Mindfulness Helps Reduce Gambling

Recent research investigated whether mindfulness might be a useful intervention to help people stop gambling. Compared to a waitlist control group, those in a mindfulness enhanced cognitive behavioral program showed significantly reduced gambling and gambling urges. At a 3-month follow-up, both groups still showed improvements, and there was a decrease in the number of participants meeting criteria for pathological gambling.

Further, those participants who reported some mindfulness practice even after the intervention ended showed significantly better outcomes than participants who reported no mindfulness practice after the completion of the program. This may indicate the important of practice, as well as the direct role of mindfulness in results.

Keryn Breiterman-Loader

Mindfulness Helps Reduce Emotional Eating

Very few of us only eat when we’re hungry and then stop eating once we’re full. We also have an emotional relationship to food. Some of us eat as a response to stress and anxiety, some of us don’t eat as a response to stress and anxiety. Some of us try to restrict our food consumption to lose weight but then binge eat when we feel so deprived and starved. These kinds for relationships with food aren’t always so healthy for our bodies (have you ever heard anyone say “Oh wow I’m feeling so stressed, please pass me that bowl of sautéed broccoli and quinoa?”), and using food generally doesn’t resolve our emotional distress.

A recent review article examined 14 different published studies that all used mindfulness as an intervention for binge eating, emotional eating, or weight change. Results indicate that mindfulness interventions successfully reduce binge eating and emotional eating, but the jury’s still out for effectiveness in weight loss. The mechanism through which mindfulness helps us have a more emotionally healthy relationship with food was not discussed at length in the paper. One hypothesis is that mindfulness gives us a better strategy for dealing with our negative emotions and thus reduces our need to use food as a coping strategy. This could be similar to findings in studies on mindfulness and alcohol consumption.

Keryn Breiterman-Loader

Romantic Relationships and Mindfulness: Let’s Have a Talk

Having difficult conversations with our romantic partners can be a necessary yet stressful experience. Past research has found that people who tend to feel less secure about their relationships experience even more anxiety when dealing with conflict with their romantic partner. Other research has found that mindfulness is associated both with better stress regulation and with feelings of more secure relationships.

A recent study investigated the relationship between mindfulness, secure attachment, and stress during a difficult conversation with a romantic partner. Participants (all heterosexual couples) filled out questionnaires measuring mindfulness and attachment (how secure or insecure they feel in their relationships). Then they came into the lab one week later, where they completed some activities including a conflict discussion task with their partner. Results indicated that more mindful participants had lower levels of cortisol (a stress hormone) during their conflict discussion and were better able to regulate their negative emotion after the discussion. Further, this relationship was largely explained through the fact that mindfulness is associated with more secure attachment.

Keryn Breiterman-Loader