(00:00.75)
(00:07.158)
Insomnia affects multiple people worldwide and it changes the quality of life and health of about 30 to 45 percent of the global adult population. And I know that for myself, many times I can lay awake at night worrying about things or feeling slightly guilty about something I did during the day, which is called rumination and
my brain will just kind of fixate on it. And sometimes you wonder, how do I decrease that little voice? How do I keep it from being so loud or from causing me to ruminate on things or catastrophize about the future? So I'm going to be starting something different on the podcast and this is going to be paper reviews.
And today we're going over a very important paper on insomnia and how mindfulness based stress reduction can help reduce it.
(01:26.904)
The paper that we're reviewing today is called The Effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on Sleep Quality and Mental Health for Insomnia Patients. Now the great thing about this is it's a meta-analysis, which means they did a search in a database for multiple previous articles that wanted to answer this question. And the question is, does MBSR...
help with sleep quality and mental health for insomnia patients. The paper was published on May 20th, 2020 by Sa-Ling Chin at OWL. And this was in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research. And this actually receives a very high score, meaning the quality is very high for this type of journal.
The population was insomnia patients aged above 18 years. They looked at a total of seven studies and the methods was the meta-analysis. The outcomes they looked at were sleep quality, anxiety, and depression. Specifically, did MBSR improve these outcomes? In total, there were 497 patients in seven randomized control trials that were analyzed. And the results showed that
Compared to the control group, meaning the people who did not receive MBSR training, the MBSR group significantly improved in sleep quality, depression, and anxiety. However, they note that future research is needed using standardized methods examining the long-term effects of MBSR on the mental health of individuals with insomnia.
And I know from previous studies that it's very important to kind of sharpen the sword or take an MBSR class. Again, usually the effects can last anywhere from eight to 12 months, meaning that a strong effect is usually seen across those, that time period. And then it kind of tapers off. Individuals with insomnia often complain about tiredness, nervousness, and kind of general weakness.
(03:44.642)
And of course, like everybody knows when you're tired, you're gonna have really negative emotions like irritability and tension and repeated exposure to insomnia. So repeated episodes of insomnia can lead to things like depression, decreased cognitive function, even things like substance abuse. So people are more likely to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes.
as well as it will inhibit your social and work ability. And this insomnia, it goes hand in hand, meaning it's highly associated with psychiatric disorders like anxiety, depression, and even suicide.
(04:42.068)
And MBSR programs were developed by integrating Oriental Buddhist practices, for example, like sitting quietly, meditation and yoga into an eight week group training course. And these sessions that I've taken personally myself before are usually held about 2.5 to three hours per week. And what we do is we learn to practice and cultivate mindfulness. And in this we...
do the exercises. So we don't really discuss the large aspect of theory. We are more interested in doing the practice itself because oftentimes that's the hard part. In other words, if you're trying to change your eating habits, most people will read about it, but a lot of them will not actually follow through with the practice of doing it. So this class will actually cause you to
Practice it meaning it's a little bit jarring in the first kind of round of it Because they will ask you to immediately start meditating so they will introduce themselves like the instructor Will introduce themselves and all of a you'll just be meditating and it'll be like a little five minute meditation And then as the group goes on then you will or as the class goes on you will meditate longer and longer
Now, one of the limitations of this study was that among the seven included, five were from China and two were from the US. This kind of makes the results difficult to generalize to other populations, meaning you kind of wonder, will other populations accept MBSR or will they be slightly against it because of the myths surrounding mindfulness? Another important thing to note is that the authors had no competing interests to report.
(06:44.536)
So I hope you found that particularly useful and I'll put a link to the paper down in the show notes. But for the rest of the night, I really hope that you are falling asleep thinking about a warm fire and cozy blankets.