AcuDestress: The powerful intersect between mindfulness and neuroplasticity
When people talk about
stress reduction today the words
“medication” and
“psychotherapy” are being heard less and less, and the words
“mindfulness” and
“neuroplasticity” are coming up more and more. Nowadays, as one learns from perusing
Continuing Medical Eduction thrusts, the search is on for increasing effectiveness, as medications and even psychotherapy have not lived up to their billing as first rate solutions for chronic refractory-to-treatment stress.
Today, for acute stress, for crises like the loss of one’s job, yes, but for the kind of stress that goes on for years and decades, impinges on physical health and functions as an addiction to outmoded coping patterns, not really. Unless one is psychotic (not tuned in to the same world as others) in which case, medications help a lot, drugs can be a stopgap measure in the face of chronic stress that often either doesn’t work, or works only until we stop them. If medications are working, of course, the patients are hardly coming to see us...
Mindfulness....
So, what about mindfulness? The mainstay of
mindfulness practice, the
Center for Mindfulness founded by
Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School began offering their eight week program in 1979, and it is now offered in over 200 medical centres, hospitals and clinics around the world as an eight-session training costing
about $500. After some years,
mindfulness was picked up by the psychotherapy community, chiefly by
Dr. Dan Siegel whose Mindsight Institute at UCLA has given a needed boost to psychotherapy for longer term mental and emotional distress in younger patients, through adding mindfulness to its therapeutic process. Dr. Siegel advocates, as a preventive strategy, adding to the 3 R skills of reading, writing and ‘rithmatic the skills of reflection, relationship and resilience, an advocacy we can readily support. I’ll come back to this, as these are skills which bubble up readily and in short order during AcuDestress.
We are now measuring mindfulness scores of our clients, who average 27-30% prior to coming to an AcuDestress session, rise to 57-59% within the first month and then to 86-9% six months later, then stay there.