A recent study has shown that the 8-week mindfulness program of the renowned MBSR method is as effective in treating anxiety as one of the most common drugs used for this purpose.
Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s 8-week mindfulness program of Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s renowned MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) method has proven to be as effective in calming anxiety as the antidepressant escitalopram, a widely used drug treatment in case of anxiety. This has been demonstrated by a recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry.
Since the drug escitalopram is not without side effects (nausea, diarrhea, constipation, sexual problems, drowsiness, dizziness …), the results of the study suggest that meditation should be considered as a safe option to treat anxiety disorders. To what extent? We’ll tell you.
MEDITATION AGAINST ANXIETY: IS IT AS EFFECTIVE AS A DRUG?
According to the latest World Mental Health Report of the World Health Organization (WHO) of June 2022, the number of people suffering from mental illness worldwide now amounts to almost 1,000 million people, with anxiety and depression being the most common disorders.
The data is worrying, since anxiety causes physical and psychic symptoms that are very distressing, as well as being limiting. Given this situation, drugs such as escitalopram are often prescribed to combat the disorder, although they are still drugs that, like all, can have side effects.
For this reason, in recent times many medical professionals recommend their patients to try to reduce stress by practicing mindfulness, with the MBSR method. Despite the good results offered by this stress reduction technique, until now its efficiency had not been compared with that of drugs. Therefore, American scientists decided to determine with a study if the MBSR method could be a treatment as effective as escitalopram. The result of the investigation was surprising.
For the study, they recruited 430 patients with anxiety disorder diagnosed in U.S. hospitals. Some of the patients took an 8-week course of MBSR and others took escitalopram during the same period. After this time, they again assessed the participants’ anxiety levels. Guess what happened?
People who had taken the 8-week MBSR program had a reduction of 1.06 on the CGI-S scale that measures anxiety, while those who had taken escitalopram reduced this value by 1.17, that is, the reduction in anxiety in both cases was similar. This means, according to the study’s conclusions, that the efficacy of the meditation intervention for anxiety disorder was not inferior to the intervention with drugs.
In addition, of the patients who started treatment, 8% of the escitalopram group discontinued treatment because of its adverse effects, while none of the MBSR group dropped out of treatment.
WHAT IS THE MBSR MEDITATION PROGRAM
The MBSR meditation program is based on the research of Dr. Kabat-Zinn, who showed that after 8 weeks of mindfulness practice, the neural connections of the brain are modified.
What mindfulness achieves is to “disconnect” the neural pathways of negativity that cause stress and anxiety to establish new positive thought and action patterns. In short, the MBSR meditation program in 8 weeks helps people with anxiety to recognize the negative patterns and thoughts that cause anguish and discomfort to transform them little by little.
