Mallika Dureja
Anorexia Nervosa, or AN, is a serious mental illness that has affected a lot of family members, friends, and celebrities. People with AN worry a lot about their weight, shape, and self-esteem. AN symptoms include an eating disorder, not eating enough, throwing up on purpose, and being very thin. As a treatment for AN, mindfulness meditation is already widely used. On the other hand, no one has looked into how well it works in the clinic to treat neurogenic emaciation. (Also see: Types, causes, treatments, and tips for preventing eating disorders in children.)
Through their mindfulness meditation programme, the team has seen a big drop in the test subject’s obsessive thoughts about his or her own self-image and the brain activity that goes along with those feelings. The study’s lead author, Tomomi Noda, says that the results show that the people who took part in the study got better at accepting their anxiety as it is.
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Meditation and being aware of the present go hand in hand. The first one teaches people to be more aware of what they are doing right now and to accept their circumstances without judging them. This is the way to practise mindfulness.
Co-author Masanori Isobe says, “We focused on the idea that people with AN might try to avoid their crippling anxiety about weight gain and self-image by eating less or throwing up.”
A 4-week mindfulness intervention programme used tasks meant to cause weight-related anxiety to study how the brain changes. The researchers then got rid of the patients’ anxiety by helping them accept their current situations and experiences for what they were, instead of trying to change them or avoid them.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, was used by the researchers to look at how attention is controlled in relation to eating disorders. The results of the study back up what the researchers saw and felt. But they didn’t expect that global events like the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war contributed a lot to patients’ worries.
Group leader Toshiya Murai says, “We expect our results to have practical applications in clinical psychiatry and psychology, as well as in broader research into reducing suffering through mindfulness by using self-acceptance as a way to control attention.”
