attentive to their present experience in a nonjudgmental way, which is believed to help reduce the rumination common to mood disorders. “A mindful perspective teaches people how to apply a brake between a single lonely thought and what could be a resulting chain of distressing thoughts and feelings,” says psychologist J. David Creswell of Carnegie Mellon University, co-author of the study on loneliness. To find an MBSR program in your area, go to http://tinyurl.com/findMBSR.

This article was originally published with the title Focus on Yourself to Alleviate Social Pain.

4 Comments

1. 1. curmudgeon 10:57 AM 1/3/13

   Wow! So lonely people feel less lonely when they're on a program requiring social interaction with a therapist and other sufferers and anxious people get more anxious when they're on a waiting list with no specified start date. Now who could have predicted that, eh?
   
   It baffles me that claims like this are taken seriously for even a second. Exactly the same results could be garnered from a book club, a softball team, a pizza appreciation society, or a knitting circle. Strange then that no such comparative/control study was made by advocates of this hip and happening 'cure'. Nor are we told of dropout rates (I know what I'd have done if I'd been put on the waiting list and it isn't being a patient little soldier!) or people so badly affected that they never even made it to the first session despite being amongst the lucky few!

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2. 2. speshulk 01:07 PM 1/3/13

   Curmudgeon: you're missing an important point- these studies are talking about people with social anxieties, not just lonely people. Because of their anxiety, it is very unlikely that just "socializing" at something like a book club would do anything to help them. In fact, in my experience that just makes things worse- anxiety prevents meaningful interaction, which leads to enhanced feelings of lonliness.
   This article is just a summary of scientific research- if you want more quantitative information, look up the referenced scientific peer-reviewed articles mentioned by the author (it would have been nice to see proper citations in this article).
   
   Now, I do agree that people are exploiting the Mindfulness technique and that there is no reason for people to pay hundreds of dollars for what is simply group meditation, but it has been shown to be very effective as a therapy more many.

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3. 3. Gigya 10:30 AM 1/8/13

   MBSR was developed in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., who is a psychologist. At the time, his Stress Reduction Clinic was housed in the department of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical school. However, Kabat-Zinn is a psychologist, not a physician. By the way, MBSR is more than simple group meditation. MBSR is a unique form of treatment. While it is based on a very specific form of Buddhist mindfulness meditation, it is not traditional Buddhist meditation. However, some of the benefits may be obtainable by practicing other forms of mindfulness training.
   

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4. 4. ESummers 12:24 AM 3/8/13

   A Heads Up / Correction. Jon Kabat-Zinn has a Ph.D. but he is not a psychologist. He is a scientist who received his Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT in 1971 in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate, Salvador Luria. Jon Kabat-Zinn has several books, numerous articles and videos available on or through the Internet. In many of them, he talks about his background and the development of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program.

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