Mindfulness-based stress reduction

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is a program that incorporates mindfulness to assist people with pain and a range of conditions and life issues that were initially difficult to treat in a hospital setting. Developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in the 1970s by Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn, MBSR uses a combination of mindfulness meditation, body awareness, and yoga to help people become more mindful.

MBSR programs have been proposed for a wide variety of conditions including stress reduction. Clinical research studies have documented various physical and mental health benefits of mindfulness in different patient categories as well as in healthy adults and children. While MBSR has its roots in spiritual teachings, the program itself is secular.

The concept of mindfulness has existed for over five millennia. Many credit the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course for introducing mindfulness to mainstream Western culture.

In 1979 Kabat-Zinn founded the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts and nearly twenty years later the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine. Both these institutions supported the successful growth and implementation of MBSR into hospitals worldwide. Today close to 80% of medical schools offer some element of mindfulness training and research and education centers dedicated to mindfulness have proliferated.

MBSR has been described as "a group program that focuses upon the progressive acquisition of mindful awareness." The MBSR program is an eight-week workshop that entails weekly group meetings (two-hour classes) and a one-day retreat (six-hour mindfulness practice) between sessions six and seven, formal home practice (a minimum of 45 minutes daily meditation, six days a week), and instruction in three formal techniques: mindfulness meditation, body scanning and simple yoga postures. Body scanning is the first prolonged formal mindfulness technique taught during the first four weeks of the workshop and entails quietly lying on one's back and focusing one's attention on various regions of the body, starting with the toes and moving up slowly to the top of the head.

MBSR is based on the following tenets: non-judging, non-striving, acceptance, letting go, beginner’s mind, patience, trust, acceptance, and non-centering.[1]

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