Mindful awareness has scientific
support as a means to reduce
stress, improve attention, boost the immune system and promote a general
sense of health and well-being.
Since opening in 2005, the Mindful
Awareness Research Center (MARC) at
UCLA has focused on identifying, evaluating and disseminating the most effective
mind awareness practices to assist individuals in both clinical and non-clinical settings.
“The center’s mission is to foster mindful
awareness in daily living using research
and education,” says Dr. Susan Smalley,
founder and director of MARC and professor of psychiatry at UCLA.
Smart Business spoke with Smalley
about mindful awareness, how it has influenced her work with ADHD and why self-help tools could ultimately lead to treatment models based on prevention.
What is mindful awareness?
Mindful awareness is a moment-by-moment awareness of one’s experiences as
they occur. This means paying attention to
where your are at the present moment.
That can include things like what you’re
feeling, what you’re thinking, your body
sensations, and so on. Many of these practices are drawn from Eastern traditions
like Tai Chi, yoga and meditation. Some
people use the term ‘mindfulness,’ which
can be used synonymously with mindful
awareness.
How has this practice influenced your work
with ADHD?
As an awareness training methodology,
mindful awareness practices centered in
meditation seem to help individuals regulate their attention. You take something
that is automatic like watching your breath
and you give it your full attention. Through
this process of meditating and learning
how to regulate your attention to your
present experience, you start to discover a
lot about how your mind works. For example, it is easy to lose interest in the process of paying attention to your breath and your
mind wanders off. In the process of becoming aware that your mind has wandered
and attempting to bring it back, there is a
training of attention that occurs.
A colleague (Lidia Zylowska, M.D.) and I
conducted a study using mindful awareness to work with individuals who had
attention disorders. The pilot study we
conducted looked at attention deficit disorders among teenagers and adults and
found promising changes in attention as
measured by computerized tasks of attention and other objective measures. This
pilot study suggests that these tasks will
lead to attention regulation and may be
very useful as a complementary tool in
working with individuals who have attention disorders.
You founded the Mindful Awareness
Research Center. What challenges have you
faced with this project?
The biggest obstacle has been getting scientists to appreciate ‘looking within’ as a
tool of discovery. Mindful awareness can
be studied using objective tools of Western
science, but trying to get scientists to actually have the experience themselves (a subjective experience) as well as investigate it has been a challenge.
In order to understand mindful awareness, it really requires a first-person experience, which means you have to do it. As
scientists are trained to look outside themselves and objectify experiences for study,
it’s challenging to introduce subjective
experience as an alternative method of discovery into the culture of science.
What does initial research reveal about the
possibilities of using mindful awareness to
help treat behavioral and psychiatric disorders?
Most of the research has been done with
adults, and a lot of it has been conducted in
a clinical population — individuals with
depression and anxiety disorders. Those
studies are very promising in that there are
clear improvements in mood and reductions in anxiety. Also, new studies are
investigating biological and physiological
correlates. These findings will be of vital
importance in helping people self-regulate
their own emotions and their own attention.
How can self-help tools like mindful awareness ultimately lead to a treatment model of
prevention rather than intervention?
In the past, research has focused on intervention rather than prevention. But this
will shift because we’ll be able to identify
individuals who carry susceptibility genes
for different kinds of traits, such as a predisposition toward anxiety and depression.
Mindful awareness practices will
increase in importance as early detection
of predisposition occurs. This is what
we’re seeing with genetic knowledge
around chronic physical illnesses like diabetes and heart disease. Even though
genes play an important role, preventive
steps like diet and exercise will play a very
important role in preventing mental health
illnesses in the future.
DR. SUSAN SMALLEY is founder and director of MARC and
professor of psychiatry at UCLA. Reach her at (310) 206-7503 or
[email protected]. For more information please visit
www.marc.ucla.edu.
