Mindfulness

Increasingly, therapists have been incorporating mindfulness training into their approach to therapy. Some of the specific approaches you may have heard of include Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Through developing mindfulness, the willingness to be present with what is, we can learn to observe our thoughts and to “look at them rather than through them.” This helps us to recognize and disengage from patterns of negative thinking. Rather than putting primary emphasis on challenging distortions in our thinking and struggling to change our thoughts, as in more traditional Cognitive Therapy, the goal in mindfulness based approaches is to notice our thought processes without getting carried away by them, and thereby to change our relationship to our thoughts, feelings and memories. The ability to observe our own thought processes from a more clear and neutral perspective has been shown to be particularly helpful in preventing depressive relapses.