Meditation helpful for anorexia patients: Research

Unfortunately, many family members, acquaintances, and celebrities have suffered from anorexia nervosa, or AN, a severe mental condition characterised by intense weight, form, and self-esteem worries. An eating disorder, dietary restriction, intentional vomiting, and extreme emaciation are all indications of AN.

Mindfulness meditation is already widely utilised as an AN treatment. Its clinical value in the treatment of neurogenic emaciation, on the other hand, has never been investigated. According to a group of experts from Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Medicine, mindfulness meditation can help to ease such concerns. The outcomes of the study show changes in the activity of brain areas related with anxiety.

The mindfulness meditation approach used by the team resulted in a considerable reduction in obsessive thoughts about the test subject’s self-image as well as brain activity connected with related emotions.
“Our results suggest that the participants in the study became better at accepting their anxiety as it is,” says lead author Tomomi Noda.

Mindfulness and meditation complement each other. The former teaches practitioners to sharpen their awareness of their current experience as well as their ability to accept rather than critique their circumstances. The latter is the method for approaching awareness. “We focused on the possibility that patients with AN try to avoid their crippling anxiety about weight gain and self-image by restricting food or vomiting,” says co-author Masanori Isobe.

A 4-week mindfulness intervention programme used tasks designed to provoke weight-related anxiety to investigate brain changes. The researchers subsequently reduced the patients’ anxiety by assisting them in accepting their current events and experiences at face value rather than avoiding them. The researchers examined attention management in relation to eating disorders using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.

The study’s findings back up the researchers’ subjective experiences. However, they were surprised to learn that some worldwide events, including as the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, played a substantial role in patients’ anxiety. “We anticipate practical implications of our results in clinical psychiatry and psychology and broader research into mitigating suffering through mindfulness, using the strategy of self-acceptance to regulate attention,” concludes group leader Toshiya Murai.