What is your ROI for attending a course to learn about mindfulness?
Let’s start by noting that not all mindfulness courses are created the same. The Mindfulness-based stress reduction course, known as MBSR, is the most well-researched mindfulness program in the world.
You learn new skills for self-regulation of stress and symptoms in areas such as emotion regulation, chronic pain, headaches, high blood pressure, sleep disorders, anxiety, depression, and G.I. symptoms, work and personal relationships.
If you are a provider and have patients who are not responding to treatment, referring them to a mindfulness course is a way to support your patients. Examples of patients who may benefit from this are patients with anxiety disorders not responding to medication or too dependent on benzodiazepines. Chronic pain patients who are committed to increasing their ability to function while reducing their intake of opiates. Patients who have sleep disturbances and want to decrease their medication or not start taking any medications. Patients with chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia report benefitting from MBSR. It’s reported that compliance with MBSR programs is high. People not only rarely drop out, but they also state they continue to use mindfulness in their lives on a regular basis.
So who else is doing it? It may surprise you. Our military through their Warrior Mind Training Course, Aetna International, Apple Computers, Boeing, Cargill, Inc. Compusense, Deutsche Bank, DOD, eBay, Facebook, Ford Motor Company, Genentech, General Mills, Google, Hughes Aircraft, Kaiser Permanente, NASA, Nortel Networks, Plantronics, Target, Texas Instruments, Twitter, Qualcom… just to name a few.
Mindfulness meditation is a way of training the mind to be more focused in the present moment. As Jon Kabat Zinn states, “Mindfulness is paying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally anywhere, anytime.”
For more information on the research results mentioned, click on Free Mindfulness Resources to access some of these studies. Reach out to us if you are interested in signing up for our online zoom course starting January 31.
I’ll end with a quote by Daniel Goleman, “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.” (Vital Lies, Simple Truths” (1985)
