Mindfulness Intervention Essay

Mindfulness interventions are gaining increasing support for the reason that it teaches an essential skill that benefits an individual’s mental health. By participating in learning and practicing mindfulness, the individual consequently fosters a skill. That is, learning to recognize emotions and behaviors and then self-monitor them with a mindful and non-judgmental awareness. These interventions have the potential to develop an individual’s greater self-awareness, increased impulse control and decrease emotional reactivity to difficult situations (396). Although clinicians consider mindfulness analogous to various established approaches, Thompson and Gilbert accentuate the importance of separating mindfulness from other techniques. In particular,

Authors Thompson and Gilbert identify differences between both populations in terms of developmental abilities. The fact is, that teaching mindfulness to children and adolescents needs to be developmentally appropriate. What is not clear is the specific stage needed to be reached before participating in mindfulness interventions. Those who follow Piagetian framework suggest that participants of mindfulness should attain the stage of ‘formal operations’, known for abstract and hypothetical reasoning that generally occurs around the age of 12 years old (398). Contrastingly, clinicians using cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) perspective results can be seen in Piaget’s ‘concrete operations’ stage, generally from age 7-12 (398). This perspective requires a sense of self-awareness, modification of habitual behavioral tendencies and utilization of metaphors that help abstract ideas to be understood (398). Comparatively, mindfulness requirement is similar to that of cognitive-based therapy. It is likely, that useful work can be carried out within this younger age range. However, Thompson and Gilbert suggest “researchers will have to establish the lower age limit for teaching mindfulness empirically. Before that has taken place, rather than imposing an unevidenced cut-off point, it may be more practical to use standard adult practices as a template from which modifications and adaptations can be made” (398). To further the authors argument. Brain changes observed in adult practitioners through electroencephalographic measurements, present changes in white matter (responsible for relaying and communicating to other brain areas) and in anterior cingulate cortex (involved in the development of self-regulation) (6). Neuroimaging studies indicate that meditation causes change to the central nervous system and lead to different