Depression and Mindfulness

Are you one of the 121 million people worldwide suffering with depression?

If so you may find, along with hundreds of other people, that mindfulness meditation is the right treatment for you, working by changing the neural pathways in your brain, creating a relief from depression that you can rely on.

Research has shown mindfulness meditation to be as effective as anti-depressants – and, unlike medication, it has no disturbing side-effects. In fact, as well as curing your depression, mindfulness meditation may give you many extra benefits, such as reduced stress, peace and calm, healthier relationships, clearer focus, and an improved immune system.

Depression thrives when it tricks you into going over and over a repertoire of negative thoughts. Meditation eliminates this process by increasing your self-awareness and the control you have over your own thought processes. This allows you to replace the negative self-talk with more realistic self-beliefs.

Another trademark of depression is catastrophic thinking: “My life’s a mess”, “I’m hopeless”, “no one likes me”, “I  can’t go on”, “everything’s a disaster”. Once you start being mindful in meditation, it becomes easier to cut out these imprecise generalisations because you gain greater clarity into how things really are, and your thought processes become sharper and more creative.